The Associated Press

LEXINGTON - The maker of OxyContin used a sales campaign that focused on doctors to turn the narcotic into a top seller.

Between 1996 and 2001, Purdue Pharma invested more than $500 million deploying a small army of sales representatives around the country to pitch OxyContin, a Lexington newspaper reported Sunday, citing previously confidential corporate records.

The company offered the representatives some of the best paychecks in the business. And it gave them sophisticated intelligence about doctors' prescribing practices, the newspaper said, citing documents from an Ohio lawsuit and a closed investigation by Florida's attorney general.

Purdue used the prescribing data to help it break into a rich market: family doctors who were the busiest prescribers of competing pain pills.

In Appalachia, residents had a long history of heavy painkiller use.

In 1998, for example, parts of southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky and West Virginia received more of OxyContin's competing painkillers per capita than anywhere else in the nation, federal data show.

Purdue's strategy worked. In 2000, national OxyContin sales exceeded $1 billion. In Kentucky, that translated to 9.7 million pills.

But illegal users soon tapped that vast reservoir of pills with deadly consequences, especially in rural America. And Purdue was fighting allegations that its sales and promotion were to blame.

Purdue Pharma officials say OxyContin's rapid growth had more to do with widespread untreated pain than with salesmanship.

"You can't sell a billion dollars of anything if you aren't meeting a need," said Robin Hogen, Purdue's vice president for public affairs.

"We go to market the way most companies do," he said.

That's the problem, say some critics.

Purdue should have stressed limited use "rather than encouraging and targeting some physicians to use OxyContin aggressively," said Dr. Robert Anthenelli, a University of Cincinnati medical school associate professor, in an affidavit filed in a lawsuit in Butler County, Ohio, Common Pleas Court.

In 1996, Purdue launched OxyContin with total sales and promotion spending of $40 million. By 1998, it had more than doubled that amount, and in 2001 it laid out $267 million.