Purdue’s Sackler family offers to pay opioid victims $8bn to end legal action

The family behind the pharmaceutical maker of OxyContin have offered to pay up to $6bn ($8.3bn) to settle an avalanche of litigation.

The Sackler name was removed from the wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art housing the Temple of Dendur in December 2021 over the family’s links to the US opioid crisis. Picture: Getty Images

The family behind the pharmaceutical maker of OxyContin have offered to pay up to $6bn ($8.3bn) to victims of the US opioid crisis to settle an avalanche of litigation.

The Sackler family’s new offer would raise by at least $US1bn a $4.5bn bankruptcy settlement thrown out by a US judge in ­December over language that would have shielded the family from further lawsuits involving the highly addictive prescription painkiller.

Under the new proposal, the Sacklers “would be paying, in total, not less than $5.5bn and up to $6bn”, according to a filing to the US Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York.

But while a “supermajority” of involved parties have agreed to the deal, all eight US states ­involved along with the District of Columbia would need to sign off for it to move forward, the report says.

The additional funds would be used “exclusively for abatement of the opioid crisis, including support and services for survivors, victims, and their families”.

The opioid addiction crisis has caused more than 500,000 overdose deaths in the US over the past 20 years.

Facing thousands of lawsuits, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and it pleaded guilty to three criminal charges over its aggressive marketing of OxyContin in 2020.

In December, a US judge ­ ruled that the federal judge who had ­approved the original bankruptcy plan three months earlier had no authority to prevent future lawsuits against the Sacklers, except in cases of intentional misconduct.

While more than 40 states had signed off on the rejected deal, a group of eight, and the District of Columbia, refused to accept it.

William Tong, the Connecticut Attorney-General who led the ­appeal against the earlier ruling, called its overturning a “seismic victory for justice and accountability”.

The Sacklers family – long a major benefactor of museums and prestigious universities – had their name ­ removed from seven ­exhibitions at the Met museum in New York last year. The museum cut off funding from the Sackler family in 2019, but was relatively slow to remove the name from its wings. Paris’s Louvre became the first major ­institution to do so, dropping “Sackler” from its “Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities” in 2019.

Earlier this month, a group of pharmaceutical companies and distributors agreed to pay $US590m to settle lawsuits connected to opioid addiction among Native American tribe members.  Pharmaceutical companies McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health had already struck a separate deal with the ­Cherokee tribe last September for $75m. On February 1 the companies agreed to pay another $US440m over seven years to other Native American tribes. Johnson & Johnson, for its part, agreed to pay $US150m over two years to all the tribes, of which $US18m are destined for the Cherokee.

Native Americans have “suffered some of the worst consequences of the opioid epidemic of any population in the United States,” including the highest per-capita rate of opioid overdoses compared to other racial groups, according to the plaintiffs’ Tribal Leadership Committee.

Johnson & Johnson, McKesson and the other two companies in the accord – AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health – previously agreed to a $US26bn global settlement on opioid cases.

J&J said the $US150m it agreed to pay in the Native American case has been deducted from what it owed in the global settlement.

AFP