The legal odyssey for OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and its owners is complex. Here’s what to know

Members of the Sackler family, owners of the OxyContin company Purdue Pharma, are seen as the main culprits in the U.S. opioid epidemic.

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a deal for the company to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids through bankruptcy court. The deal would be largely financed by converting the company into a public benefit corporation, with profits used to fight the opioid crisis, and owners contributing up to $6 billion for the same purpose.

But in a 5-4 ruling, the court rejected the plan because it would have extended protection from civil lawsuits to business owners who had not filed for bankruptcy protection themselves — and not all parties agreed.

Here’s a look at the Family’s Stamford, Connecticut-based company during the overdose crisis:

Deaths from opioids began to rise in the years after the powerful prescription painkiller hit the market in 1996.

The drug was marketed to doctors on the idea that it would pose a low risk of addiction.

Deaths from prescription opioids, including OxyContin, which came in high doses and was easily crushed to make it more potent in its original formulation, rose rapidly until 2011—when prescriptions were more controlled and illegal sales were cracked down on—and have fluctuated ever since. When those levels stabilized, deaths from heroin began to skyrocket. And as heroin deaths declined in the late 2010s, a growing number of fentanyl-related deaths and other powerful, illegal, laboratory-produced opioids.

The number of American The number of overdose deaths from all drugs has decreased last year for the second time in three decades, preliminary data show.

Yet overdose deaths remain near record highs. The total is expected to exceed 107,000 by 2023, with about three-quarters of cases involving opioids.

About twice as many people in the US now die from opioid overdoses each year than from car accidents.

Three brothers, doctors — Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler — bought the pharmaceutical company Purdue Frederick in 1952. Arthur, the eldest, was a pioneer in marketing drugs, including Valium, to doctors. His descendants sold their stake in the company after his death in 1987, years before OxyContin came on the market.

The other brothers and their heirs continued to hold seats on the company’s board until the last of them resigned in 2019, ahead of efforts to settle the thousands of lawsuits the company faced alleging that the company targeted doctors and the public misled about the risks of OxyContin. . They are still the owners, even though they haven’t received any profits in years.

Documents released as part of lawsuits showed family members pushed for more OxyContin sales, which ultimately made them billions.

At the time of the drug’s launch in 1996, Richard Sackler, a son of Raymond, who was then a director of Purdue and later became president and chairman of the board, told the company’s sales staff at a meeting that there would be “a blizzard of prescriptions who would bury the people.” the competition.”

Five years later, when it became clear that the drug was being abused in some cases, he said in an email that Purdue should “harness the abusers by any means necessary,” calling them “the perpetrators and the problem.”

The Sacklers are ranked as one of the wealthiest families in the country and have largely done so kept a low profile. One exception: They contributed millions to cultural and educational institutions and got their names on galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris and a school at Tufts University, among others. Many of those places have the Sackler name removed in the past five years.

During a 2021 hearing, Richard Sackler said he, the family and the company bore no responsibility for the opioid crisis. In the same hearing, a cousin, Mortimer DA Sacklerexpressed some sympathy, saying, “We are sorry if a medicine we released that was intended to relieve pain caused pain.”

The following year, Richard and two other family members appeared at a distance for a unusual court hearing in which a woman who lost her son to an overdose called them “scum of the earth.”

Beset by lawsuits, Purdue and its owners took a series of significant steps.

In early 2019, Sackler’s family members left the board. And late that same year, the company filed for bankruptcy as part of an effort to negotiate a settlement for all those lawsuits.

The they finally reached a deal called on family members to contribute up to $6 billion over time – amounting to about half of the family’s collective fortune – to fight the crisis, with at least $750 million going to individual victims in payments ranging from about $3,500 to $48,000.

The Sacklers also gave up their ownership of Purdue and the company became known as Knoa Pharma, an enterprise that sought to fight the epidemic for a profit.

In return, family members would be protected from civil lawsuits.

In 2020 the company pleaded guilty to fail to maintain an effective program to prevent drugs from being diverted to the black market, to provide misleading information to the DEA and to pay doctors on a speaker program to encourage them to write more prescriptions. The request was part of a deal with the federal government to settle criminal and civil lawsuits that included $8.3 billion in fines and forfeitures. But it would pay only a small portion — $225 million — as long as it processed the settlement through bankruptcy court.

OxyContin is the best-known prescription opioid, but Purdue isn’t the only company producing these drugs to face lawsuits.

Including the settlement proposed by Purdue, there have been others $50 Billion in Opioid Settlements with state, local and Native American tribal governments. The money is intended to combat the crisis.

The companies involved included pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Teva; distributors included McKesson, Amerisource Bergen and Cardinal Health; and pharmacy chains including Walgreen Co., CVS Health And Walmart.

More recently, claims have been filed against pharmacy benefit managers such as Express Scripts and Optum Rx. These companies have denied any wrongdoing and the cases have not yet gone to trial.