Former FDA Official Dr. Curtis Wright Defended His OxyContin Approval

In the second episode of Netflix’s Painkiller, Edie Flowers explains how the United States Food and Drug Administration’s New Drug Application (NDA) review process usually comes down to just one person who does no independent testing. “For OxyContin, his name was Curtis Wright,” Uzo Aduba’s attorney character says, claiming that Purdue Pharma’s then-president Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick) thought his NDA would “sail through” the FDA process unchecked. “Richard thought Curtis was just a formality. Richard was wrong.”

Though Painkiller is a fictionalized retelling of real events in the origin of America’s opioid crisis, Dr. Curtis Wright is one of the characters who is a real person. Played by series creator, showrunner, and writer Noah Harpster, Wright was the FDA official in charge of issuing OxyContin’s NDA approval — something he eventually signed off on in 1995, despite his initial concerns over the lack of supporting scientific data. The Sacklers have long maintained their innocence in creating the opioid epidemic by citing the FDA’s full approval of the highly addictive drug, according to The New Yorker.

“Painkiller is about the several moments when this epidemic could have been stopped,” Harpster said in a Netflix promotional interview. “That’s what really grabbed us with this story ... looking at all these moments when a different decision — sometimes made by one person, sometimes made by an entire organization — could have changed the course of this epidemic and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

According to a 2006 internal government memo, which was made public in August 2019, prosecutors discovered significant impropriety in the way that Wright shepherded the OxyContin application through the FDA, according to The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, who also executive produced the Netflix series.

Shortly after Wright approved OxyContin for sale, he resigned from his position at the FDA to work for the Adalor pharmaceutical company. Then, in 1998, he took a job as the executive director of medical research for Purdue Pharma, where his first-year compensation package was at least $379,000 — roughly three times his previous salary — per the prosecution memo. (Wright declined The New Yorker’s comment request in 2020.)

However, the Navy veteran explained in a 2018 court deposition how he came to work for Purdue, claiming he never had any conversations about joining the company while at the FDA. “A recruiter from a recruitment company, I believe — I don’t know whether he had a company or whether he was independent — contacted my home, and my wife talked to him. And she thought I should talk to him, and I didn’t,” Wright said, per court documents. “And he called again, and she suggested very firmly that I talk to him. And I talked with him and met, we met with him. And he and [my wife] convinced me that I should interview at Purdue.”

Wright also defended his OxyContin approval in a 2017 Esquire interview. “At the time, it was believed that extended-release formulations were intrinsically less abusable. It came as a rather big shock to everybody — the government and Purdue — that people found ways to grind up, chew up, snort, dissolve, and inject the pills,” he claimed. “In the mid-nineties, the very best pain specialists told the medical community they were not prescribing opioids enough. That was not something generated by Purdue — that was not a secret plan, that was not a plot, that was not a clever marketing ploy.”

Painkiller co-creator Micah Fitzerman-Blue pointed to his approval decision setting off the chain events that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, however. From 1999-2021, nearly 645,000 people died from an overdose involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids, according to the Center for Disease Control.

“Purdue and every other opioid manufacturer in America would tell you that they are producing a drug that was approved by the FDA. But what they don't tell you is that the FDA — even though it’s a regulatory agency that’s supposed to keep Americans safe — can still be pressured by the industry to do its bidding,” the co-showrunner said. “We live in a country where street drug dealers often go to jail. We don’t live in a country where the corrupt corporate executives who made and marketed the drug often go to jail.”

In 2023, Wright is no longer employed by Purdue Pharma, which is undergoing a rebrand amid an unresolved bankruptcy settlement. The doctor is now in his seventies, and his last known job, as the Clarion Ledger reported in 2018, was working as a consultant.

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