The Making of A Corporate Shill: A Case Study

When The Media Says "Experts" They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (Part 24)

Before the rise of social media as the most common form of communication and information sharing, capturing major publications like NYT, Washington Post, Politico, USA Today, Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters was sufficient to propagandize the public into believing whatever narrative you had to peddle to protect your paymaster’s bottomline and at this time Purdue Pharma’s narrative was that opioid addiction is a behavioral problem of people who were drug abusers before taking prescription opioids. Having the credentialed expertise while expounding your paymaster’s narrative made you pretty much unassailable to anyone without your credentials. Such was the case for Sally Satel, a licensed psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who had completed medical school at Brown University and had been a tenured professor of psychiatry at Yale. In the wake of the opioid epidemic of the early 2000s, Purdue Pharma contracted out PR services from Dezenhall Resources and began funding non-profit advocacy groups like the American Pain Foundation and Washington think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, which received $50,000 in annual donations from the opioid maker from 2003 until they filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Purdue Pharma also paid $24,000 for executives to attend 2 events hosted by the Think Tank and communicated with their leadership through their DC lobbyist Burt Rosen.

In July 2001, shortly after getting business from Purdue, Dezenhall Resources president Eric Dezenhall and VP, Sheila Hershow, had lunch with Satel, where according to emails between the PR firm and opioid maker, Satel read a “debunking package” and expressed interest in writing opinion pieces in major news outlets pushing back against the negative coverage Purdue Pharma was receiving for the opioid epidemic specifically emphasizing how “the medical needs of patients are being sacrificed to protect drug abusers” the exact narrative Purdue executives wanted to divert public scrutiny from their product. Satel commented that “it was not usual to talk to people who have interesting stories” as if top executives at PR firm working for an opioid manufacturer have no other MO than “telling interesting stories.” A month after the chance lunch meeting with Dezenhall executives, Satel published her first opinion piece defending Oxycontin in the Boston Globe. While the outlet mentions Satel’s credentials as a psychiatrist and her association with AEI it does not mention her proxy association with Purdue Pharma through Dezenhall Resources and AEI. In February 2002, Satel appeared on an AEI expert panel that answered media questions about the opioid addiction. The two other panel experts were a company executive and a company lawyer. Reuters used the event to report that the expert panel “mostly agreed that Purdue Pharma should not be viewed as the culprit in the problem of the abuse of its long-acting painkiller OxyContin.” In April 2002, Purdue directly paid Satel $2,000 to speak to physicians at a New Orleans hospital about addiction; Satel and the physician who organized the speaking gig claim to have zero recollection of the event. The following year, Dezenhall and Purdue executives, including Dr. J David Haddox, then head pain specialist at the company, helped prep Satel for her appearance on The Diane Rehm show which airs on NPR. Satel was quoted on Diana’s show as recently as 2018 as well. While her credentials as a psychiatrist and association with AEI were mentioned, her association with the PR firm and Purdue were not. On October 13, 2003, Satel was interviewed on CNN, in place of a company representative, by Wolfblitzer. Once again only her affiliation with AEI was mentioned. In September 2004, Satel repeated the same corporate narrative in Forbes running with the headline “OxyContin doesn’t cause addiction. Its abusers are already addicts” much to the delight of Purdue executive Howard Udell who expressed it in an email to another executive with Eric Dezenhall carbon copied. Even after Purdue plead guilty to misleading doctors and patients about the addiction risks of Oxycontin Satel continued to attack critics pinning a Wall Street Journal article titled “Oxy Morons” that repudiated federal prosecutors for being zealots. Satel continued to sporadically pontificate the company narrative over several years picking it up again in 2018, with another opinion piece in Politico, with renewed media interest in the opioid problem.

As I mentioned in (Part 18), one of the fraudulent claims Purdue included on the package insert was that delayed absorption reduced the liability of abuse. However, in the clinical trials for the 12 hour controlled release Oxycodone half of the participants experienced pain before 12 hours had elapsed and a third experienced pain before 8 hours had elapsed, which led the research team to change the study to allow smaller doses within the original 12 hour window. Patients who did not get the 12 hours of pain relief not only develop a higher tolerance to the drug but can also experience more acute withdrawal symptoms. Instead of encouraging shorter time intervals between doses, company sales reps encouraged physicians to titrate up while downplaying and sometimes outright lying about the elevated risk of addiction from doing so.

ProPublica: Inside Purdue Pharma's Media Playbook: How it Planted The Opioid Anti-Story