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.
In the current timeline I can’t believe Richard Sackler isn’t head of the FDA.
So glad my dead mother will definitely see justice. /s
Lol there’s people who sold these on the street that got YEARS in prison, kids taken away, assets seized and exorbitant fines on top of that- lives ruined forever.
At least the consumers of people who sold them on the street knew they were addictive by then.
These fuckers straight up lied and said it was 100% non addictive which they knew was fucking bullshit and nothing happens to them.
Purdue will be converted into a non-profit called Knoa Pharma, focusing on developing and distributing opioid overdose reversal and addiction treatment medications.
Though I feel nothing short of their complete separation from ALL their wealth AND prison time is the minimum of what they deserve, this is at least a commitment to meaningful change.
I’m honesty shocked this got ‘won’ to this extent.
I would have figured that they had enough money, lawyers, and accountants, to quash most of this.
Yeah, of course they’re not actually personally going to rot in prison, that’s for little people.
Relative to a lot of other shit, this is a rare, near actual W for consumer protection in the US, by the standards of similar precedents.
… shame so many victims are already dead, lives ruined.
I’m kind of just surprised the legal system still functions at all, at this point, for people with a net worth over ~$100m.
We need to stop defaulting to “of course rich people won’t personally go to prison.” It only helps enable that in the courts. We need to be furiously protesting these courts and their decisions. Enforce EQUALITY in the court systems.
Talk all you want, won’t matter unless we get a lot more Luigis, or something like that.
Me, personally, I’m sick to death of ‘consensus building’ and ‘starting a discussion’.
We’re at least a, if not two decades beyond that point.
Sitting around talking on the internet or in real life already got monetized and turned into a profit engine by the same system that makes the wealthy into untouchable demigods.
How is this handled by a bankruptcy court and not a criminal court? Thousands of people were prescribed addictive drugs specifically as non-addictive.
And they’ll also all go to jail for life for mass manslaughter, right?
Or is this tragedy one of those “a single death is a tragedy, a million death are a statistic” kind of this?
Because the sacklers quite literally have pulled a statistic. The sacker family literally is in the areas of Hitler and Stalin with their fucking body count, but at least Hitler did it for a vision, as fucked as it was. These fuckers did it all just for the money
Thesr victims were not shot, that would have been merciful. They first had to suffer long and hard so that they could spend lots and lots more money before they’d die.
They. All. Knew.
Fuck this family. I hate the concept of hell,.nobody deserves to burn for eternity but these fuckers? Yeah, I hope they all burn in hell for eternity, they’re literally at the top of the the worst people ever list.
But instead they pay some pennies on the dollar as a cost of doing their business…I’m sure that’ll teach them
It’s a lot of money but they will all be fine. They should be in prison.
Fuck that, they should be force fed oxy and every doctor in the country prohibited from helping with their inevitable addiction.
I sincerely hope no one else gets addicted to opioids. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. These aren’t people, they’re fucking demons.
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.
