The Sacklers
For the first time during the long legal reckoning over the opioid crisis, members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma heard directly from people who say their company’s main product, Oxycontin, wrecked their lives.
David Sackler, Richard Sackler and Theresa Sackler listened and watched during the roughly two-hour long hearing as people described surviving addiction and spoke of losing loved ones to the epidemic.
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Roughly 500,000 people in the U.S. have died from opioid overdoses since the opioid crisis began in 1999, including prescription painkillers and street drugs such as heroin and illicit fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The virtual hearing was held in federal bankruptcy court at the request of the mediator who hashed out a deal with members of the Sackler family, who are expected to pay roughly $6 billion in exchange for immunity from future opioid lawsuits.
Half a million people. That’s a hell of a body count.
Family members who served on the company’s board and who played a significant role in management decisions have long maintained they did nothing wrong, according to internal Purdue Pharma documents.
Half a million people.
500,000 since 1999 is a big number, but I wonder why they include street drugs such as heroin and illicit fentanyl in that number. Is it a claim that the prescription opioids that cause death also cause addiction that requires street drugs to satisfy in the absence of the prescription opioids? By contrast it is estimated that alcohol related deaths between 2000-2016 were 425,000. Alcohol is also heavily marketed, promoted, and romanticized, and not just by the alcohol producers.