A member of the family that owns Purdue Pharma — which is being sued by more than 1,000 jurisdictions for its alleged role in seeding the opioid crisis with its pain medication OxyContin — has been awarded a patent for a treatment for opioid use disorder. 
 
 Dr. Richard Sackler is listed as one of six inventors on the patent, which was issued in January and was first reported Friday by the Financial Times. Critics told the FT that they were disturbed that the patent could enable Sackler to benefit financially from the addiction crisis that his family’s company is accused of fueling. 
 
 Purdue has denied the allegations in the lawsuits, which also target a range of other opioid painkiller manufacturers and distributors. 
 
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 The patent concerns a new formulation of buprenorphine, one of the medications shown to help people with opioid addiction. It is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration in tablet and film form, but the patent describes a wafer that could dissolve even faster than existing forms when put under the tongue. 
 
 The patent says that the faster the treatment dissolves, the less risk there is for diversion. 
 
 Sackler is the past president of Purdue; his father was one of three brothers who founded the company. The family has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to museums and schools and hospitals around the world, but has increasingly come under scrutiny amid the opioid crisis. 
 
 In addition to the more than 1,000 lawsuits against Purdue from cities, state, counties, and tribes — most of which have been consolidated in an Ohio federal court — a case brought by Massachusetts recently named the Sackler family as defendants. 
 
 Meanwhile, Congress has requested from Purdue a copy of a deposition from Sackler that was taken as part of a lawsuit brought by Kentucky against Purdue. The case was settled in 2015, but it is believed to be the only time a member of the Sackler family has been questioned under oath about the marketing of OxyContin and what the company knew about the addictive properties of the pain reliever. 
 
 In a lawsuit in Kentucky, STAT has also sought to obtain a copy of the deposition. 
 
 The description in the patent warns that people who are addicted to drugs sometimes commit crimes to feed their habit, which is why it says improved forms of medication-assisted treatment are needed. Some of the lawsuits against Purdue and the other opioid companies have cited the public safety and law enforcement costs associated with addiction. 
 
 The description of the patent says the form of buprenorphine could also be used to treat pain in people or animals. 
 
 Purdue declined to comment on the patent. 
 
 Separately, Purdue has been trying to show it is taking steps to address the addiction crisis. It has backed safer prescribing efforts and donated money to the National Sheriffs’ Association to purchase naloxone and train law enforcement on its use. This week, it contributed $3.4 million to a company working on a low-cost naloxone nasal spray. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Phil McCausland and Tracy Connor 
 
 Purdue Pharma, the company best known for selling the prescription painkiller OxyContin, announced on Saturday that they would stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors. The move comes amid a series of state and municipal lawsuits that blame the company for contributing to the opioid epidemic. 
 
 Purdue has faced criticism for more than a decade that it has aggressively and irresponsibly pushed the sale of its drug OxyContin. The company said Saturday that it would cut its sales force by more than 50 percent, with approximately 200 people remaining in the department. 
 
 "We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers," Purdue said in a statement. 
 
 The company plans to run all questions about its highly profitable drug Oxycontin — which the American Addiction Centers said has a strong “potential for addiction and subsequent withdrawal symptoms” — through its medical affairs department. 
 
 Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of Opioid Policy Research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, said he wished that the company had decided to stop marketing the drug years ago and that other opioid manufacturers would agree to do the same. 
 
 "The problem we have is doctors over-prescribing opioids, and it’s difficult to promote more cautious prescribing if manufacturers are sending drug reps into doctor’s offices and advertising in medical journals and investing millions to get them to prescribe more," Kolodny said. 
 
 "Overall, the impact will be small because the genie is out of the bottle," he said of the opioid manufacturer's decision. "But if other opioid manufacturers would do the same, it would have a bigger effect." 
 
 Purdue generated $1.94 billion in Oxycontin sales in 2017, according to Symphony Health Solutions. That is approximately $1 billion less than its all-time high in 2013. 
 
 First introduced in 1995, Oxycontin was marketed by Purdue as being a non-addictive, time-release version of oxycodone used for the treatment of chronic pain. Users soon learned that they could bypass its time-release function by crushing the pills and snorting or injecting them. 
 
 Related: Welcome to Williamson, W.Va., where there are 6,500 opioid pills per person 
 
 Because of Oxycontin’s rising cost, many people who developed an addiction to the opioid subsequently turned to heroin, contributing to the ongoing drug epidemic. 
 
 In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its executives were fined $634.5 million for misleading the public about the painkiller's addictive properties. The company's top lawyer, former president and former chief medical pleaded guilty to misbranding the drug. They were placed on probation for three years and ordered to perform 400 hours of community service. 
 
