Purdue Pharma Offers $10-12B To Settle Opioid Claims (nbcnews.com) 68
The maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, and its owners, the Sackler family, are offering to settle more than 2,000 lawsuits against the company for $10 billion to $12 billion. From a report: The potential deal was part of confidential conversations and discussed by Purdue's lawyers at a meeting in Cleveland last Tuesday, Aug. 20, according to two people familiar with the mediation. Brought by states, cities and counties, the lawsuits -- some of which have been combined into one massive case -- allege the company and the Sackler family are responsible for starting and sustaining the opioid crisis. At least 10 state attorneys general and the plaintiffs' attorneys gathered in Cleveland, where David Sackler represented the Sackler family, according to two people familiar with the meeting. David Sackler, who was a board member of the company, has recently been the de facto family spokesperson. The lawsuits that Purdue and the Sacklers are seeking to settle allege that their company's sales practices were deceptive and at least partly responsible for the opioid crisis, which claimed more than 400,000 lives from 1999 to 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some of the lawsuits also allege that after 2007 the Sackler family drained the company of money to enrich themselves.
No wrong-doing. (Score:5, Funny)
Crisis you say? How many zeros should I put on this check to make it go away?
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Johnson & Johnson case has an effect (Score:3)
"at a meeting in Cleveland last Tuesday, Aug. 20"
Although the Johnson & Johnson verdict was announced after that, I suspect that the possibility of a large verdict influenced the thinking of Purdue.
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And you find this funny? How?
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I hope that answers your question.
Re: Johnson & Johnson case has an effect (Score:1)
That's Not Funny [youtube.com]!!
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Subjects are dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
"For their part, the Sackler family, which has faced an increasingly hostile activist movement, would pay at least $3 billion. Forbes ranks the family as the 19th richest in America, with a fortune of at least $13 billion shared by an estimated 20 family members."
Worth 13 billion, mostly all from opiods, only has to pay 3 billion.
10 billion profit? That's a win for the Sackler family.
These attorney generals should be ashamed for settling. This should've gone to court even if the Sackler family was willing to give up everything. This deserves to be in the public via trial.
""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."
"The people and communities affected by the opioid crisis need help now. Purdue believes a constructive global resolution is the best path forward, and the company is actively working with the state attorneys general and other plaintiffs to achieve this outcome," the company added."
Oh, just go fuck yourselves.
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I think a condition of the settlement should involve all adult members of the Sackler family being put on a nice, month-long oxycontin treatment regimen. Just so they can better understand what they've put others through in the name of profit.
Oh, who am I kidding. When you're worth billions there's a good chance you've already done harder things than oxy anyway.
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Nobody is forcing anyone to take OxyContin or Fentanyl - most abuse of it is actually illegal in origin. Yes it's true that doctors overprescribed when the science of its effects wasn't present but since then doctors and medical industry have changed and made it so hard to get them legitimately that plenty of people are suffering because the doctor won't subscribe more than 3 pills at a time and if you lose just one pill, your doctor will put you on a "pain management plan" which basically implies you have
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most abuse of it is actually illegal in origin.
The same is true of heroin, yet heroin dealers face felony drug trafficking charges. Profiting off illicit drug use is a crime... if you're not rich.
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The Sacklers/Big Pharma should be treated like any other drug gang: their assets should be seized by the government and they should be prosecuted and sent to jail f
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I think a condition of the settlement should involve all adult members of the Sackler family being put on a nice, month-long oxycontin treatment regimen. Just so they can better understand what they've put others through in the name of profit.
That would probably qualify as "cruel" punishment.
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But not unusual, I'd bet in the eyes of most. And since that little qualifying word "AND" is in the sentence between cruel and unusual, you'd need both to prove a constitutional violation. Otherwise, the cruel fines many have had to pay for bullshit litigation should've been tossed decades ago.
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It takes longer than a month.
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"The people and communities affected by the opioid crisis need help now."
Oh, NOW they need help? Not, you know, back in 1999 when they were accused of starting this crap?
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This deserves to be in the public via trial.
Do you have some basis to believe the outcome would be better with a trial? They'll have the trial in some jurisdiction full of fellow wealthy elites, stack the jury accordingly, drag the process out for 5-7 years and should the outcome be less than favorable for the Sackler's they'll head into a decade or more of appeals, all carefully routed to the correct appeals judges after everyone stops paying attention. 15+ years from now there may or may not be an actual enforceable judgement. This is a clown-wo
So they did way more damage than that? (Score:2)
Impressive. Usually, these settlements are only a fraction of the actual damage done and profits made.
