John Temple > Quotes

“Studies have demonstrated that opioids may actually increase pain over the long run and that non-drug treatments are much more effective than opioid therapy. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared that painkiller overdose deaths are an official epidemic.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Between 1996 and 2002, Purdue funded more than twenty thousand pain-related educational programs, almost ten a day, seven days a week. During the same years, Purdue conducted”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“It didn’t mention that the “article” was a letter to the editor, published in 1980, and that its conclusions were based on a simple review of the charts of hospitalized patients, not a scientific study of long-term narcotic use. But the idea was out there, published in a scientific journal: Fewer than 1 percent of pain patients would develop addictions.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Cafiero’s report said that Broward County was the nation’s number-one dispensing site for oxycodone, that doctors in the county had dispensed more than 3.3 million pills in the first six months of 2008. A Broward County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman said: “The appearance is that they are pill mills, simply handing drugs out, hand over fist. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of individuals trafficking into the state of Florida specifically to obtain pharmaceutical drugs.” The report showed photos of a”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“The Sun-Sentinel ran a story in April 2009 that said every single one of the fifty largest-selling oxycodone clinics in the United States was located in Florida. Thirty-three of them were in Broward County. A single small municipality, Oakland Park, was home to eighteen clinics within a two-mile radius.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Turned out the rugged mountains and humid climate of eastern Kentucky were excellent for growing weed. By the 1980s marijuana was believed to be the state’s number one cash crop.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“the manufacturing companies keep asking the DEA for permission to make more pills, and the DEA keeps granting it.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“It wasn’t hard to get urine. Folks back home had taken to selling Mason jars of it at flea markets. Whitney”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Rick Scott, the governor-elect, decided to shut down the state Office of Drug Control and signed an executive order on the day of his inauguration that froze “all new regulations,” which meant that rigorous new pain clinic standards created by the Board of Medicine were shelved. Then, everyone was astonished when the new governor cut funding to the state’s long-awaited prescription drug database. Police, fellow Republicans, and the White House drug czar, among others, urged Scott to reconsider. The database was an ounce of prevention, they said, the best way to keep tabs on excessive prescribing. As Broward County sheriff Al Lamberti put it: “We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.” Even pain medicine groups were stunned by Scott’s move.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“he learned to exploit three loopholes in Florida law and regulations. The first was the state’s lack of a prescription database. Pill seekers and their doctors found it easy to operate in Florida because cops and pharmacists had no way to track the flow of prescription narcotics.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“The company was selling an addictive drug that it said would not addict you as long as it was taken as prescribed. Then, when the drug did addict someone, and they began taking too much of it, or hoarding it to take all at once, or trying to obtain multiple prescriptions or early refills—then, that person was no longer taking it as prescribed. That person became one of the outcasts, an addict, and therefore the “safe when taken as prescribed” dictum remained valid.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Four of the doctors at American Pain were among the top nine physician purchasers of oxycodone in the United States, according to the DEA, which meant that together, they were a juggernaut. A”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“News reports detailed a wave of OxyContin abuse that originated in rural areas with a tradition of pill dependency, such as western Virginia, eastern Maine, and Kentucky.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Pharmaceuticals were the most profitable industry in the country, and the pharmaceutical lobby was by far the biggest in Washington.*”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Between July 2008* and the raid, the doctors of South Florida Pain and American Pain wrote 66,871 prescriptions for various medications. Ninety-six percent of the prescriptions were for oxycodone or alprazolam. More than 80 percent of the patients were from out of state.* The five American Pain doctors under investigation wrote prescriptions for fourteen million oxycodone pills. Executive Pain’s six doctors wrote for almost four million oxycodone pills. Boshers was the biggest writer, personally responsible for prescribing 3,601,860 oxycodone 30-milligram pills. Altogether, doctors targeted at both clinics had prescribed enough oxycodone to have given every man, woman, and child in Florida a pill. Then”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“According to the International Narcotics Control Board, the US had consumed 83 percent of the global supply of oxyco-done in 2007. And 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone. No one believed that the US was in that much more pain than the rest of the world.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“What gradually became clear in 2005 and 2006 and 2007 was that Kentucky users were leaving the state for their drugs. Seven states border Kentucky, with seven different sets of drug laws and regulations and seven different levels of prescription drug scrutiny. Few states kept track of prescriptions as closely as Kentucky. Eastern Kentuckians were arrested with pills from doctors in Detroit; Philadelphia; Cincinnati; Slidell, Louisiana. But increasingly, the destination for painkillers was Florida, which didn’t track prescriptions of controlled substances at all.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“And the companies developed one new opioid narcotic after another, hailing each as a breakthrough.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“As a pharmacist, Golbom could determine only two clear advantages OxyContin had over heroin as a recreational drug. One, OxyContin was legal. Two, it was pharmaceutical-grade—you knew exactly what was in it, unlike a bag of heroin bought on the street. Other than that, oxycodone addiction and heroin addiction were the same thing.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“As the flow of patients and cash had continued to rise, Ethan was spending up to six hours each night counting the money.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Purdue paid its reps better than most drug-makers paid theirs—by 2001, an average salary of $55,000 and an average bonus of $71,500. Purdue spent a half-billion dollars on the one-on-one sales strategy between 1996 and 2001.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“sorting”
― John Temple, Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America's Patriot Militia Movement

