Purdue Offers Up $10 – 12 Billion to Settle All Lawsuits – MedPage Update
Just revealed:
The opioid/OxyContin maker Purdue and members of the billionaire Sackler family owning the company have offered to settle thousands of lawsuits against the company for $10 to $12 billion. according to people briefed on the offer. More than 2,000 states, cities, and counties across America are pursuing the OxyContin maker over the large bills for cleaning up the opioid crisis — and are deciding whether to accept the offer by Friday. The Financial Times is reporting on this offer from the Sacklers and Purdue.
On August 26, Purdue paid $270 million to Oklahoma and Teva Pharmaceuticals paid $75 million also to Oklahoma.
From the Financial Times: “Purdue said it believes a ‘constructive global resolution is the best way forward’ and is working with state attorneys-general and other plaintiffs to achieve it. 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”.
For all the harm done to this nation due to purposeful deceit and lies on the use of opioids claiming it was not addictive, someone needs to go to prison from the Sackler family.
Purdue Exposed
Medpage Today, Kristina Fiore, August 28,2019
I suspect with the new information being available, Purdue finally threw in the towel and offered a settlement. I also suspect this will impact other companies decisions to appeal as J & J is doing.
STAT News Wins Legal Fight Over Purdue Documents
A trove of documents detailing Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid epidemic will be made public, STAT News reported, as the Kentucky Supreme Court denied the company’s request to review lower courts’ decisions to release them.
STAT waged a 3.5-year legal battle to make those records public. While some remain under seal, the outlet posted a sought-after video deposition of Richard Sackler. It had obtained a transcript of that deposition in February, which gained further attention when comedian John Oliver hired famous actors including Bryan Cranston and Michael Keaton to re-enact it.
The documents promise new information on how Purdue promoted its oxycodone product OxyContin and what, exactly, its executives knew about its risk of addiction. Among those documents are depositions of other Purdue executives; physician testimony; emails and memos about marketing strategies; internal reports on clinical trials; and communications about earlier legal cases.
All of the documents were part of Kentucky’s lawsuit against Purdue over its alleged illegal marketing of OxyContin. That suit was settled in 2015, with Purdue shelling out $24 million.
Purdue may soon be paying a far higher bill, with media including NBC News reporting that the company has pitched a $10 to $12-billion settlement in the consolidated cases set to go to trial before a federal judge in Ohio in October.
This does not bode well for Purdue, its settlement, or threat of years of litigation. The smoking gun was always there and pieces of it can be found in previous posts of mine. Relating the US Senate Joint Committee numbers to when Oxycontin was introduced after 1995 and the incremental increase in deaths from opioids, the use of a part of the Porter and Jink letter to the NEJM which said opioids were not addictive “minus the part where it said when used in a hospital setting,” the abuse of the Porter and Jink letter in the number of citations, the millions spent in lobbying state legislatures to block new laws, etc.
John Oliver uses Keaton and Cranston to portray Richard Sackler in this 20 minute Clip. It is worth watching. “the launch (Oxycontin) would be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white,.”
Run75441 (Bill H)
Run….I am a 30 year veteran of being a sales person and at times, a sales executive in the networking industry. What these stories reveal is a sustained effort by this company and others to sell as many pills as possible without any controls or brakes on what any responsible sales executive would notice the second his point of sale report came in showing massive amounts of sales to certain individuals or areas. There is no way I can accept that this was not under the control of both sales and marketing at this company. They made bundles of money for years on sales of these highly addictive drugs. They ignored sales to abusers of prescriptions that likely formed the basis for the addiction of millions in order to make quotas and gain bonus money. This stinks to high heaven. Some blame doctors rightly so but do not let them off the hook. A point of sale report shows exactly where all these pills are being sold and Perdue sales management decided not to give a damn.
Wooley:
I understand your thoughts. On Angry Bear, go to the search function and write in OPIOIDS and hit enter or the arrow. See what comes up on Opioids and the depth to which I wrote on my own.
10 – 12 B ? Talk about a lowball first offer. I expect their liability will be > 200 Billion.
Just:
I think we can accept the 12 billion if a few of them go to prison as being pushers. 10 to 20 years with the very same people they helped to addict to Opioids and then Heroin. They should not be able to walk away from criminal responsibility.
These people at Purdue Pharma and Teva are never going to go to prison or even face individual financial penalties — after all, they are upper class capitalists!
My suggestion: (1) Reflect that courts have decided that “Corporations are individuals!” And decide to punish the guilty individuals — seize the corporations. The governments of the UK and USA ought to act to take over all assets of Purdue and Teva — including all pharmacological products they own or have rights in. Nationalize them. Pay not one cent in compensation to stock holders. Stop paying all employees, and terminate any payments to pension funds. Cease all outgoing payments to suppliers and terminate all leases and real estate transactions.
Then either operate the seized firms as a government operation, transfer all assets to the National Institute of Health for research purposes, or sell the real property on the open market to the highest bidder, with the purchase money being diverted to compensation of individuals unwittingly addicted to opioids. No one else should benefit from the continued existence of the guilty firms.
(2) Alternately, state governments should feel encouraged to press for as much compensation as possible from the firms AND THEIR EXECUTIVES until all forced into complete bankruptcy.
(3) Whichever alternative occurs, economic “experts” should recount this case and its resolution in the first chapter of any ECON 101 textbook they write, or describe the details in the first week or so of freshman/sophomore economic courses. Beginning economics students need to be made really clear about what “the Free Market” actually entails in the modern world. instead of swallowing Ayn Rand-ish fantasies.
Sigh! To think I used to call myself a libertarian.
Mike:
View the John Oliver clip, I just added to the post and at the bottom.