China sales boom for painkiller at centre of opioid addiction in US
Soaring cancer rates, an ageing population and outreach push by nation’s doctors have helped increase sales of OxyContin in China
With its harsh anti-drugs laws and painful history with debilitating opium epidemics in the 19th-century, China would not spring to mind as a promising market for OxyContin, a painkiller that has been at the centre of an opioid addiction outbreak in the US.
Yet in China, powered by soaring cancer rates and an ageing population, OxyContin is turning into a hit. And the drug company behind the brand is giving sales an added boost through an outreach push to doctors and by working with the most powerful of allies – the Chinese government.
Certainly doctors and patients should be aware if they use strong opioids that there is small but significant risk of developing a dependence to those opioids
OxyContin is sold in the Asian country by Mundipharma (China) Pharmaceutical Co, a company associated with American company Purdue Pharma, the seller of the long-acting opioid in the US. Both are part of a worldwide network of independent, privately held companies owned by trusts belonging to the Sackler family, one of America’s richest families with a US$13 billion fortune, according to Forbes.
However, even as the reach of the painkiller widens, China faces ever greater challenges in managing the use of inherently risky opioids within its sprawling, state-run health care system.
Several doctor training presentations in a government-backed pain-management campaign, for which Mundipharma provides organisational support, as well as some on the company’s online platforms, highlight decades-old foreign studies that downplay the risks of opioid addiction.
The programmes reach tens of thousands of local doctors, often familiarising them with the purported superiority of OxyContin.
