Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the corporation owned by the Sackler family, is reportedly willing to offer up $10 billion to $12 billion to make its ongoing opioid legal problems go away. According to NBC News investigative reporter Laura Strickler, the pharmaceutical giant’s lawyers discussed the big numbers with “at least 10 state attorneys general and the plaintiffs’ attorneys” in Cleveland on Aug. 20. The reported offer was confidential in nature, and it is unknown how or if a judge’s decision on Monday to fine opioid maker Johnson & Johnson over half a billion dollars in a similar legal case will influence these discussions.
The Sackler family is best known for running the largest legal-ish drug empire over the past decade, fueled by success in getting people addicted to opioids such its infamous creation, OxyContin. Purdue has been sued by numerous state’s attorneys trying to hold its opioid kingpins accountable for their part in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of lives adversely affected by the scourge of addiction to their drugs.
The crux of the lawsuits is that Purdue and the Sackler family spent tons of money underplaying the very nature of their pain-relief medication, poured millions into promoting the overuse of the highly addictive drugs, and were principal actors in our country’s opioid public health crisis.
Purdue wants to settle this issue, and is willing to part with billions to make that happen, not because it is admitting guilt, but because, “While Purdue Pharma is prepared to defend itself vigorously in the opioid litigation, the company has made clear that it sees little good coming from years of wasteful litigation and appeals." That, and, of course, it’s a lot cheaper than having to do some real heavy lifting in cleaning up the mess it helped to create.
The numbers that Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter is referring to are the government’s own estimates on the costs America has already incurred as the result of fatal and nonfatal opioid addiction. The Sackler family is clearly not interested in giving away its wealth, and as it has shown, it is psychologically unable to accept any true responsibility for building its entire empire on the bones of destroyed families and communities.
NBC News says that the offer includes Purdue Pharma filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy and having the business restructured into a for-profit public trust fund. “Purdue lawyers claim the value of the trust to plaintiffs would include more than $4 billion in drugs that would be provided to cities, counties, and states, the people familiar with the matter said. Some of the drugs are used to rescue people from overdoses.” Any subsequent profits made on OXyContin or the new drug Nalmefene (used to combat overdoses on opioids) would be shared by the municipalities that agree to the deal.
The deal would also include the Sackler family paying out $3 billion of that money, which would be “obtained by the family selling off Mundipharma, a separate global pharmaceutical company they own.”
It remains to be seen whether or not this reported offering will be accepted, but one thing is for sure: $12 billion is not enough. In fact, $120 billion is not enough, and while $120 trillion might begin to help pay for some of the work that needs to be done to educate and treat people, even that won’t undo the damage the Sackler family profited from.