By Douglas Hook
Updated: Dec. 17, 2021, 11:38 a.m.
Published: Dec. 17, 2021, 11:38 a.m.
Updated on September 25, 2020
Source: Mass Live
Photo Source: Unsplash, Olga DeLawrence
Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin, the powerful prescription painkiller that experts say helped touch off an opioid epidemic, will plead guilty to three federal criminal charges as part of a settlement of over $8 billion, Justice Department officials told The
Federal Judge Colleen McMahon has halted a negotiated settlement between Purdue Pharma L.P. and thousands of state, municipal and tribal governments that had sued over its involvement in the opioid crisis. McMahon said that the conditional settlement Thursday, which was agreed upon in September, should not proceed because it releases the company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, from liability in civil opioid-related cases. According to McMahon, she was perplexed by the $10 billion the Sacklers withdrew from Purdue between 2008 and 2018, at the height of the opioid crisis. The crisis started in the late ‘90s and is still impacting communities across the U.S. to this day, according to the National Institutes of Health. In 2019, nearly 50,000 people in the United States died from opioid-involved overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total “economic burden” of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment and criminal justice involvement. In that same year, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy as part of a settlement with 24 state attorneys general, excluding Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and thousands of others in a massive lawsuit regarding Purdue’s marketing of opioid products. In its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, Purdue said it has assets valued at between $1 billion and $10 billion. OxyContin pills arranged for a photo at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt. A federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2021, gave conditional approval to a sweeping, potentially $10 billion plan submitted by OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to settle a mountain of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades. Under the terms of the resolution, Purdue will turn over for public disclosure the evidence from lawsuits and investigations of Purdue over the past 20 years, including deposition transcripts, deposition videos and 13 million documents. Purdue will also be required to turn over more than 20 million additional documents, including every non-privileged email at Purdue that was sent or received by every member of the Sackler family who sat on the board or worked at the company. “My goal has always been to do right by the families who suffered from the Sacklers’ greed,” said Healey in a statement to MassLive. “They are the reason I brought the first lawsuit exposing the Sacklers’ misconduct; the reason I fought for full disclosure, compensation, treatment and harm reduction; and the reason I testified before Congress against the abuse of our bankruptcy laws. The test for success, in this case, is whether we deliver for the people the Sacklers hurt.” Healey had previously made her feelings known on the September settlement in July when she publicly said that the agreement does not require the Sackler family, which owns the company, to pay back any of the profits they made by selling addictive drugs. In McMahon’s 142-page assessment, she drew attention to the aggressive marketing campaign the Sackler family undertook to the detriment of the public. “Concerned about how their personal financial situation might be affected, the family began what one member described as an ‘aggressive’ program of withdrawing money from Purdue almost as soon as the ink was dry on the 2007 papers,” McMahon wrote. McMahon said that the case raised constitutional questions but that she did not need to reach them, having found no authority for a judge to grant immunity to parties who do not seek bankruptcy protection.
How much is the cost of human life? What should pharmaceutical companies like Purdue pay for the death toll of the opioid epidemic? Do you know someone who has passed because of the opiod epidemic?
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