Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family have reached a settlement that will leave the family with many billions of dollars.
The company is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy imminently. The settlement, which was described by two people involved in the negotiations, involves the dissolution of Purdue Pharma as it now exists, the formation of a new company that will continue to sell its signature opioid, OxyContin, with the proceeds going to a public beneficiary company that will pay the plaintiffs. Purdue Pharma also will donate “rescue” drugs, several of which are in development, for addiction treatment and overdose reversal.
The Sackler family will pay $3 billion in cash over seven years.
The settlement does not include a statement of wrongdoing.
The company declined to comment.
The settlement is a landmark moment in the long-running effort to compel Purdue Pharma, the company whose drug is seen as an early driver of the crisis, and its owners, the Sacklers, to have their day of reckoning for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from overdoses and the calamitous systemic costs.
The settlement comes scarcely six weeks before the start of the first federal trial in the sprawling opioid litigation in front of a federal judge in Cleveland who has recently issued tough pretrial rulings against the defendants — drug manufacturers including Purdue, as well as drug distributors and chain retailers. Although other manufacturers have already settled in that case, as well as in an earlier state opioid trial in Oklahoma, the Purdue agreement is the first so-called “global” arrangement. Negotiated by a team of five lawyers representing nearly 2,300 lawsuits in federal court, as well as by lawyers for the states, the resolution would end almost all of the cases against Purdue…
But because the deal falls short of what some state attorneys general had insisted upon, they have said that they will continue to pursue the Sacklers themselves. In recent weeks, perhaps in anticipation of legal fortresses built by the Sacklers to guard their fortune, which Forbes estimated to be about $13 billion, more states, including Virginia, New Mexico and Delaware, have been filing cases against members of the family. The states have used anarray of legal tactics, hoping for an even bigger payout from the Sacklers and to force them out of the pharmaceutical business altogether.
A critical sticking point has been the timing of the family’s sale of its global pharmaceutical business, Mundipharma, and the contribution the family would make from the proceeds. Some attorneys general, including those from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, who have not signed on to the settlement, had been pressing the family to sell the company immediately and to discontinue manufacturing drugs for international markets. And regardless of what price Mundipharma fetched, the attorneys general said, they wanted the Sacklers to commit an additional $1.5 billion up front.
The family refused to do so.
“Connecticut has not agreed to any settlement,” William Tong, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement. “Our position remains firm and unchanged and nothing for us has changed today.” He added: “I cannot predict whether Purdue will seek bankruptcy, but all I can say is we are ready to aggressively pursue this case wherever it goes — whether it is in the Connecticut courts or through bankruptcy.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oh, it’s good to be king.
Billionaires hold all the “Get Out of Jail Free” cards and can even keep their billions no matter how destructive their impact on the lives of so many people, especially the young. Eric Garner on Staten Island where I teach was murdered by unindicted Officer Daniel Pantaleo in July 2014 b/c police say Garner was selling “loosies,” loose cigarettes. We can have super-rich families or we can have democracy, but not both; we can have billionaires or we can have social justice, but not both. Fork in the political road goes to one or the other, not both, but most candidates for Pres. refuse to acknowledge it.
Not surprised…..
Forbes estimates the Sackler fortune to be about $13 billion. A payment of $3 billion in cash over 7 years is an insult to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from overdoses. Where is jail time? That is what is needed. Stop the payment of money that isn’t enough to dent the fortunes of these criminals.
Amazing, another super wealthy corrupted criminal family gets a light slap on the wrist with a “white” glove.
This is way off topic but a tragedy for the immigrants who are starving and threatened with death in their own countries. This is what we get when a bigot runs the country. One horror after another seems to be the rule of the day.
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Supreme Court Backs New Trump Asylum Restrictions
The policy requires many Central American migrants to seek and be denied asylum in another country before applying in the United States.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed the Trump administration to bar many Central American migrants from seeking asylum in the United States. The court said the administration may enforce new rules that generally forbid asylum applications from people who had traveled through another country on their way to the United States without being denied asylum in that country.
