American Pain Society

The American Pain Society was a professional pain-advocacy organization that supported expanded opioid use for long-term chronic pain while receiving millions of dollars from companies that made opioids. Its role sits within a broader account of how changing medical standards and commercial interests converged around pain treatment—and how the financial ties between advocacy groups and drugmakers became the subject of a Senate investigation whose results were never made public.

Advocacy and Industry Funding

The investigative reporting of John Fauber documented that the American Pain Society and the American Academy of Pain Medicine pushed for expanded use of opioids to treat long-term chronic pain while taking in millions from opioid manufacturers. The account places the Society among organizations whose advocacy intersected with commercial support. It does not specify the amount the Society itself received, identify particular payments, or establish that industry funding alone determined its position.

The subject arose in a period when professional and institutional approaches to pain were changing. As OxyContin entered the market in 1996, doctors, hospitals, and accreditation bodies were adopting the idea of pain as the fifth vital sign. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations approved mandatory pain-assessment and treatment standards in 1999. These developments reflected a wider concern that pain had often been undertreated; they also helped create an environment in which expanded treatment became an institutional priority. The evidence does not attribute those standards to the American Pain Society, but they provide context for the policy climate in which opioid advocacy gained influence.

Reporting and the Senate Investigation

Fauber’s articles brought attention to the relationship between pain advocacy and pharmaceutical funding. They prompted a 2012 investigation led by Senators Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus into ties between pain-advocacy organizations and drug companies. The investigation targeted the American Pain Foundation and Purdue Pharma, among other nonprofit organizations and pharmaceutical companies. The available account identifies the American Pain Society as part of the reporting that led to the inquiry; it does not establish that the Society was itself specifically named as a target.

The investigation’s findings were sealed in the Senate Finance Committee’s office and remained undisclosed despite periodic calls for their release. Dr. Steve Gelfand, an addiction specialist and activist who had helped Barbara Van Rooyan file an OxyContin recall petition with the FDA, described the inquiry as something many had welcomed but that was never followed up. The sealed results left the public without the fuller accounting the investigation might have provided.

Significance and Limits of the Record

The Society’s significance in this account lies in the tension between two concerns: the need to address pain that had been inadequately treated, and the consequences of advocating broader opioid use while accepting money from companies that manufactured those drugs. The surrounding history shows how pain-assessment standards, patient-experience measures, and Purdue Pharma’s promotion of OxyContin reinforced attention to pain treatment. Those broader developments should not be mistaken for evidence that the Society created the standards or directed the company’s marketing.

Because the Senate findings remained sealed, the account establishes the existence of reported financial ties and the resulting investigation, but not its conclusions about the American Pain Society. The unresolved record is itself consequential: scrutiny began, yet the public could not see the inquiry’s findings or assess what they showed about the relationship between professional advocacy and pharmaceutical funding.