Re:So they did way more damage than that? (Score:5, Interesting)
They killed countless people. Actual damage done is way more than their actual net worth.
From: https://www.moveforwardpt.com/... [moveforwardpt.com]
> 7. The CDC estimates the total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse in the US is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of health care, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.
They basically raped and pillaged our economy and people to enrich themselves by a fraction of the damage they caused. If there was any justice they should all be in prison for life and have all their assets confiscated.
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They basically raped and pillaged our economy and people to enrich themselves by a fraction of the damage they caused.
Looks like it. Predatory capitalism at its best.
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Estimates of total American spending in response to the opioid crisis, including public and private costs, are in the trillion dollar range thus far.
To put that ten billion dollars in perspective, it'll pay for about 19 days of what we're expected to be shelling out over the next three years. That's the say nothing of the nearly fifty thousand Americans getting killed every year.
That's an Al Qaeda wet dream. By any objective standard Purdue Pharma ought to be considered a serious threat to American secur
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So they accepted incredible damage to others for a comparatively small gain. Pretty much the definition of "evil".
What I also find impressive (and not in a good way) is that they could get away with this for so long.
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It's what Hannah Arendt called, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the "banality of evil". The Nazis weren't the comic book supervillains of the movies. They were more like accountants and shopkeepers: dull, and often pathetically obsessed with respectability.
All the while the Sacklers were promoting the over-prescription of Oxycontin and turning a blind eye to obviously abusive distrution of the stuff, they were running around the great cultural capitals of the world buying social capital with art philanthropy a
Chump change (Score:3)
So in case we were wondering... (Score:1)
The price of a life in $30,000. (Less attorneys/state fees) so like what $.01?
News for ? (Score:1)
No tech or internet or cultural hook for this news story at all.
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After you read some of the comments here you will need some opioids...
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News for nerds. We're nerds here. Not 'techs' and not 'culturals.'
According to a WPost reporter (Score:4, Insightful)
the drug companies were quite sneaky in how they shoveled the pills. Their defense is that the products had labels labeling them addictive and that doctors were required to write the prescriptions and that they were following FDA rules.
However, the doctors are not scientists. The drug companies got scientists at unis and other places to scrounge up studies showing the pills weren't so addictive. Then they peppered doctors with these reports. Add to that some unscrupulous doctors that would write scripts for anyone. Some even had pharmacies they controlled in the same building as their offices. There were also a plethora of new "pain centers" especially in Florida, I think it was because their state laws were particularly lax down there. And the pols in Florida knew a gift horse when they saw one.
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Did they even do studies?
My understanding was it was more of a letter to the editor type thing along the lines of "people that get treatment for pain in hospitals don't seem to start seeking" was what they used.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/... [statnews.com]
Basically a letter that was anecdotal saying that short term use in a hospital setting seems to be safe was used as evidence that there was a low risk for addiction.
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After a serious injury, I took faring high doses of oxycodone, for a few weeks. I can see why people get addicted, the sensation is nice. When it came time to stop, I went thru a process of decreasing the dose by half every week. By the end, it wasn’t a huge issue.
However I still think about the relief from pain if gave me,without the horrible feeling codeine my regular painkiller does. Ive been managing moderate to severe pain for years and the time on Oxy was the only time I felt just normal for yea
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It would be nice if Doctors didn't RX it like candy on false pretenses too.
I was given some for my wisdom teeth, I needed 1 and a half pills, they gave me 20. I saved the rest and used them for later injuries, but with over 10x the needed given out, there's bound to be plenty floating around for abuse.
Actually, I bet if I took 20 pieces of candy from the bowl on the counter I'd get stronger side eye.
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The problem is, physicians insist that they have the knowledge, skill, and are in the ideal position to make those decisions. The FDA basically gets to say whether a drug can be sold or not. Once they've made that decision, they can dictate the packaging, but that's about it. Everything else is up to the treating physician, who can essentially do whatever they want.
Pharma is guilty, but they're far from the only ones. The whole system needs to be overhauled to depend as little as possible on the opinions of
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Idea, strategy and legal coverage probably provided by Wolfram and Hart.
