Ho ho ho !
Merry Late X-Mas. Not sure yet whether this is front-paged on the NYT print edition yet...
Under Attack, Drug Maker Turned to Giuliani for Help
Background : a court judgment last May determined that Purdue Pharma used fraudulent graphs and data, that misled doctors about the potency of the drug - which was about twice as strong as advertised - to market the opiate based painkiller Oxycontin.
Rudy Giuliani started working for Purdue Pharma in 2002. Parents of teens who died from Oxycontin overdoses suspect Giuliani's PR and legal help, not to mention his top-level connections at the DEA, helped Purdue Pharma executives escpae jail time.
Oxycontin fueled an addiction-driven crime wave in suburbs and rural areas as addicts held up pharmacies for the drug and whole new illegal distribution networks sprang up to circulate the standardized, pharmaceutical grade opiate pills.
In short order, all sorts of people were popping Oxycontin - including Rush Limbaugh, who probably inveighed on the radio against the "irresponsibility" of inner-city drug addicts while high on Oxycontin.
Many of those who died from Oxycontin overdoses were teenagers, whose grieving parents now blame Rudy Giuliani for the fact that Purdue Pharma executives convicted in a court case against the company settled last May did not receive any jail time despite the fact that they had been found guilty of fraudulently marketing Oxycontin.
Excerpts from NYT story:
Trust Him ! He's Rudy !
In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr. Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani’s missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him....
Over the past few weeks, Mr. Giuliani’s consulting business has received increasing scrutiny...
...Giuliani Partners would not say how much Purdue had paid it, but one consultant to the drug maker estimated that Mr. Giuliani’s firm had, in some years, earned several million dollars from the account.
"Everything I did with Giuliani Partners has been totally legal, totally ethical," Mr. Giuliani recently told The Associated Press. "There’s nothing for me to explain about it. We’ve acted honorably, decently."
Here's the conclusion of the NYT story ;
In May, Purdue and its executives, after spending tens of millions of dollars to repair the company’s image, agreed to plea deals to avoid a trial. Together, they paid $634.5 million in fines and payments.
After years of denial and a high-profile public relations campaign, the company was forced to admit that it had misled doctors and patients. But to the parents of young people who had died getting high on OxyContin, the absence of jail time was evidence of Mr. Giuliani’s influence.
...Ed Bisch, whose son died of an OxyContin overdose, said that he believed that Purdue got a free pass for years thanks to Mr. Giuliani.
"It was all because of Giuliani," said Mr. Bisch. "And he got to take the money."
Previous coverage of the Giuliani-Oxycontin link here, at the Daily Kos by CTliberal examined ties between Giuliani and the DEA and the possibility that Giuliani may have used his personal influence to slow down the DEA's investigation of Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin :
Drug Enforcement Administration officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com Giuliani personally met with the head of the DEA when the DEA's drug diversion office began a criminal investigation into the company.
As the book Painkiller by Barry Meier points out both Giuliani and his then-partner Bernard Kerik "were in direct contact with Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of DEA."
Also see this recent Vanity Fair article on Giuliani, Oxycontin, and related matters
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An Ode To "Oxycontin Rudy"
If Rudy Giuliani wins the GOP nomination and then gets elected president, he and Rush Limbaugh can invite shadowy international pharmaceutical drug companies tied to his former "Purdue Pharma" legal client and throw a big Oxycontin party where he and Rush get out their secret Republican transvestite urges and prance round in stoned exultation that they're above all those laws and moral strictures, publicly advocated by the GOP and religious right, by which the common folk are supposed to live their lives. The Nazis rose to power on a "law 'n order", "traditional moral values" position too, and many of them were, privately, sexual and behavioral libertines.
It's an, tawdry old story endlessly repeated and about as appealing as Rudy Giuliani prancing around in drag, especially when we know that if the Christian right leadership demands that Rudy bash gays he do so with the same abandon as he adopted the "Islam is an evil religion that we're at with with. It's obvious. First thing I'll do is bomb Iran." rant the GOP's Christian right gatekeepers demand (only Ron Paul's bucking that requirement, and he won't get the nomination.)
Soooo....
When Rudy Giuliani stepped down as "law 'n order" mayor of NYC, what else was he to do but pick up a fat legal account defending a pharmaceutical company that had managed to provoke a national crime wave by fraudulently marketing an absurdly addictive painkiller that was twice as strong as the company claimed ? Why, of course.
Oxycontin wasn't just an inner city problem - the drug drove a wave of crime that swept across small towns and suburbs across America because it was a legal drug, a highly profitable one too, that was dispensed not from dealers on street corners and in alleys but, rather, from spiffy pharmacies: a pharmaceutical grade, standardized, always reliable high.
What was a good, honest, straight laced crime-fighting ex-mayor of NYC to do but pick up a lucrative account as head legal defense lawyer for the company whose fraudulent marketing of the painkiller Oxycontin had done to rural America what "crack" cocaine had done to America's inner cities in the 1980s ? A man's gotta' pay the bills, and Rudy certainly had a few.
By deceptively marketing to doctors, with fraudulent charts and graphs no less, a new painkiller that was actually twice as strong as the pharmaceutical company said, people who got prescribed the painkiller got hooked, then got their friends hooked, then started illegally selling the drug, so that in remarkably short order people all over the nation were holding up pharmacies, at gunpoint, for their supplies of the magic little pills called Oxycontin. What a racket.
As mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani branded himself as the "law and order" mayor who had successfully cleaned up the Big Apple with a simple formula that would have made sense to any Stalinist, Nazi, or other authoritarian politician anytime in recorded human history : more cops, meaner ones. Thus, we got the Amadu Dialo killing in which an elite NYPD police unit got spooked and unloaded 41 bullets, at point blank range, into the body of an unarmed man who had been so foolish as to answer his doorbell.
Despite such grotesque abuses of police power, New Yorkers seemed willing to cut Rudy Guiliani's draconian approach to policing New York slack because... it got results ! NYC Crime levels dropped for over a decade. Actually, during decade of the the 1990's crime levels dropped nearly everywhere, in any city of any size or for that matter any town or hamlet or suburb, anywhere in the United States. Boston "achieved" the same results as NYC under Giuliani with a radically different, basically peaceful, approach to policing.
Still Rudy Giuliani has tried to brand himself as a tough, no nonsense politician with the basic sense to admit the obvious: you don't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and you can't clean up the streets without breaking a few heads.
But, charges of hypocrisy have dogged Giuliani despite his best efforts to firm up his brand name by sauntering out from his secret city-funded love nest to forcefully lead a traumatized post 9-11 NYC by heroically posing atop the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center towers so that the image of his firm, mayorly command of a heap of smoking rubble could go out to the world in the evening network news.
Rudy Giuliani sure took firm charge of the Oxycontin problem too ; he cashed in. What's a good prosecutor to do ? Bills to be paid, y'know.