A federal bankruptcy court judge on Friday said he would approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.
The deal overseen by US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm.
The new agreement replaces one the US supreme court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. The judge said he would explain his decision in a hearing on Tuesday.
First, did anybody notice that the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to the opioid epidemic included heroin? Seems like shitty reporting to me.
There’s two sides of this. What Purdue did is truly awful and they deserve to be punished.
The other half of it, is that oxycontin works. I know somebody who has chronic pain due to a car accident, they have tons of metal in their body and the surgery never healed quite right. The result is they are never, ever, pain-free. On a good day they are at 3/10, bad day 8/10 on the 0 to 10 pain scale.
Oxycontin was one of the few drugs that brought them anywhere close to being pain-free. On oxycontin their pain was actually managed to the point that it didn’t impact their everyday life. For my friend, oxycontin was truly a wonderful life restoring drug.
In fighting the opioid epidemic, my friend was a bystander casualty. In the fight to stop opioid abuse, prescribing oxycontin even for people who genuinely benefit from it became a regulatory and insurance minefield. It’s like in the effort to stop abuse, the entire world forgot that some people actually need the stuff. Prescribing it became a problem for my friends pain doctor, as the amount of pushback from government and insurance for every prescription became totally untenable.
My friend now takes multiple short acting pain pills a day, and gets significantly less relief and lower quality of life despite being on a very similar daily morphine equivalent dosage.
So for whoever reads this, please don’t forget that while there are awful people at drug companies and insurance companies and the like, and pushing prescriptions of unneeded addictive medications should result in a lot of jail time, there are patients involved in this fight. Patients who can benefit from this drug, and whose needs are being totally forgotten.