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Just lock them up (Score:2)
The amount they will be willing to pay will only increase if you jail the top 10 shareholders and the top 10 execs.
seems fair...NOT (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the RIAA, a pirated music track is worth $15,000 (or more). So a human life is worth less than 2 pirated songs.
OR if we look at wrongful death settlements they can be more than $10 Million, so that would come to $4 Trillion, so at the very least they should be adding one or two more zeros to the end of their settlement amount.
Now if they feel that is unfair, I guess we can settle for them all having an oxytocin overdose just to see how much they value their lives.
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Isn't capitalism great? You can do unspeakable evil and still make a great profit!
Cause the deaths... (Score:2)
$10 Billion is acceptable... (Score:2)
If they're offering $10B.... (Score:2)
If they're offering $10B they they know that what they should be on the hook for is more like $30B or $40B.
They're hoping to get off cheap and look like they're being a good, responsible corporation.
Decades from now the name "Purdue Pharma" will be akin to the word "Nazi" or "Zyklon B". Universally reviled and for good reason.
This is bullshit (Score:2)
For starters all profit should be recovered. If they made 50 billion they should start the fines at 50 billion. Then work up from there. Then there is the 400,000 manslaughter counts they have to face. To put it in perspective: Vietnam War deaths-250,000, Iraq War civilian deaths 206,548 , US Civil War death toll- 620,000
The morbid and distasteful takeaway here is that this company is much more effective at killing than the US military
FDA & DEA (Score:2)
Shouldn't the FDA and DEA take some responsibility for not doing their jobs?
"The FDA is responsible for protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs ..."
DEA is "tasked with combating drug trafficking and distribution within the United States. The DEA is the lead agency for domestic enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act"
"The Controlled Substances Act (CSA) is the statute establishing federal U.S. drug policy under which the manufacture, impo
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What the FDA and DEA did was say "this could be addictive". And made Perdue put that on the label for the drug, and the usual requirements for prescriptions of drugs like this.
What Perdue then did was send "studies" to doctors in their marketing materials saying "it's not really addictive. Look! Studies!". The studies were flawed or fake, but the doctors had no way of knowing. So they prescribed based on the information that they had. (Ignoring pill mills for now).
So, the government agencies did their
Why are they not in jail? (Score:2)
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Anyone else who distributed opiates on mass scale would spend the rest of their lives in jail. Why should the Sackler's get of with billions left in the bank. They should at least be bankrupted with their money taken as proceeds of crime.
If that includes Congress, everybody at the FDA, and everybody at the DEA, then I will support that.
Zeros (Score:2)
I've got a better plan (Score:2)
$10,000,000,000/400,000 = $25,000/life (Score:1)
$10 Billion to $12 Billion Each (Score:2)
Stupid people (Score:2)
I'm gonna sound harsh here, but I'm pissed. Any time I get a prescription, the first thing I do is research it. Learn something before you take a drug FFS. How addictive oxy is can be found all over the web. Blame the Sacklers & the pharma industry all you want, but the responsibility also lies with the consumer. And I'm pissed at the idiots who play with fire & get burned, 'cause now I can't get it for legitimate use.
My doctor & I went thru years of physical therapy
American fairness (Score:2)
Black guy pushes a few grams of marginally toxic cannabis on the street - welcome to the American prison industry, and we invite and incentivize you to stay for the whole ride.
Some rich white dudes push tons of opioids killing hundreds of thousands - receive a slap on the wrist, promise not to do it again, make some iron clad settlements which ensure every aspect of the crime is forever swept under the rug and nobody is allowed to talk about it, and life goes on.
That's American capitalism for you, a shining
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Some rich white dudes push tons of opioids killing hundreds of thousands - receive a slap on the wrist, promise not to do it again, make some iron clad settlements which ensure every aspect of the crime is forever swept under the rug and nobody is allowed to talk about it, and life goes on.
The crime is not paying protection money to the government.
Settlement, you say? (Score:2)
Aren't those fully tax-deductible? :)
I live in Cleveland (Score:2)
This is a joke. (Score:2)
This is a joke. If you divide the proposed amount by the number of lawsuits, it comes out to about 6 million dollars per suit. Johnson & Johnson just lost one suit for 572 million. Basically, Purdue is scared shitless and trying to make this all go away before they are completely destroyed.
Purdue Pharma (Score:1)