How The Mighty Have Fallen: Restrictions Are Upheld for Executives in Purdue Pharma OxyContin Case
An administrative law judge has upheld a decision barring three former Purdue Pharma executives from participating in federal health care programs for 15 years, the Department of Health and Human Services announced last Friday, according to the New York Times.
The three executives are former CEO Michael Friedman, Howard Udell, the company's former top lawyer, and Dr. Paul Goldenheim, who was once the chief medical officer of the company. In a nutshell, they pled guilty to intentionally misbranding OxyContin as a safe, non-addictive pain reliever, when in fact they knew those things be untrue.
In 2007, as part of a settlement agreement in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Purdue Pharma paid more than $634 million to settle these, and other, allegations. The investigation, which was led by then-U.S. Attorney John Brownlee, also produced considerable evidence of wrongdoing on the part of these three executives.
In light of the evidence, Brownlee added a unique twist to the case—he obtained criminal indictments against all three executives for their individual roles in Purdue Pharma's wrongdoing. Like most large corporate wrongdoers caught in the act, Purdue Pharma was willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, but it didn't want its three top officers to plead guilty to criminal acts.
But Brownlee insisted that all three men plead guilty to criminal acts as part of a global settlement. After much "weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth," on the part of Messrs Friedman, Goldenheim, and Udell, each pleaded guilty to criminal charges. As a result, each was banned for 15 years from doing business with federal health care programs.
Notwithstanding the logistics and the sheer size and complexity of such a prosecution, consider this: Brownlee prosecuted this massive case with one of the smallest U.S. Attorney's offices in the entire country.
Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell also kicked in some help, and so did the folks downtown at the Department of Justice. But the main impetus all along was John Brownlee, who witnessed first hand the devastation wrought by OxyContin in Virginia's blighted rural areas. More than 200 deaths occurred in rural Virginia alone as a result of OxyContin abuse.
For those of you who have never heard the story, it is inspiring. I'll let Brownlee tell it, but suffice to say that when settlement negotiations started on this case, Purdue was classically arrogant. The list of lawyers they brought to the table reads like a who's-who of superlawyers and politicians—Purdue retained then-Republican Presidential candidate Rudy Guliani and current United States Attorney General Eric Holder among many others.
What Purdue Pharma really needed, however, was something more than good lawyers—what they really, really needed was a good set of facts, and it was already too late for that.
What Virginians needed—that is, the taxpayers, the citizens who witnessed the carnage that these wrongdoers inflicted on us all in the name of profits—was a good legal team, led by a man who had the instincts to see this case for what it was and to refuse to settle the case for a nuisance value.
Posted by Zachary Kitts at 1/27/2009 5:27 PM 
Categories: False Claims Act Practice in Virginia,Qui Tam practice in Virginia
Categories: False Claims Act Practice in Virginia,Qui Tam practice in Virginia
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