Details of the lawsuit filed by the Washington State Attorney General against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, were unsealed on Friday.
The complaint reveals the tactics of Purdue Pharma drug representatives and how they interacted with doctors.
The lawsuit against Purdue Pharma mentions several local doctors.
Dr. Donald Dillinger operated a pain management clinic in South Everett. He retired a few months ago and didn't know he was mentioned in the Washington State Attorney General's lawsuit against Purdue Pharma until a KIRO 7 crew contacted him on Friday.
"I got a questionnaire from the AG's Office, kind of inquiring about whether the drug reps had been soliciting me in some specific way or using some kind of inducements to get me to prescribe, which they had not," said Dr. Dillinger.
The complaint says between 2007-2016 Dillinger wrote nearly 10,000 prescriptions for OxyContin, 26 times more than the average Everett prescriber.
Dillinger questions the 10,000 figure. "I didn't really like to use OxyContin because of the exorbitant price they always demanded," said Dillinger.
He's not surprised he wrote 26 times the prescriptions of average providers.
"I had pain patients referred to me by their primary care doctors, people with legitimate pain problems that needed opioids. All the primary care doctors were getting out of this. None of them wanted to do it anymore, they were fearful of losing their licenses," said Dillinger.
The AG's suit calls out another Everett doctor, Dr. Delbert Whetstone, and says a Purdue rep wrote in a report in 2008 that Dr. Whetstone's patients are all "20-year-old thugs with diamonds in their ears and $350 tennis shoes who always pay cash," according to the complaint.
The lawsuit alleges the drug rep didn't report Whetstone to the DEA until 2011. KIRO-7 tried to contact Whetstone, he was sentenced to federal prison in 2012.
Dillinger believes the governor wants to take a stand in the opioid crisis and turned his focus on doctors and encouraged the Medical Quality Assurance Board to take a critical look. Dillinger was disciplined by the Medical Quality Assurance board in 2017. Dillinger told KIRO-7 he decided not to fight it because it was time to retire anyway.
And while Dillinger says he didn't see misconduct by the Purdue reps he encountered, he does support the AG's lawsuit. Dr. Dillinger cited an investigation by the Los Angeles Times that had gangs trafficking black-market OxyContin from Los Angeles to Everett in 2016. He says Purdue Pharma reps should have seen the large numbers of OxyContin being prescribed and filled in LA. >>http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-oxycontin-everett/
With the AG's recent action he does worry that patients can't get the drugs they need to live, "that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction for the thousands of human beings living with pain today who are in many cases unable to obtain the medications that allow them to approach a more normal level of function," said Dillinger.
"I know I did the right thing," said Dillinger. "I'm a good doctor and my patients were suffering and very compliant people."
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