Florida Health News

Pharmacist to testify against new OxyContin

By Carol Gentry
5/5/2008 © Florida Health News

Golbum

A white-coat crusader from Clearwater, pharmacist Larry Golbom, is scheduled to appear before an FDA advisory committee today in Gaithersburg, Md., to warn against allowing sale of a new form of th e prescription painkiller OxyContin.

Purdue Pharma says its new formulation of OxyContin will be safer than the one approved in 1995, which was developed as a time-release drug to provide cancer patients and others in intractable pain a continuous dosage over 12 hours. But addicts and recreational users quickly discovered that if they crushed the pills and snorted or injected the contents, they could get an immediate rush akin to that of heroin. 

The company says the new version is more resistant to tampering. The tablets have "plastic-like properties which make them difficult to break," the company said in documents released by FDA last week. The agency asked drug companies to come up with another long-acting drug that would be harder to abuse. Agency official Bob Rappaport wrote that a new product is vital “for the millions of patients in this country who suffer from chronic pain.”
 
Golbom, who self-finances a one-hour radio show each Sunday night in Tampa Bay, “The Prescription Addiction Radio Show,” told Florida Health News that he doesn’t believe any product containing oxycodone hydrochloride – the active ingredient in OxyContin, which is derived from the opium poppy -- could be tamper-resistant.  

“Somebody will figure out a way to inhale this product or extract the active ingredient,” Golbom predicts.

He has prepared slides for the committee that show the chemical similarities between oxycodone and heroin, which he says are “interchangeable” and have identical side effects. Like heroin, oxycodone has killed thousands of people and addicted thousands more, he said.

“As a pharmacist, I see the sunken eyes and hopeless look from far too many people who have been mismanaged with opiod therapy,” Golbom says.

A year ago, the president and two other top Purdue Pharma executives agreed to pay $634.5 million in fines for having marketed OxyContin to doctors as being less addictive than other painkillers.

Since the company made false claims before, Golbom says, it would be a mistake for FDA to accept its claims of safety for the new formulation. The FDA approval would lead doctors to believe that it is safe to prescribe, he said.

A pharmacist for 30 years, Golbom became an activist against the abuse of prescription narcotics two years ago, after a member of his family was sold OxyContin that had been prescribed by a Clearwater doctor to a pusher posing as a pain patient. See Bitter Medicine, published in the Tampa Tribune July 2007.

Golbom’s show airs on Sunday nights on WGUL 860 AM. His archived shows are available on his Web site, http://www.prescriptionaddictionradio.com. 

--Carol Gentry, editor, can be reached at Carol.Gentry@FloridaHealthNews.org.