Purdue Frederick

Purdue Frederick was a patent medicine company established in the 19th century, located on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. In 1952, Arthur Sackler, a name strongly associated with pharmaceutical advertising success, purchased the company and renamed it to Purdue Pharma. He handed over the operation to his brothers while he focussed mainly on pharmaceutical marketing outside of the company. Arthur Sackler is notably known for the marketing campaigns of Librium and Valium, which became top-selling drugs, massively enriching him through a unique compensation scheme based on the volume of pills sold.1

The name Purdue is prominently tied to the opioid crisis, particularly through their development and marketing of OxyContin. The marketing strategies of Purdue Pharma significantly included bypassing typical safety tests on addiction and abuse potentials, hypothesizing based on the drug's release mechanism that it would not be addictive or prone to abuse. This assumption was crucial to Purdue's claim of OxyContin being superior to other opioids, a stance that later came under intense scrutiny and criticism for its role in the opioid epidemic.2