US DoJ OxyContin probe "fell short" Public Citizen claims

The US Department of Justice's criminal probe into drugmaker Purdue Frederick Corp "fell short" in three key areas, according to the Public Citizen, an antibusiness consumer group, in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As a result, the group alleges in a statement that the company's officials were allowed "to get off the hook for their misdeeds" and the DoJ failed "to force the company to disgorge a much larger amount of its profits."

The first alleged failing was to limit the scope of the prosecution to the 1996-2001 period, the director of health research at Public Citizen, Sidney Wolfe, argued. Second, penalties were limited to a timeframe that ignored earlier "illegal promotional activities," which had contributed to Purdue's profits from OxyContin (oxycodone HCl), a powerful prescription pain reliever. Finally, Public Citizen believes that the DoJ should have ensured that some of the drugmakers' executives were jailed.

Dr Wolfe likened the drug's distributors to narcotics dealers, stating that "we seem to have a double standard of justice. The damage to the public from these white-collar drug pushers surely exceeds the collective damage done by traditional street drug pushers of this drug."