Open Editor's Digest for free
Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The Sacklers and the opioid maker they founded, Purdue Pharma, have jointly agreed to pay $7.4 billion to settle liabilities related to their roles in the opioid crisis, ending months of negotiations after a previous deal collapsed.
This latest agreement, which still requires bankruptcy court approval, is $1.4 billion more than the previous agreement concluded between the two parties. The new settlement was agreed upon between more than a dozen US states and other individuals who filed lawsuits against the company.
The pharmaceutical company initially filed for bankruptcy in 2019 in a federal court in New York to manage hundreds of lawsuits over its role in… Opioid crisis. As part of the agreement, the Sacklers will pay $6.5 billion over the next 15 years Bordeaux He will pay $900 million
“Families across New York and across the country are experiencing extreme pain and loss caused by the opioid crisis,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the officials who helped broker the deal, said Thursday. “While no amount of money will be able to completely undo the damage we have caused, this massive influx of funds will provide resources to communities in need so we can heal.”
Purdue's latest settlement is one of the largest potential reparations to arise from the opioid crisis in the United States, which has led to more than 600,000 deaths since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
An earlier $6 billion deal agreed between the Sacklers and creditors — which was largely negotiated during the pandemic — was invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer. The agreement relied on protecting family members from future lawsuits, which the Supreme Court said was not permissible without the family members filing for bankruptcy themselves.
The new deal is designed so that the Sacklers will not be automatically protected from liabilities, but victims will need to agree not to pursue further legal action in order to receive compensation, according to a statement from the New York Attorney General's Office.
The Supreme Court's decision has left lawyers and companies trying to determine how to resolve so-called “mass torts,” where corporate product liability claims have totaled thousands of victims and hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
The money pledged by the Sacklers and Purdue will be used over the next 15 years to fund opioid addiction treatment and recovery programs, the Texas Attorney General's Office said.
Crucially for many victims, members of the Sackler family will no longer be allowed to sell opioids in the United States as part of the deal, and their ownership of Purdue has ended.
The Sacklers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
