Ed Bisch—Lee Nuss

Ed Bisch and Lee Nuss’s partnership joined two bereaved parents whose sons had died amid the spread of OxyContin. What began as a connection made through loss became a durable alliance against Purdue Pharma: they helped turn an online memorial into an organized campaign, pressed for changes in prescription monitoring and drug prevention, and stood beside one another in a courtroom where grief itself became visible. Their relationship was both political and practical, founded on the recognition that each understood what the other had lost.

An Unexpected Connection Through Loss

Bisch had channeled his grief into OxyKills.com, a message board he created to warn other families. It soon became a public memorial and a clearinghouse for overdose figures reported by local medical examiners and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Parents from across the country used it to remember their dead children. The site made scattered losses legible as a shared crisis, but it also drew Bisch into an unrelenting stream of messages from people seeking contact and recognition.

Lee Nuss was initially too grief-stricken to reach out to Bisch herself. Her daughter Monique called him one night and asked him to speak with her mother. In that conversation they discovered that they had grown up in the same working-class Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown, less than a mile apart. The coincidence of place accompanied a more painful likeness: each had lost a son.

Nuss’s son, Randy Nuss, was eighteen when he died after taking a single crushed 80-milligram OxyContin pill bought from a friend. The friend’s mother wanted him to sell it to help pay rent. Nuss said she had not known that Randy was using pills. She had opioid medication left over from dental surgery, still untouched at the time of his death, and initially took that as evidence that his use had not gone on for long. These details gave the two parents’ alliance a specific point of contact: not an abstract disagreement about drug policy, but the sudden loss of young sons and the knowledge that families could be unaware of the danger until it was too late.

From Memorial to Organized Opposition

After reading Barry Meier’s 2003 book Pain Killer, Nuss and Bisch joined forces with Art Van Zee and Sister Beth Davies. Their informal alliance developed into Relatives Against Purdue Pharma, a grassroots nonprofit that carried the work of Bisch’s message board into public and political life. The change in scale mattered. OxyKills.com assembled names, stories, warnings, and statistics online; the new organization brought bereaved parents together to press institutions and confront the company they held responsible for the crisis.

The group advocated for statewide prescription monitoring programs, which would allow doctors to check patients’ prescription histories and help prevent people from obtaining prescriptions from multiple providers. Its members also sponsored drug-prevention workshops in schools and protested outside Purdue’s corporate headquarters with poster-sized photographs of their dead children. These activities linked policy advocacy to memorialization: the images were not merely campaign materials, but representations of the people whose deaths had brought the parents together.

The partnership also placed Bisch and Nuss within a contentious public argument over OxyContin. RAPP members confronted chronic-pain patients who praised the medication for helping them function and sleep. Bisch suspected that some online supporters were paid advocates hired by Purdue to challenge the group’s views, although the account specifies that he was correct in only a few cases. The conflict showed the difficult terrain on which the parents organized: they opposed the company’s marketing and the harms they associated with the drug while facing public defenses of its use by people who said it relieved their pain.

Mutual Support in Court

Their alliance took a particularly concrete form in 2005, when Bisch drove twelve hours from Philadelphia to sit beside Nuss in a Tampa federal courtroom. They had invested hope in Karen White’s wrongful-termination case, believing it might establish that Purdue’s marketing practices had crossed a legal boundary. White sought damages for lost wages and emotional pain after being dismissed; her case was the first against Purdue to proceed beyond summary judgment. Bisch’s journey made clear that his role in the partnership extended beyond campaigning. He went to support Nuss at a trial they both regarded as consequential.

The courtroom also held a small, intimate record of the loss behind their activism. White had one lawyer and no staff; Nuss and Bisch stood with her, and Nuss brought a small urn containing Randy’s ashes. She also carried rosary beads and lent White an extra set. A few days into the trial, Nuss realized she had left the beads in her car. As she went to retrieve them, she handed White the urn to hold. Nuss later recalled White’s surprise and emotion at being entrusted with it. The gesture transformed the parents’ shared commitment into an act of trust: Randy’s memorial was placed in the hands of the person whose case they hoped would challenge Purdue.

The moment was interrupted when Purdue’s lawyers learned that the urn was in the courthouse and asked the judge to have it removed. Bisch and White expected Nuss to become angry when they told her that Bisch had taken the urn out of the building. Instead, she laughed. She said that Randy was absent in body but present in spirit, and that although he had left the building, he would return. Her response held sorrow and defiance together. The removal could not undo the meaning she gave the urn, or the role his memory played in the cause she and Bisch shared.

The Meaning of the Partnership

Bisch and Nuss’s relationship connected private bereavement to organized action without erasing the difference between those things. Their campaign involved monitoring policy, school education, public protest, and opposition to Purdue’s account of its marketing. Yet its motivating evidence remained personal: the names and images of dead children, the stories families had not known how to tell, and the presence of a son’s urn at a trial. In Bisch’s memorial site and in the courtroom, remembrance became a way to make loss public rather than leave parents isolated with it.

Their alliance also belonged to a period when parents confronting addiction often lacked the communication networks and support structures that later became more available. The book’s account begins its reporting in 2012, when interviewed families were frequently too ashamed to speak publicly. Against that atmosphere of silence, the work of Bisch and Nuss offered a form of connection built from shared recognition and repeated action. Their partnership did not promise that a lawsuit or a policy campaign could restore what they had lost. It gave their grief a collective language and a continuing public purpose.