“combated drug waves by reducing quotas before. In the 1970s, when speed pills were popular, the DEA cut the quota of amphetamines by 90 percent, and the illicit market dried up. A decade later, sedative-hypnotics like Quaa- ludes swept across the country, and the DEA cut the quota of the ingredient methaqualone by 74 percent, which effectively erased the problem. Now, prescription narcotics were killing far more people than speed or sedatives, but the government was signing off on large increases in the supply each year.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Needle marks scarred her hands, the only place on her body she could still find a vessel. She was dissolving and injecting ten to twenty pills a day. The highs weren’t really highs anymore, just a break from the bone-deep pain of withdrawal.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Endo, maker of Opana, Percocet, and Percodan, distributed a patient education publication that said withdrawal symptoms and increased tolerance to narcotics are not the same as addiction. “Addicts take opioids for other reasons, such as unbearable emotional problems.”* The”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“But deaths involving prescription narcotics continued to mount, until the trend was impossible to dismiss. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids quadrupled between 1999 and 2007, from about three thousand to twelve thousand per year. By contrast, cocaine killed about six thousand users in 2007, heroin about two thousand. Prescription narcotics were now killing more Americans than all illegal drugs combined. In”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“problem-solution marketing. They would market and publicize the problem of untreated pain. Then they’d promote the solution: OxyContin.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“A new clinic was opening every three days, on average,”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“And like cocaine before it, the illicit painkiller trade was dominated by one state: Florida. But the similarities between cocaine and oxycodone ended there. Oxycodone wasn’t created in Colombian jungle laboratories or smuggled in suitcases or on thirty-foot “go-fast” speedboats. It was manufactured in pharmaceutical plants in St. Louis and promoted on highway billboards, and in page after page in the back of the New Times, a free weekly newspaper in South Florida. The bigger advertisements usually showed a woman holding her forehead and wincing, or a man’s torso arched in agony. The ads blared: “CHRONIC PAIN? STOP HURTING AND START LIVING!” Then, in smaller type: “Walk-Ins Welcome. Dispensing On-Site!” Some offered coupons or specials. One clinic’s ad said nothing about pain itself and simply displayed the goods: an amber prescription bottle, dozens of little blue pills tumbling out.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

“Purdue doubled its sales force during those years, from 318 to 767 pharmaceutical reps. In the trade, the reps are called detailers, and they’re typically good-looking, gregarious, and well-dressed. They remember the names of the clinic receptionists and secretaries and nurses. Purdue expected each drug rep to develop a list of 105 to 140 physicians within a specific sales region and call each one every three or four weeks.”
― John Temple, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic