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Pharma Companies Made Parody Videos to Push Opioids

From a parody of “The Office” to a take on a Taio Cruz song, the clips encouraged sales teams to push powerful drugs.

Multiple pharmaceutical companies implicated in the opioid crisis made parody videos encouraging their sales staff to sell more pills, a Washington Post investigation found. In one 2008 video, company AlPharma parodied the TV show The Office to promote sales of the morphine pill Kadian. “I’ve gotta be a lean, meal selling machine to sell Kadian to all kinds of doctors,” said one character in the video. (AlPharma has since been acquired by Pfizer.) A Purdue Pharma video cited by The Guardian parodied the Taio Cruz song “Dynamite” to promote sales of the opioid Butran. In the internal video, sales staff sang, “Cause I sold you once, now I sold you twice.” A 2oo6 video by company Cephalon showed the fentanyl tablet Fentora appearing on a stage as the U2 song “Beautiful Day” played and fireworks burst in the background.