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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 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.
The deal is among the largest in a series of opioid settlements brought by state and local governments against drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies that totaled about $50bn.
It could close a long chapter – and maybe the entire book – on a legal odyssey over efforts to hold the company to account for its role in an opioid crisis connected to 900,000 deaths in the US since 1999, including deaths from heroin and illicit fentanyl, to which people who had become dependent on the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin turned when their pill supply was restricted or cut off.
Lawyers and judges involved have described it as one of the most complicated bankruptcies in US history. Ultimately, attorneys representing Purdue, cities, states, counties, Native American tribes, people with addiction and others were nearly unanimous in urging the judge to approve the bankruptcy plan for Purdue that was tentatively agreed to this January.
Purdue filed for protection six years ago as it faced lawsuits with claims that grew to trillions of dollars.
Some members of the Sackler family owning the privately held Purdue, which now-deceased members of the family grew into a specialist in pain treatment in the early 1990s, became famous philanthropists using the huge profits that their star drug OxyContin generated.
But their reputation took a dive when investigative journalism and activism exposed the company’s expansionist drive to increase prescriptions of the opioid despite growing addiction and deaths across the US.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
