R&I – FS
A bankruptcy court gave members of the pharma family immunity from further civil suits. They don’t have to admit wrongdoing – and they may end up richer than they started. Corporate money has a powerful and malign influence on so many aspects of American life. But even by that low standard, events this week in a New York bankruptcy court are shocking. The legal system has effectively allowed one of the country’s richest families to buy its way out of accountability for what a White House commission called “America’s national nightmare” of mass opioid addiction.
On Wednesday, the court approved a deal for the dissolution of the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma, which kicked off the opioid epidemic two decades ago with its illegal drive to sell a high-strength painkiller, OxyContin. Purdue’s owners, members of two branches of the now-notorious Sackler family, are estimated to have made more than $10bn from the drug – even as the opioid crisis claimed more than 600,000 lives, with the toll climbing higher by the year. Astonishingly, the Sacklers seem to have been able to work the bankruptcy process to buy themselves immunity from accountability in the civil courts – in return for handing over only a small fraction of the money they made from OxyContin – and still remain one of the richest families in the country. All while continuing to deny their responsibility for their role in creating the opioid crisis.
At this point Purdue Pharma’s reputation is little better than that of a Mexican cartel. The company has twice pleaded guilty to felonies, in 2007 and last year, including lying about the risk of addiction from OxyContin, bribing doctors to prescribe it and defrauding the federal government. But that barely scratches the surface of the company’s corruption in pursuit of profit: it used its money and influence to warp the practice of medicine, compromise drug regulators and keep open the doors to mass prescribing of opioids even as evidence of an epidemic grew.
The judge’s critics say the outcome was preordained from the moment Purdue filed its case in his court. But it is an outcome that fits with the history of a uniquely American epidemic. No other country has experienced the same scale of opioid addiction and death, in part because corporations in other countries do not wield the same influence over the practice and regulation of medicine.
Neither did Purdue act alone in this crisis. Drug distributors and pharmacies jumped on the bandwagon. Other opioid manufacturers, such as Johnson & Johnson, raked in the profits of narcotic painkiller addiction. Even as evidence of a crisis grew and doctors witnessing the devastation sounded warnings, the din of corporate money drowned them out. The quarter of a billion dollars a year the drug industry spends on lobbying bought the complicity of politicians, influenced regulators, weakened investigations by the justice department and stalled action by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Purdue used its political muscle to head off even more serious criminal charges and to keep its executives out of prison.
Above all, the drug industry kept the doors to mass prescribing of opioids open for years not because they were an effective way to treat pain but because they were hugely profitable. Those same firms are now increasingly agreeing to payouts to head off a torrent of lawsuits – but it’s hard to conclude that they regard it as anything more than the cost of doing business. Not least because, like the members of the Sackler family behind Purdue, none of them admit to having done anything wrong.
Rawr
Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/05/opioids-killed-600000-americans-sacklers-immunity