In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

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 urdue Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the opioid painkiller OxyContin, said it would no longer actively market opioid products — a major about-face for a company increasingly viewed as a principal culprit in the country’s addiction and overdose crisis. 
  
 The company said it is reducing its sales staff by more than half, and that its remaining salespeople will no longer visit doctor’s offices to push their product. Instead, the company said it will direct prescribers to materials published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the office of the U.S. surgeon general. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
  
 / Updated By Phil McCausland and Tracy Connor 
  
 Purdue Pharma, the company best known for selling the prescription painkiller OxyContin, announced on Saturday that they would stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors. The move comes amid a series of state and municipal lawsuits that blame the company for contributing to the opioid epidemic. 
  
 Purdue has faced criticism for more than a decade that it has aggressively and irresponsibly pushed the sale of its drug OxyContin. The company said Saturday that it would cut its sales force by more than 50 percent, with approximately 200 people remaining in the department. 
  
 "We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers," Purdue said in a statement. 
  
 The company plans to run all questions about its highly profitable drug Oxycontin — which the American Addiction Centers said has a strong “potential for addiction and subsequent withdrawal symptoms” — through its medical affairs department. 
  
 Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of Opioid Policy Research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, said he wished that the company had decided to stop marketing the drug years ago and that other opioid manufacturers would agree to do the same. 
  
 "The problem we have is doctors over-prescribing opioids, and it’s difficult to promote more cautious prescribing if manufacturers are sending drug reps into doctor’s offices and advertising in medical journals and investing millions to get them to prescribe more," Kolodny said. 
  
 "Overall, the impact will be small because the genie is out of the bottle," he said of the opioid manufacturer's decision. "But if other opioid manufacturers would do the same, it would have a bigger effect." 
  
 Purdue generated $1.94 billion in Oxycontin sales in 2017, according to Symphony Health Solutions. That is approximately $1 billion less than its all-time high in 2013. 
  
 First introduced in 1995, Oxycontin was marketed by Purdue as being a non-addictive, time-release version of oxycodone used for the treatment of chronic pain. Users soon learned that they could bypass its time-release function by crushing the pills and snorting or injecting them. 
  
 Related: Welcome to Williamson, W.Va., where there are 6,500 opioid pills per person 
  
 Because of Oxycontin’s rising cost, many people who developed an addiction to the opioid subsequently turned to heroin, contributing to the ongoing drug epidemic. 
  
 In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its executives were fined $634.5 million for misleading the public about the painkiller's addictive properties. The company's top lawyer, former president and former chief medical pleaded guilty to misbranding the drug. They were placed on probation for three years and ordered to perform 400 hours of community service. 
  
 The drug maker recently attempted to recast itself as an advocate in the fight to end the opioid crisis, while maintaining an aggressive sales push. According to new details released in a 2017 Washington state lawsuit, Purdue’s sales staff collected data to find the highest prescribers it could and then aggressively market its drugs to those individuals. 
  
 A logo sign outside of a facility occupied by Purdue Pharma L.P., in Wilson, North Carolina on Nov. 27, 2015. Kristoffer Tripplaar / Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA 
  
 More recently, the company identified nurses and physician assistants as "a high value target, particularly due to impact on primary care," and pushed its sales team to target these potential prescribers. The drug maker noted an 18 percent uptick in sales from nurses and physician assistants between 2014 to 2015. 
  
 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 people who received prescriptions to drugs like Oxycontin currently struggle with an opioid addiction. The CDC also reported that more than 1,000 people are treated in emergency rooms for prescription opioid overdoses. 
  
 The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that opioid pain reliever prescriptions escalated from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 207 million in 2013. The institute also found that the United States is the biggest consumer of hydrocodone in the world, taking in almost 100 percent of the world’s doses. 
  
 Related: Americans are abusing over-the-counter drugs as well as opioids, study shows 
  
 The White House Council of Economic Advisers announced in November that the ongoing opioid crisis cost the country $504 billion in 2015, attributing the high dollar amount to health care, criminal justice spending and lost worker productivity. Their finding is more than six times the most recent estimate. 
  
 In the past year, Purdue has been named in lawsuits filed by the Ohio, Alabama and Washington attorneys general. Even cities like Philadelphia have filed a suit against the company for exacerbating the drug addiction crisis. 
  
 Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced earlier this week that he had filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, stating that drugs like Oxycontin had left "a trail of addiction and death winding through every community of this state." 
  
 "Alabama ranks first in the nation for the number of painkiller prescriptions per capita,” Marshall said in a statement. "As a result, it is estimated that almost 30,000 of our residents over age 17 are dependent upon heroin and prescription painkillers. Alabama’s drug overdose death rate skyrocketed by 82 percent from 2006 to 2014 and it is believed that many of those deaths were from opioid painkillers and heroin." 
  
 Related: Drug overdose deaths rise drastically in places Trump calls home 
  
 Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose state leads the nation with the highest per capita rate of fatal drug overdoses, said in a statement that he was "encouraged by Purdue's decision to stop marketing deadly opioids," but "they are still a long way from reversing the damage they've done to families and communities across the country." 
  
 "If they really want to start helping the communities they've devastated, they should support and implement my LifeBOAT legislation, and contribute one penny per milligram of every opioid they sell to funding treatment centers," Manchin, a Democrat said. 
  
 The legislation "would establish a permanent funding stream to provide and expand access to substance abuse treatment," and impose a fee of 1 cent per milligram of active opioid ingredients in prescription pain pills, and include rebates for cancer-related pain and hospice care, according to his office. The re-introduced bill was referred to the Finance Committee last year. ||||| SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email 
  
 Photographer: George Frey/Bloomberg Photographer: George Frey/Bloomberg 
  
 Pain-pill giant Purdue Pharma LP will stop promoting its opioid drugs to doctors, a retreat after years of criticism that the company’s aggressive sales efforts helped lay the foundation of the U.S. addiction crisis. 
  
 The company told employees this week that it would cut its sales force by more than half, to 200 workers. It plans to send a letter Monday to doctors saying that its salespeople will no longer come to their clinics to talk about the company’s pain products. 
  
 “We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said in a statement. Instead, any questions doctors have will be directed to the Stamford, Connecticut-based company’s medical affairs department. 
  
 OxyContin, approved in 1995, is the closely held company’s biggest-selling drug, though sales of the pain pill have declined in recent years amid competition from generics. It generated $1.8 billion in 2017, down from $2.8 billion five years earlier, according to data compiled by Symphony Health Solutions. It also sells the painkiller Hysingla. 
  
 Purdue is credited with helping develop many modern tactics of aggressive pharmaceutical promotion. Its efforts to push OxyContin included OxyContin music, fishing hats and stuffed plush toys. More recently, it has positioned itself as an advocate for fighting the opioid addiction crisis, as overdoses from prescription drugs claim thousands of American lives each year. 
  
 Rising Toll 
  
 Purdue and other opioid makers and distributors face dozens of lawsuits in which they’re accused of creating a public-health crisis through their marketing of the painkillers. Purdue officials confirmed in November that they are in settlement talks with a group of state attorneys general and trying to come up with a global resolution of the government opioid claims. 
  
 More than 60,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016, and there was a fivefold increase in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids -- from 3,105 in 2013 to about 20,000 in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The addiction epidemic cost the American economy $504 billion in 2015, the equivalent of 2.8 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product that year, according to a report by the Council of Economic Advisers. 
  
 About 200 remaining Purdue salespeople will focus on promoting the company’s opioid induced constipation drug, Symproic. The drug launched last year in partnership with Shionogi & Co. |||||
The medical website STAT sees it as the "end of an era"—the maker of OxyContin is going to stop promoting the opioid to doctors. As Bloomberg reports, Purdue Pharma is cutting its sales staff in half to 200 employees and will no longer send representatives to doctors' offices. The move comes as Purdue attempts to shift its reputation from being one of the culprits in the opioid epidemic to being one of the companies trying to curtail it. The development also comes as Purdue faces dozens of lawsuits that accuse it of getting Americans hooked on the painkiller with the help of its aggressive marketing. As STAT observes, Purdue "changed the paradigm" on opioids by being a pioneer in the strategy of sending reps directly to doctors and pitching the pill. Critics seem a little underwhelmed by the latest move. "Overall, the impact will be small because the genie is out of the bottle," Andrew Kolodny of the Opioid Policy Research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management tells NBC News. "But if other opioid manufacturers would do the same, it would have a bigger effect." (The move follows a major move against OxyContin by a large insurer.)