That's why there are conflict of interest statements in research papers and is also why we laid the legislative hammer down on pharma companies after what Purdue did- Purdue Pharma intentionally misused a single-paragraph letter published in a 1980 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The letter, from authors Hershel Jick and Jane Porter, observed a low rate of addiction in a group of closely monitored hospitalized patients who were taking opioids. Purdue's marketing materials then twisted this limited finding into the blanket claim that the risk of addiction was "much less than 1%" for all prescription opioid patients, including those with chronic pain. The company was aware of internal research by Lawrence Robbins et al that found addictive behavior in 8% to 13% of OxyContin patients. Rather than pursuing the concerning nature of these findings, Purdue pushed the ≤1% narrative using the flawed Jick and Porter study; internal documents from 1996 revealed Purdue knew about widespread abuse of OxyContin, the company did nothing to address the issue. The issue yet again, was never the scientists, the scientists knew about the 8-13% statistic. The issue once again was the business aspect, the company and its representatives- who were trained to tell doctors that signs of addiction, such as requests for early refills, were actually signs that the patient's pain was not being treated effectively. They were taught about the fabricated concept of "pseudoaddiction" to encourage doctors to prescribe even higher doses. Purdue also aggressively targeted doctors with meals and gifts, while tracking their prescription habits (which is now illegal). The company often targeted high-prescribing physicians, even those with known histories of improper prescribing (which is now illegal but still occurs) incentivized sales representatives with high commission and fired those who questioned their narrative. They also sent representatives to areas "with high rates of pain" although these yet again were just vulnerable communities like the poor (miners, laborers, etc) the sick or the old. The sales representatives for the most part were doing their job marketing a drug they had been convinced was a solution. Those who held the fault were the higher ups in the company who silenced published studies disagreeing with their claims and brainwashed their sales representatives. The Purdue Scandal is absolutely perfect at capturing what's wrong with modern science and it is NOT the scientists, who were doing valid research and publishing papers warning about Oxycontin. The 1% statistic wasn't even funded by Purdue, it was a small unreliable study done with a tiny sample size on an observed population that was warped by a company. The writer of the "Letter to the Editor" actually ended up suing the company if I recall and deeply regretted publishing it in a paper. Yet again, he was simply doing research, every scientist was doing research and publishing their findings. The key aspect is that science builds and concept proofs nearly constantly and when that 1% statistic was debunked it was no longer in the hands of the scientists, they'd done their job, it was in the hands of politicians, who were lobbied by Purdue. Research is always accurate, interpretations and spins of the research are not. You cannot blame anything within STEM for the actions of corrupt politicians or greedy multinational pharma corporations. There are an insane amount of stage III clinical trials which fail and it's partly due to the much, much heavier restrictions put onto scientific research after the Purdue incident and subsequent opioid crisis. If anything due to that science is more transparent than ever, people just will be people and trust "experts" without medical degrees who say what they will say about data that they cannot even begin to comprehend. Truth is truth coming from an unbiased expert, no one going to law or business can be an expert in medicine.
