Gardner Harris

What then happens, as you know, Shamita, is that my former colleague Barry Meyer of The New York Times in 2001 writes a famous story about Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers that lays out the entire opioid crisis about how addictive OxyContin was.

about the role of the FDA in this crisis and about the role of payments to doctors that has led to this explosion in prescriptions of opioids writ large.

And so from that moment on, from 2001 on, OxyContin prescriptions really don't grow.

They flatline because people understand from that moment on just how dangerous it is.

But the opioid crisis continues

to barrel forward.

And that's because Johnson & Johnson is doing the exact same thing as Purdue Pharma.

And in fact, it's now selling its duragesic patch, this fentanyl patch, by telling doctors that it's non-addictive.

Okay, it's hard to even conceive of this now, that anyone could possibly claim that fentanyl is non-addictive.

But that's what Johnson & Johnson did for years and years and years.

So, of course, death soared.

But Johnson & Johnson didn't just stick with duragesic.

It started launching its own drug.

branded opioids just like OxyContin, these long-acting opioids that everyone knew at the time were easily abused.

So it really was an expression of Johnson & Johnson's heart and soul, which is despite

The clear proof before them of the huge number of deaths, the huge number of injuries just rushed in because they saw Purdue Pharma's PR problems as an advantage for them.

So the FDA has an entire unit of police officers.

These are sworn officers with guns who investigate crimes.

But in 1992, the FDA took a fateful step

And that is that at that point, Congress had limited the FDA budget to the point where FDA's approvals of new drugs were taking as long as two years.