ArticleBMJ open2022
Industry strategies to market opioids to children and women in the USA: a content analysis of internal industry documents from 1999 to 2017 released in State of Oklahoma v. Purdue Pharma, L.P.
Article in BMJ open, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Weight Loss Medication Marketing and First Nations People: Disease Awareness or Corporate Profit?The Medical journal of Australia · 2026Article
- Purdue's development of abuse-deterrent formulation opioids as a response to market competition: An industry documents analysis.SSM. Qualitative research in health · 2026Article
- Lobbying in the Shadows: A Comparative Analysis of Government Lobbyist Registers.The Milbank quarterly · 2025Article
- Article
- Reclaiming the narrative: countering harmful commercial discourses.Health promotion international · 2024Article
- Pharmaceutical industry use of key opinion leaders to market prescription opioids: A review of internal industry documents.Exploratory research in clinical and social pharmacy · 2024Review
- Evaluation of the strategies opioid manufacturers used to recruit health professionals and encourage overprescribing: an analysis of industry documents.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Misuse, Abuse and Medication Errors' Adverse Events Associated with Opioids-A Systematic Review.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- The Commercial Determinants of Violence: Identifying Opportunities for Violence Prevention through a Public Health-Based Framework Analysis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Article
- What did the scientific literature learn from internal company documents in the pharmaceutical industry? A scoping review.Cochrane evidence synthesis and methods · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveIdentify advertising strategies used to market opioids to women and children.
designQualitative content analysis of internal pharmaceutical industry documents released in litigation, dated between 1999 and 2017.
settingUSA.
participantsOpioid manufacturers (Janssen, Ortho-McNeil, Purdue, Teva (Actavis), Janus, Cephalon); women; children. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Advertising campaigns, industry executive statements regarding marketing goals
methodsWe examined ((DATASET) link: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/drug/) documents released in State of Oklahoma v. Johnson & Johnson (2019) to identify marketing strategies and campaigns developed by opioid manufacturers that focused on children and women, as well as public records, including websites developed by manufacturers and their allies, to confirm whether marketing campaigns proposed in internal industry documents were implemented. Documents identified as relevant were coded for themes based on expectations drawn from previous research on marketing using internal industry documents, which included making emotional appeals and understating the risks of addiction.
resultsWe found that opioid manufacturers sought to recruit coaches and school nurses to encourage opioid use by children, developed unbranded initiatives suggesting adolescents ask providers for pain care medications, suggested that opioid use could reduce health risks associated with untreated pain among women and advocated to policy makers that women faced unmet needs for pain medication.
conclusionsThe USA strictly regulates direct marketing of medications but does not place the same restrictions on indirect marketing and unbranded campaigns, which encourage people to seek treatment without indicating the names of specific products. Opioid manufacturers in the early 21st century appear to have relied largely on unbranded campaigns for marketing, which they described externally as public health promotion and internally as a way to increase sales of opioids. The rapid increase in opioid use concomitant with these campaigns suggests that additional scrutiny of this kind of marketing may be needed in order to protect vulnerable groups.
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Registered trials
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