Barbara Van Rooyan—Patrick Van Rooyan

Barbara Van Rooyan’s bond with her son Patrick was transformed by his death into a search for answers about OxyContin and the institutions that had approved and promoted it. Patrick died in 2004 after taking the drug for the first and only time, at a Fourth of July party. Barbara’s grief did not remain private: it led her to question how a powerful opioid had entered ordinary circulation and to join a campaign for changes to its use and labeling.

Loss and the Question of Approval

Patrick was twenty-four. After his death, Barbara, who lived in Folsom, California, contacted Ed Bisch, an advocate who connected her with the Virginia physician Art Van Zee. She had read Van Zee’s account of his conflict with Purdue Pharma in Pain Killer, but knew little about OxyContin beyond its association with a well-known case of addiction. Her central question was how a drug so strong had come onto the market in the first place.

The question tied her son’s individual story to the broader history of the drug’s introduction. OxyContin had entered the market in 1996 as medical institutions were giving pain greater formal priority. The Joint Commission adopted mandatory standards for pain assessment and treatment in 1999, while Purdue Pharma presented OxyContin as safe for a wide range of chronic pain, not only cancer pain. The company’s representative, Dr. J. David Haddox, promoted an addiction-risk figure of less than one percent, and a 1996 training session characterized doctor-caused addiction as exceptionally rare. Those assurances circulated amid growing pressure on clinicians to assess pain and treat it more actively.

That context does not establish the circumstances of Patrick’s use beyond what the account records: he took OxyContin at a party and died after his first and only use. It does explain why Barbara’s question reached beyond her own family. The drug’s marketing claims, its expanding role in pain treatment, and the regulatory decisions behind its availability formed the landscape in which her son encountered it.

The Documentary Trail

Art Van Zee answered Barbara’s question by walking her through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 1995 approval of OxyContin, overseen by examiner Curtis Wright. He had a copy of Purdue’s New Drug Application, which Sue Ella Kobak had given him in 2000. The application made the discussion more than a retrospective argument: it contained information about how the drug could be misused and what had been observed during its development.

The application review described how crushing a tablet could cause the drug to be released immediately rather than in a controlled manner. It also recorded withdrawal symptoms among several clinical-trial participants and stated that 68 percent of the oxycodone could be recovered from a single crushed pill after it was liquefied. In his approval summary, Wright had urged care in the product’s competitive promotion. These details stood in tension with Purdue’s later claim that it had not known of OxyContin’s abuse problems until February 2000. Wright would later work as a consultant for Purdue Pharma, a development that further complicated the story of approval, warning, and promotion.

For Barbara, the New Drug Application supplied specific grounds for asking whether the drug’s risks and intended uses had been handled responsibly. She did not argue that OxyContin had no legitimate medical use. Her position distinguished terminal and acute pain from chronic noncancer pain: she believed the drug could have a place in end-of-life care and in acute cases where lesser opioids had not worked, but should not be used for chronic noncancer pain before other treatments had been explored. That distinction shaped her later demands for restrictions.

A Petition and a Public Campaign

Barbara’s response was persistent and practical. She repeatedly contacted U.S. Food and Drug Administration staff, asking for a temporary recall until OxyContin could be reformulated to resist abuse and relabeled for severe pain only. An ombudsman told her that staff knew who she was. The recall process was lengthy, but her research background helped her approach it as a documentary and administrative task rather than abandon it as an inaccessible one.

Her effort also built on, and differed from, Art Van Zee’s earlier campaign. Van Zee had gathered ten thousand signatures for a recall petition but never formally submitted it, saying that the group lacked the time, energy, and staff to complete the process. Barbara incorporated his evidence into her own petition, with help from her physician husband, and filed it on February 1, 2005. A separate petition from the Connecticut attorney general, filed in 2004 and seeking stronger warnings about frequent prescribing, had meanwhile stalled; it would be rejected in 2008.

Barbara’s advocacy was not limited to paperwork. She testified alongside Van Zee at U.S. Food and Drug Administration hearings and organized a protest in her Northern California hometown outside a Purdue-funded continuing medical-education seminar taught by a prominent pain-clinic doctor. The contrast was pointed: while industry-funded education promoted pain treatment, a mother whose son had died after taking OxyContin was demanding a closer accounting of the drug’s risks and the limits of its use.

An Unanswered Demand

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2005 forum ended with experts urging close monitoring of abuse and addiction after new drugs reached the market. For Barbara, that recommendation came too late to protect Patrick. She also believed the agency had missed an earlier opportunity: a year before his death, it had declined to restrict OxyContin to severe pain. In her view, such a restriction might have reduced addiction while preserving access for people who were terminally ill or dying.

Her petition sought a temporary recall and a future product with abuse-resistant formulation and narrower labeling; her testimony and protest extended that request into public view. She waited for a response, and the account leaves the waiting unresolved. The relationship’s significance therefore lies not in a claim that one family’s loss alone explains the opioid crisis, but in the way Patrick’s death gave Barbara a specific point from which to examine a system: what evidence existed, what warnings were acted upon, and which patients the drug was meant to serve. Her continued effort made the private question of a mother seeking an explanation inseparable from a public argument about approval, marketing, and protection.