 (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File) By Christopher Ingraham The reformulation of the powerful painkiller OxyContin in 2010 is the chief driver of the explosion in heroin overdose deaths in subsequent years, according to a new working paper from researchers at the RAND Corp. and the Wharton School. OxyContin, released by Purdue Pharma in 1996, is a powerful extended-release opioid designed to provide 12-hour relief to patients suffering from severe pain. The original formulation was particularly prone to abuse, as drug users found that they could crush the pills and chew, snort or inject them in order to deliver 12 hours of powerful painkiller dosage all at once. In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty to misleading consumers about the risk of abuse associated with the drug. The company paid $600 million in fines, and in 2010 it released a new formulation of the drug that made it extremely difficult to crush or dissolve the pills in an attempt to make it harder to abuse. It was the first drug to receive an "abuse-deterrent" designation from the FDA. That reformulation was one of a number of steps taken by authorities across the country to limit the number of prescription painkiller overdose deaths, which by then had been trending sharply upward for more than a decade. Other interventions included the use of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) to track the sale of prescription painkillers, and a "pill mill" law in Florida passed in 2010 putting tighter regulations on pain clinics that in some cases dispensed painkillers recklessly. Taken together, these interventions have been widely credited with staving off the rise of prescription painkiller deaths. But they came with an unintended side effect.
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