A federal appeals court had largely blocked the new policy, but the justices, in a brief, unsigned order, allowed it to go into effect while legal challenges move forward. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
In a Supreme Court brief, the solicitor general, Noel J. Francisco, representing the administration, said the new policy was needed to address “an unprecedented surge in the number of aliens who enter the country unlawfully across the southern border and, if apprehended, claim asylum and remain in the country while their claims are adjudicated.”
Under the policy, which was announced July 15, only immigrants who have been denied asylum in another country or who have been victims of “severe” human trafficking are permitted to apply in the United States. “The rule thus screens out asylum seekers who declined to request protection at the first opportunity,” Mr. Francisco wrote…
“The states have used an array of legal tactics, hoping for an even bigger payout from the Sacklers and to force them out of the pharmaceutical business altogether.” I applaud this effort. The internal Purdue Pharma emails revealed by FOIA show a profit-driven mission to defraud the public w/claims that their “new product” somehow avoided long-understood opiate-addiction danger & thus was appropriate for prescription for chronic pain. That alone is enough to justify putting this corporation out of business.
However. This SHOULD be just the tip of the iceberg [more in my below post].
As you may remember from my posts at Diane’s 8/27 post “Sackler Family Offers $10-12 Billion to Settle All Litigation,” my eldest died at 23yo from SFCA (Sudden Fatal Cardiac Arrythmia) during a 3-wk hospitalization aimed at switching him from high-dose extended-release opioids to methadone, for treatment of severe organic [chronic] pain resulting from a lifelong rare autoimmune disease that suddenly worsened at age 20.
I’ll add this: I’ve said before that at no time during his 2.5-yr opioid treatment was he addicted. (And in fact there were no OD symptoms accompanying his death). He was med-intolerant in general [had been lifelong- even to alcohol], and just moving him from baby-dose of opium to 5mg more could only be accomplished by emptying out the capsules, counting the beads, & increasing his dose 10 beads at a time.
However, I must disclose that he had a med procedure just 2 mos before death to relieve 2 yrs’ severe urinary pain which resulted in deep [worse] bladder pain. After that, his pleas for more more meds & hospitalization indeed sounded a lot like the pleas of the addicted for higher dosage. But I’m going to add to that: this kid was bipolar, and the fact is that as disease pain increased over that 2.5 yrs, it triggered mixed depressive-manic episodes which seemed in turn to intensify the pain. I learned from research during that period that depression & pain neurotransmitters move along the exact same neuropathic trailways & are nearly indistinguishable.
The point of all this personal disclosure is to reveal to readers how little the complexities of the brain are understood in medicine today. Opioids are brain meds. We’ve made some headway & neuroscience research continues, but we are still at a primitive stage. Much of the research that remains to be done gets slowed—even occasionally stymied—by the age-old mind-body barrier among classic medical disciplines. There is very, very little psycho-neurological research that gets clinically trialled. I know, because after our eldest died, our 2 remaining musical sons ran 7 annual fund-raiser concerts in their brother’s memory to benefit anyone doing that sort of thing: outside of Howard Hughes Institute—which was self-funded & not seeking donors—there was only the Johns Hopkins Mind-Body Research Institute—which today is disbanded & folded back into their psychiatric school.
So: understanding that, you can see how ludicrous & completely ascientific & amoral was the profit-driven Purdue mission of capitalizing on chronic pain symptoms, w/next-to-zero empirical research on the complexities of chronic pain itself.
Sorry I meant Diane’s 8/27 post on Sackler lawsuit doings. Have to admit, I haven’t researched Johnson&Johnson’s or any other major pharma cos’ involvement in this fiasco. But this is what I mean by, hopefully this lawsuit is just the TIP OF THE ICEBERG: here I’m repeating what I posted on 8/27:
“I watched CSPAN Wash Jnl coverage of the issue today [8/31/10], which led me to 2017 60mins series I’d missed. It studied how the opioid crisis started. They pin the trigger that opened the floodgates on the FDA, which after a series of secret meetings w/Big Pharma reps in 2001, changed the opioid label—based on no science whatsoever– to allow prescription for chronic pain, for long periods [no time limits].
“Next in line to blame [#2]: three obscure generic drug mfrs—most prominently Mallinckrodt—who manufactured the vast majority of the 76 million opiate pills prescribed in US between 2006-2012. Mfrs by law were supposed to be tracking the orders & reporting suspicious activity to FDA [did not do].
