In this episode, host Jenna Miller speaks with Los Angeles Times reporter Harriet Ryan and editor Matt Lait, to discuss their award-winning investigation, “Oxycontin’s 12-hour Problem.” The two reveal how doctors were not only were many doctors being investigated for overprescribing a drug, they were often linked to bad pharmacies that lacked state oversight. The pair share some tips for young journalists and what decisions they made that helped humanize the business story. Their project took home the Bronze Award at the 2016 Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Journalism.
Transcript
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Jenna Miller: How to Cover Money: Inside the 2016 Barlett and Steele Bronze award-winning investigation, “Oxycontin’s 12-hour problem.”
Harriet Ryan: I think that some people talk to us because they want to help others, and they have recovered from opioid addiction, which is kind of a monumental feat for a human being. It is so, so hard. I think other people talk to us out of anger at the what had happened to them and just not being able to make sense of it.
Miller: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center How to Cover Money podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Jenna Miller, today’s host of the How to Cover Money podcast. Today we talk with Los Angeles Times reporter Harriet Ryan and editor Matt Lait, now with CNN, about the 2016 Barlett and Steele Bronze Award project, “Oxycontin’s 12-hour problem.” During an investigation into opioid manufacturers, Ryan, along with two other reporters, found that Purdue Pharma had prior knowledge of problems with the popular painkiller and gave doctors inaccurate recommendations about dosage in order to increase revenue. The team revealed that misleading marketing led to increased abuse and addiction. I sat down with Ryan and Lait who started out by taking us back to the beginning of the project.
Matt Lait: There was a court reporter who started noticing that doctors were being charged with reckless prescribing and he got interested about that, and we wanted to quantify how large of a role bad doctors played in the prescription drug epidemic. As part of our research, we made public records requests for autopsy reports in Southern California, about five counties. And we were able to show that the majority of people that were dying of prescription overdoses were people under a doctor’s care. From that reporting, we looked at lax medical board oversight. To have a bad, if you have a bad doctor, you have have to have a bad pharmacy. So we looked at pharmacies. We looked at state’s ability to monitor. They monitor doctor shoppers, patients who look for doctors, but they never turn that information around and try to look at the doctors who were supplying to the patients.
Ryan: So the first story we did about Purdue Pharma concerned kind of like a secret list that they kept in headquarters, of doctors they suspected were catering to drug dealers and addicts, and the company admitted to us that, like 92% they had not reported to law enforcement. And subsequent to that story, we started receiving documents, ultimately from a variety of sources, providing information about the company, about their security operation and also about a potential flaw in their pill. And that concerned the main selling point of Oxycontin, which was supposed to last for 12 hours. And what we were reading and what we were hearing was actually for many people, it didn’t.
Miller: How did you prioritize what stories to do first, and what was most important to include in your stories?
Ryan: The first story we did was about the flaw that I mentioned, and we decided to do that one first, because it affects everything that came from that. More than 7 million Americans have abused Oxycontin, according to federal statistics, and we wanted to see, is there an explanation for that, is it something that’s actually in the pill? So we looked at sort of the the fundamental composition of the drug first. What we found was that it wears off early for many people, long before the 12 hours, and that when it does wear off, people can be plunged into narcotic withdrawal, and it’s an excruciating experience, and it’s one that leads people to abuse the drugs. And that the company had evidence of this dating back to their development of the drug in the late 80s, early 90s. And instead of figuring out a way to fix the problem, what they did was they told doctors who complained about the duration of the drug just to raise the dose on their patients, and we all now know that higher doses of opioids mean greater risk of overdose and death.
We wanted the reader to be able to kind of follow the science, but we didn’t want to overwhelm them with the science. Our conclusions are based on really in-depth review of complex principles, and the average person may be put off by that level of detail at the breakfast table or while reading on their phone. So we try to be judicious with using enough information to explain to the readers how we had reached our conclusions without overwhelming them.
Miller: Was it difficult for you to keep your emotions in check while you were reporting this story? And how did you make sure to maintain your sense of fairness?
Ryan: Emotion that’s in our oxycontin stories comes from people that have become addicted to this drug, and from their families, and I am very compelled by them, and I feel like understanding their experience and understanding that this is something that can happen to good, hard-working, well-meaning people, has been important and for me as a motivator to do the boring work of reporting. I think that sometimes in this country, our coverage of the opioid epidemic tends to focus on the ruined lives, the depravity of people who are addicted to drugs and just stop there. And I think that that can be kind of exploitive of people that are really down on their luck and who have lost their dignity, and that in some ways, the emotion of their stories, of the cost to their families and of their children. It’s kind of best harnessed to push you through the boring scientific document review part of it.
