A cottage outside Floyd, Virginia, is a tranquil stage-set for Ellen Isaacs to wage one of the longest-running wars of the opioid epidemic: the battle to hold OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, its owners and executives, to just account.
It’s battle that Isaacs, a former mortgage fraud expert at Citigroup, has been fighting since she and her son Ryan became dependent on OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s “non-addictive” painkiller that has played a central role in an epidemic that has cost 500,000 lives over two decades.