“AND #3 on the hit parade, folks: THE STATE OF FLORIDA! Yup. Due to its utter lack of regulation, FL shortly became the center of opioid distribution for the entire country, spawning hundreds of pill-mills [faux “pain mgt clinics”] to which consumers flocked during the early years of this market. A particularly egregious offender (a pill-mill doc) is now behind bars for life. A cellphone video of his waiting room during its heyday showed a hundred people packed in, lining up for 2-min combo scrip/ pill refills from behind a barred window. Routinely prescribing 25-100 pills/day to individuals. (He says he’s a scapegoat– hundreds of drs were doing it.) An interviewee said on that block alone of his FL city there were 31 such establishments.”
…So, I’d like to see lawsuits against (1)the FDA, (2)the 3 generic drug mfrs including Mallinckrodt who provided most of the pills, and (3)the state of FL, which thro its lack of regs became the “street corner” where opioids were distributed nationally during the early phase of this fiasco.
bethree5
I am very sorry about the loss of your son, for his pain and for the sorrow you and your family and friends have endured.
Thanks, Linda
“Negotiated by a team of five lawyers representing nearly 2,300 lawsuits in federal court, as well as by lawyers for the states, the resolution would end almost all of the cases against Purdue…”
Yup, the law firms and the states want to get the quickest cut they can. Extended litigation is expensive and time consuming, y’know. Who cares what the actual plaintiffs get out of it? I mean, they’re nothing but druggies, so what are their lives worth anyway?
Many states did not sign the agreement.
They will sue and pursue the Sacklers.
Hopefully, there will be a judge who will not only strip them of ALL their money (every last cent) and also force the Sacklers to take their product ten times a day until Purdue Pharma stops making it.
Purdue will go bankrupt to protect it from lawsuits, but will be replaced by another company to manufacture opioids. New boss, same as old boss. Same wine in same bottles with new label.
Really, only ten times a day?
I think they should be hooked up to an IV and have that crap, the Opioids that made the corrupt vampires wealthy and powerful, dripping into their veins 24/7, 365-days a year for 10 years without a break.
At least 16 states
“I mean, they’re nothing but druggies, so what are their lives worth anyway?”
Absolutely on point, Dienne. There is a built-in, structural govtl conflict between DEA & NIH research on pain-mgt. And when Reps run govt, DEA has the advantage: they get more funding, NIH gets less.
Ironically, faux pain-mgt pill-mills also get the advantage, as Reps favor minimal state regs. So fed oversight is reduced to a game between pushing against drug-addiction & underfunding med research [hence, pushing against state-certified pain mgt by opioid or cannabis]. As far as DEA is concerned, all pain-mgt clinics are potential pill-mill dealers, & all chronic-pain patients are potential addicts.
Meanwhile as I’ve noted elsewhere, little or zero research gets posted on failures of bona fide pain-mgt resulting in death, as ME’s are pressured to post all such deaths as “drug ODs”, no Q’s asked—so med pain-mgt research lacks an authentic data base.
The National Institutes of Health is doing research on opioid addiction.
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About the NIH HEAL InitiativeIn
April 2018, NIH launched the HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-termSM) Initiative, an aggressive, trans-agency effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis. This Initiative will build on extensive, well-established NIH research, including basic science of the complex neurological pathways involved in pain and addiction, implementation science to develop and test treatment models, and research to integrate behavioral interventions with Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD). Successes from this research include the development of the nasal form of naloxone, the most commonly used nasal spray for reversing opioid overdose, the development of buprenorphine for the treatment of OUD, and evidence for the use of nondrug and mind/body techniques such as yoga, tai chi, acupuncture, and mindfulness meditation to help patients control and manage pain.NIH has worked with experts from public and private organizations to identify the areas that would most benefit from focused efforts by NIH alone or in partnership with outside organizations.The NIH HEAL Initiative℠ will bolster research across NIH to improve treatments for opioid misuse and addiction and enhance pain management.