Miller: This project was full of personal stories. Ryan shared how she found these sources and convinced them to open up.
Ryan: We did a kind of full court press, through the treatment industry, through doctors who are treating addicts with substitution drugs. We went through message boards looking for people we interviewed say, like, probably close to 100 people. We didn’t tell them what the thesis of our story was, or what the conclusions we found from reporting. We just said, “We want to hear about your experience becoming addicted to Oxycontin. Tell us what happened.” And people were really open with us. No one said, “Well, it’s because the drugs, you know duration, it’s a lie, and because, you know, it only lasts six hours”. But in their telling, if it happened to them, they started to sound very familiar, just like falls off after six hours, falls after eight hours, you can’t stop thinking about the drug to just wait and take the next dose, you know. And I think that some people talked to us because they want to help others, and they have recovered from opioid addiction, which is kind of a monumental feat for human being. It is so, so hard. And I think they wanted to help others, and they wanted to show that there is life after and there is a possibility of recovery. I think other people talked to us out of anger at what had happened to them and just not being able to make sense of it. And, you know, we talked to people whose family members had died and they were still struggling to explain it to themselves. And I think they found, I don’t
know if comfort’s right word, but they were, they were willing and open to talk to someone who wanted to understand the experience as much as they did.
Miller: What advice do you have for beginning investigative reporters that are trying to find good sources and convince them to talk on the record?
Lait: Look, I think every reporter should view him or herself as an investigative reporter. And you want to dig and you want to get to the truth of the matter, you want to be open-minded about what you have, because there’s always the possibility or likelihood that you’re wrong, and you want to chase down every avenue to make sure you’re not wrong about something. You want to minimize the harm that an investigation can have. You want to hold people accountable. You just have to have that mindset. You want to find documents. You want to talk to people involved. You want to develop sources. And sources will talk to you if you are somebody who they feel they can trust. You want to be trustworthy. You want to abide by your commitments, and it’s worthy rewarding work, if you can do it.
Ryan: This is more like a concrete example: cover courts. It’s a good place for people to start, because there’s lots of information and documents and tidbits. There’s great information that no one sees in there. It’s all protected. You’re not going to get sued over it. And I think it can give somebody who’s young, and definitely, for me, it had this effect of, it’s in some ways similar to the process of investigative reporting, a trial or a legal case. You know, one side presents its facts. They look really bad. The other side comes out and presents their facts. You know, they are there’s maybe one piece of evidence and two sides are interpreting it different ways. I think it gives you a sense of how you need to, as an investigative report, not be on one side or the other. You’re in the jury, you’re the judge, and so you need to allow for all types of points of view and not make up your mind too early. So my advice would be, no matter what your eventual beat is going to be, learn how to use the courts, follow cases, see how documents are used, and that will provide kind of a blueprint for how you might want to use them in your reporting.
Lait: One other thing I noticed about really good investigative reporters is that they don’t take no for an answer. They find ways around obstacles and hurdles. You know, if somebody is denying them information, they will look for other ways to get that information. They’re just persistent. They’re creative. They look for solutions. And they don’t get discouraged by the walls that are thrown up in front of them. In fact, they view them as challenges to overcome. And those, when you have that kind of mindset, you’re going to be successful.
Miller: What impact have you seen this story have?
Ryan: There have been calls from… a Senator from Massachusetts has asked for a Department of Justice investigation, an FDA investigation. The New Hampshire Attorney General is using some of our material for an investigation they are doing, of all opioid manufacturers and Purdue Pharma especially. It’s being used in by various jurisdictions and their litigation against opioid manufacturers in an attempt to recoup some of the costs of treating the epidemic and dealing with it. But the most gratifying, at least to me, impact has been the letters that I’ve received from people who were addicts and say that they finally have insight into what happened to them and how they lost so many years of their lives and and they feel, in a way, vindicated.
Miller: Thank you Harriet Ryan and Matt Lait for spending some time with us discussing your award-winning business investigation, and thank you listeners for tuning in to another episode of the How to Cover Money podcast. If you’d like to read the LA Times investigation, “Oxycontin’s 12-hour problem,” make sure to visit businessjournalism.org. We’ll include links to the award-winning stories in the show notes for this episode. If you’re in need of more business journalism training, the Reynolds Center can help. Visit businessjournalism.org to find articles and self-guided training, download our free eBook: Guide to Business Beat Basics, or sign up for our monthly newsletter. The newsletter will keep you up to date on training opportunities from the Reynolds Center year round. If you enjoy the How to Cover Money podcast, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud and while you’re there, leave us a rating or a review to help make the podcast more visible to other business journalists. Support for the How to Cover Money podcast comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.
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