CASE NOTES Case Study 1: Opioid Responsibility: Big Pharma, Doctors, Consultants, and Patients Written by Anastasia Cortez Case Summary Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1995 with an unprecedented marketing effort that aimed to create a wide market for the opioid pain reliever. Their success is convincing the medical community that OxyContin was a safe and effective drug laid the groundwork for the opioid epidemic in the United States. State and federal litigation against Purdue has revealed that the company behaved unethically by marketing OxyContin to doctors who should not have been prescribing it and claiming that it could treat conditions it was not proven to be effective for and then shifting blame for addiction onto patients for whom the drug did not work as promised. Purdue‘s success in generating multibillion sales revenue for a new product came at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. Case Analysis This case discusses Purdue Pharma‘s role in the U.S. opioid epidemic. The case is an example of unethical company behavior, primarily in the context of marketing. The case also can serve to spark discussion about corporate responsibility for product problems. In this case, the responsibility chain is complicated by the involvement of doctors mediating between the company and the patients who eventually took the product. Because the opioid epidemic has had a broad impact on so many individuals and agencies, the question of company responsibility has been magnified—is Purdue responsible for paying for the opioid epidemic?