https://www.nih.gov/research-training/medical-research-initiatives/heal-initiative/enhance-pain-management#.XXmyHhcl3TY.gmail
Yeah well I’ll believe it when it starts happening, i.e.,first-line GP’s, then specialists, then pain-mgt specialists pushing anything other than opioids + naloxone for OD’s, or maybe bupinorphine. NIH can publish whatever studies it wants, AMA is in thrall to Big Pharma, which has no truck w/ cheap non-AMA alternatives like yoga, tai chi, mindfulness meditation et al alternatives to Big Pharma pain mgt.
bethree5: “NIH can publish whatever studies it wants, AMA is in thrall to Big Pharma, which has no truck w/ cheap non-AMA alternatives like yoga, tai chi, mindfulness meditation et al alternatives to Big Pharma pain mgt.”
I’ll agree with that. A doctor in the alternative medicine section of NIH was a Tai chi specialist who stood up for me when the doctors wanted to throw me out of the Neurofibromatosis Type 2 Natural History Study. I had shrunk a brain tumor by 2mm and it showed up on a MRI at NIH. The head researcher in charge of the NF2 study also said that my hearing had improved. He later denied having said that. He told me in our last meeting that I had shrunk a brain tumor but he was so anxious to get me out of the study that he didn’t tell me by how much. He was heavy into telling me that I would need to see a psychiatrist as soon as I returned to Indiana. A couple of weeks after that discussion, I received a letter from him saying that since I hadn’t contacted a psychiatrist, I was permanently out of the study.
The conclusion of their fake writeup was that they were concerned that without psychiatric help that in time I would become a threat to myself or others. I was diagnosed as being severely mentally ill. I was so ill that I had to be thrown out of the study. I was thrown out in November 2012.
The whole thing was a pile of hogwash. I was so upset that I couldn’t sleep decently for several months.
I had an evaluation done by a licensed clinical psychologist who was also a Qigong expert. He wrote a counter evaluation and stated that he saw no psychotic behavior but that the Western American Medical Association does not recognize healing.
AMA does not approve of alternative methods of healing. It costs them money when any type of healing works. Can’t stand to loose money.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who has been thrown out of NIH for having done some type of healing. I wasn’t the first and I won’t be the last. This is the dirty secret that is kept under cover by NIH.
I sent a curt letter and a copy of my counter evaluation to the director of NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, the head researcher of the NF2 study, the head psychiatrist who wrote up this nonsense, and a woman in charge of public relations for the NINDS section. Never heard from them.
That just makes my blood boil, Carol! What a nightmare for you, and what an outrage.
bethree5: Thank you. You’ve been through a lot also. There is nothing worse than having an ill child and you can do nothing but see him struggle. The medical establishment has a long way to go before it becomes what it should be.
I went to a conference in San Francisco on Qigong healing. A lot is being accomplished in China but main stream medicine in the US doesn’t even go that route.
Dr. Royal Fox had a vibrational cure for cancer in the 1930’s but died broke because of the AMA’s determination to keep his healing procedure away from patients. They claim the whole thing was a hoax. It was verified by researchers in California. I believe it was 16 or 17 stage four cancer victims. All were cured within 3 months except for 3 who had to take treatments for a longer time.
We are all walking ATM’s if we get ill. Can’t have cures. There is money to be made from surgery and pills.
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Rife discovered that exposing diseased organisms and cells to a modified form of their own oscillation pattern (vibrational energy) destroys the diseased cells, while leaving healthy cells intact and unharmed.
A specific frequency in particular called the sine wave could destroy the cancer virus.
Thereafter, Rife adapted x-ray technology and built a “ray tube” that he used to zap the organisms with the desired audio frequency.
With his special microscope, Rife could watch as cancer viruses were instantly killed by his sine wave treatment.
What an irony to read both this post & the N.Y.T. article (insofar as I’m concerned, the Sacklers & Monsanto & all who strive to pollute our air & water & erect dangerous pipelines & steal our elections so as to hurt those not wealthy enough to defend & protect themselves {by having what someone so cleverly wrote the other day “legislators’ health insurance,” in one instance} are domestic terrorists) on the 18th anniversary of 9/11/01.
Back-reference to the earlier post on patriotism.
Thank you for being such an inspiration to me and others around you.