Purdue Pharma's $7B opioid settlement is set for votes from victims and cities
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The settlement is a way to avoid trials with claims from states alone that total more than $2 trillion in damages.
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This month, 49 states announced they had signed on to the proposal. Only Oklahoma, which has a separate settlement with the company, is not involved.
Massachusetts is in line for up to $105 million from the settlement, Attorney General Andrea Campbell said Tuesday.
If approved, the settlement would be among the largest in a wave of lawsuits over the past decade as governments and others sought to hold drugmakers, wholesalers, and pharmacies accountable for the opioid epidemic that started rising in the years after OxyContin hit the market in 1996. The other settlements together are worth about $50 billion, and most of the money is to be used to combat the crisis.
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In the early 2000s, most opioid deaths were linked to prescription drugs, including OxyContin. Since then, heroin and then illicitly produced fentanyl became the biggest killers. In some years, the class of drugs was linked to more than 80,000 deaths, but that number dropped sharply last year.
Last year, the US Supreme Court rejected a version of Purdue's proposed settlement. The court found it was improper to protect members of the Sackler family from lawsuits over opioids, even though they themselves were not filing for bankruptcy protection.
In the new version, groups that don't opt in to the settlement would still have the right to sue members of the wealthy family whose name once adorned museum galleries around the world, as well as programs at several prestigious US universities.
Under the plan, the Sackler family members would give up ownership of Purdue. They resigned from the company's board and stopped receiving distributions from its funds before the company's initial bankruptcy filing in 2019. The remaining entity would get a new name and its profits would be dedicated to battling the epidemic.
Most of the money would go to state and local governments to address the nation's addiction and overdose crisis, but potentially close to $900 million would go directly to individual victims. That makes it different from the other major settlements.
The payments would not begin until after a hearing, likely in November, in which Lane would be asked to approve the entire plan if enough affected parties agree.
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