 The drug maker recently attempted to recast itself as an advocate in the fight to end the opioid crisis, while maintaining an aggressive sales push. According to new details released in a 2017 Washington state lawsuit, Purdue’s sales staff collected data to find the highest prescribers it could and then aggressively market its drugs to those individuals. 
 
 A logo sign outside of a facility occupied by Purdue Pharma L.P., in Wilson, North Carolina on Nov. 27, 2015. Kristoffer Tripplaar / Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA 
 
 More recently, the company identified nurses and physician assistants as "a high value target, particularly due to impact on primary care," and pushed its sales team to target these potential prescribers. The drug maker noted an 18 percent uptick in sales from nurses and physician assistants between 2014 to 2015. 
 
 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 people who received prescriptions to drugs like Oxycontin currently struggle with an opioid addiction. The CDC also reported that more than 1,000 people are treated in emergency rooms for prescription opioid overdoses. 
 
 The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that opioid pain reliever prescriptions escalated from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 207 million in 2013. The institute also found that the United States is the biggest consumer of hydrocodone in the world, taking in almost 100 percent of the world’s doses. 
 
 Related: Americans are abusing over-the-counter drugs as well as opioids, study shows 
 
 The White House Council of Economic Advisers announced in November that the ongoing opioid crisis cost the country $504 billion in 2015, attributing the high dollar amount to health care, criminal justice spending and lost worker productivity. Their finding is more than six times the most recent estimate. 
 
 In the past year, Purdue has been named in lawsuits filed by the Ohio, Alabama and Washington attorneys general. Even cities like Philadelphia have filed a suit against the company for exacerbating the drug addiction crisis. 
 
 Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced earlier this week that he had filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, stating that drugs like Oxycontin had left "a trail of addiction and death winding through every community of this state." 
 
 "Alabama ranks first in the nation for the number of painkiller prescriptions per capita,” Marshall said in a statement. "As a result, it is estimated that almost 30,000 of our residents over age 17 are dependent upon heroin and prescription painkillers. Alabama’s drug overdose death rate skyrocketed by 82 percent from 2006 to 2014 and it is believed that many of those deaths were from opioid painkillers and heroin." 
 
 Related: Drug overdose deaths rise drastically in places Trump calls home 
 
 Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose state leads the nation with the highest per capita rate of fatal drug overdoses, said in a statement that he was "encouraged by Purdue's decision to stop marketing deadly opioids," but "they are still a long way from reversing the damage they've done to families and communities across the country." 
 
 "If they really want to start helping the communities they've devastated, they should support and implement my LifeBOAT legislation, and contribute one penny per milligram of every opioid they sell to funding treatment centers," Manchin, a Democrat said. 
 
 The legislation "would establish a permanent funding stream to provide and expand access to substance abuse treatment," and impose a fee of 1 cent per milligram of active opioid ingredients in prescription pain pills, and include rebates for cancer-related pain and hospice care, according to his office. The re-introduced bill was referred to the Finance Committee last year. ||||| Orange and Santa Clara counties joined forces Wednesday in a lawsuit against the nation’s largest manufacturers of opium-like pain killers, accusing the firms of deceptive marketing that spawned an epidemic of addiction and overdoses. 
 
 The 105-page lawsuit, filed in Orange County by District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, alleges five pharmaceutical companies spent millions of dollars to convince the public that drugs meant only for short-term use by cancer patients should be taken for chronic pain. 
 
 The marketing campaign changed prescription opioids from a niche drug to an $8 billion industry by 2010 and contributed to more than 16,000 overdose deaths that same year, putting profits above health, the suit states. 
 
 The rise in highly addictive painkillers also created an atmosphere where doctors made life-and-death decisions based not on science but on hype, the suit states. 
 
 Rackauckas, in an interview Wednesday, likened the pharmaceutical companies to the tobacco industry. “What we’re after is to make these companies stop the practice of false advertising and false claims that these drugs are benign,” he said. “The effort is to require them to be truthful.” 
 
 Filed after an extensive series of Register columns over three years blaming much of the epidemic on drug companies, the lawsuit names Purdue Pharma, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Janssen Pharmaceuticals – a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, Endo Health Solutions, and Actavis, as well as affiliated companies. 
 
 All the companies are accused of false advertising, unfair competition and creating a public nuisance. Teva, Endo and Actavis could not be reached for comment. 
 
 Robyn Frenze, with New Jersey-based Janssen, responded, “We’re committed to responsible promotion, prescribing and use of all our medications. At this time, we’re reviewing the case.” 
 
 Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., issued a similar response, “We have not received the complaint from the local authorities, nor had the opportunity to review it. When we do, we will respond accordingly.” 
 
 The lawsuit earned applause from several Orange County parents who have lost children to prescription drug overdoses. 
 
