from 2012-18 sales of Mundipharma’s oxycodone, active ingredient in OxyContin, at ~700 Chinese major hospitals rose 5-fold

  One set of a dozen transactions in July 2017 was illustrative of the complex way Purdue moved money around.  Purdue transferred equal amounts through a series of companies before $980,000 was deposited into Beacon and another $980,000 into Rosebay.  Both then transferred the money into another company before directing it into the Japanese division of Mundipharma, a Sackler company that sells opioids and other drugs abroad.  At the same time as the transfers through Rosebay and Beacon, another $17.6 million was sent more directly by Purdue into the same Japanese unit of Mundipharma.  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/health/sacklers-purdue-payments-opioids-.html
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  The documents and interviews indicate that representatives from the Sacklers’ Chinese affiliate, Mundipharma, tell doctors that time-release painkillers like OxyContin are less addictive than other opioids — the same pitch that Purdue Pharma, the US company owned by the family, admitted was false in court more than a decade ago.  Mundipharma has pushed ever larger doses of the drug, even as it became clear that higher doses present higher risks, and represented the drug as safe for chronic pain, according to the interviews and documents.

  These tactics mirror those employed by Purdue Pharma in the US, where more than 400,000 people have died of opioid overdoses and millions more became addicted.  An avalanche of litigation over the company’s marketing has driven Purdue Pharma into bankruptcy in the US.  In China, Mundipharma managers have required sales representatives to copy patients’ private medical records without consent, in apparent violation of Chinese law, current and former employees told AP.

  Former reps also said they sometimes disguised themselves as medical staff, putting on white doctor’s coats and lying about their identity to visit patients in the hospital. As in the US, marketing material in China made claims about OxyContin’s safety and effectiveness based on company-funded studies and outdated data that has been debunked.

  The AP examined more than 3,300 pages of training and marketing materials used by Mundipharma staff, as well as internal company documents and videos. These files came from three independent sources and were verified by cross-checking. AP also spoke with one current and three former OxyContin sales representatives who worked at the company last year.

  Mundipharma has promoted its blockbuster product, OxyContin, in questionable ways in other countries, including Italy and Australia.  But the company has particularly high hopes for China — the world’s most populous nation and second-largest economy — where it has said it wants sales to surpass those in the US by 2025....Mundipharma is hiring in China.

A Mundipharma facility in an industrial park on the outskirts of Beijing, China

 from 2012 through 2018 sales of Mundipharma’s oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin, at nearly 700 of China’s major hospitals rose five-fold, according to previously unreported data from the government-linked China National Pharmaceutical Industry Information Center....“Why am I afraid of a drug epidemic?” Yu said.  “If our doctors can’t stand the temptation and want to make tens or hundreds of thousands of yuan a month, it is easy to be manipulated by other people.”  Sitting in a large, Spartan office at Ruijin’s campus in suburban Shanghai, Yu had an air of resignation.  His beliefs about how to shepherd people through suffering had fallen out of fashion in China.   https://nypost.com/2019/11/20/fake-doctors-pilfered-medical-records-drive-sackler-family-companys-oxy-sales-in-china/

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