| | | >> The real criminals are Purdue Pharma and their cohorts at the FDA who conspired to make Oxycontin legal to prescribe for anything and started getting folks hooked on opiods in the late 90's, stating they were not addictive at all.
Judge overturns Purdue Pharma’s sweeping opioid settlement
A federal judge on Thursday evening unraveled a painstakingly negotiated settlement between Purdue Pharma and thousands of state, local and tribal governments that had sued the maker of prescription painkiller OxyContin for the company’s role in the opioids epidemic, saying that the plan was flawed in one critical area.
The judge, Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that the settlement, part of a restructuring plan for Purdue approved in September by a bankruptcy judge, should not go forward because it releases the company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, from liability in civil opioids-related cases.
Although the Sacklers did not file for personal bankruptcy protection, they had made immunity from opioids claims an absolute requirement in exchange for contributing payments amounting to $4.5 billion to the agreement.
But the bankruptcy code, McMahon said, does not explicitly permit a judge to grant such release, which she called “the great unsettled question.”
The Sacklers did not respond to requests for comment Thursday evening.
Lawyers for states that had appealed the plan immediately hailed the ruling. “This is a seismic victory for justice and accountability that will reopen the deeply flawed Purdue bankruptcy and force the Sackler family to confront the pain and devastation they have caused,” said Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.
In 2018, Massachusetts was the first state to sue Purdue executives, with Attorney General Maura Healey accusing them of misleading physicians and patients about the risks of opioids in order to increase their profits. The lawsuit alleged that Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, had contributed to the overdose-related deaths of more than 670 Massachusetts residents since 2009.
”My goal has always been to do right by the families who suffered from the Sacklers’ greed. 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,” Healey said Thursday. “The test for success in this case is whether we deliver for the people the Sacklers hurt.”
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