 “It’s always been my opinion that Big Pharma is the head of the snake,” said James Kennedy, whose son, Joey, died from an overdose. “They flood the market with a very powerful opiate that shouldn’t be prescribed but for a very small portion of patients. The whole organization is designed for profit, not for healing.” 
 
 Jodi Barber, whose son, Jarrod, 19, also overdosed, declared, “This could be a major break in the epidemic.” 
 
 Pushing drugs like Vicodin, Opana and Oxycontin, the pharmaceutical companies appealed to doctors and consumers that the dangers of opioids were untrue and that the compassionate treatment of pain actually required opioids, according to the suit. 
 
 “They overstated the benefits of using opioids long-term to treat chronic non-cancer pain, promising improvement in patients’ function and quality of life,” said the suit. “(They) dismissed or minimized the serious risks and adverse outcomes of chronic opioid use, including the risk of addiction, overdose, and death.” 
 
 Slick campaigns – born in marketing offices and not supported by science – sold the opioids for long-term pain, said the suit. 
 
 “The result has been catastrophic,” said the suit. 
 
 According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription opioids contributed to 16,651 overdose deaths nationally in 2010 – more than twice as many deaths as heroin and cocaine combined. It caused more deaths than motor vehicle accidents. In Orange County alone there is an opioid-related death, on average, every other day. 
 
 For every death, CDC reports, more than 30 people are treated in emergency rooms. 
 
 “The United States is now awash in opioids,” states the suit. In 2010, 254 million prescriptions for opioids were filled in the U.S. – enough to medicate every adult in America around the clock for a month, the suit states. Twenty percent of all doctor visits result in the prescription of an opioid, nearly double the rate in 2000. Opioids are now the most prescribed class of drugs, said the suit. 
 
 While Americans represent 4.6 percent of the world’s population, they consume 80 percent of the world’s supply of opioids, according to the suit. 
 
 With the prescription drug epidemic came a rise in heroin use as addicts looked for a cheaper high. 
 
 “It is hard to imagine the powerful pull that would cause a law-abiding, middle-aged person started on prescription opioids for a back injury, to turn to buying, snorting, or injecting heroin, but that is the dark side of opioid abuse and addiction,” the suit says. 
 
 Pharmaceutical firms, according to the suit, “unleashed the epidemic” by downplaying the risks and exaggerating the benefits of opioids over other drugs, shifting medical convention. 
 
 “Defendant Cephalon, for example, marketed its opioid, Fentora, for chronic non-cancer pain even though it was approved only to treat cancer pain,” said the suit. “What makes this effort particularly nefarious – and dangerous – is that unlike most other prescription drugs, opioids are highly addictive controlled substances.” 
 
 The companies deceptively engaged a patient base that – physically and psychologically – could not turn away from their drugs. Many were not helped by the drugs, but were profoundly damaged, the suit said. 
 
 This is not the first time that the drug companies have gotten into trouble. 
 
 In 2007, Purdue settled criminal and civil charges for misbranding OxyContin, agreeing to pay the United States $635 million – one of the largest settlements with a drug company for marketing misconduct. Still, Purdue had national annual sales of OxyContin between $2.47 billion and $2.99 billion for the last five years, the suit said. 
 
 In 2008, Cephalon pleaded guilty to a criminal violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for its misleading promotion of Actiq and two other drugs and agreed to pay $425 million. 
 
 Contact the writer: tsaavedra@ocregister.com
– Irony alert: A billionaire accused of worsening the opioid crisis just won a patent for a drug to treat opioid addiction, Stat News reports. Richard Sackler, whose family owns OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, is one of six inventors behind a new medication that could help people get off drugs including opioids. It would be a new kind of buprenorphine—a gentle opiate that curbs drug cravings—which is already FDA-approved in film-strip or tablet form and now would come in wafers disintegrating quickly under the tongue, per the Financial Times. The best-selling version of buprenorphine, Suboxone, made $877 million in US sales for the British pharmaceutical company Indivior. The patent application says the new drug would help ease crime caused by addicts, but doesn't mention the thousand-plus lawsuits filed against Purdue Pharma for allegedly spurring the opioid epidemic. "It's reprehensible what Purdue Pharma has done to our public health," says the director of an addiction treatment center in Staten Island, New York. He adds that Sackler's family "shouldn't be allowed to peddle any more synthetic opiates—and that includes opioid substitutes." The Sacklers, known mostly for philanthropy before the opioid epidemic, deny fueling a crisis that killed 42,000 people in 2016. In related news, Julia Roberts is starring in the new film Ben Is Back about a mother dealing with an opioid-addicted son who comes home for Christmas, per USA Today.