“For the first time,” Huffington Post reports (here), “victims of opioid addiction and families who lost loved ones to OxyContin addiction were able to directly confront members of the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical company was responsible for a crisis that has cost at least 500,000 American lives.”
This is what they said: “You are the scum of the earth.”
“In three hours of emotional testimony on Thursday, 26 speakers from 19 different states spoke in court before David, Theresa and Richard Sackler … during a bankruptcy hearing for Purdue Pharma, the company that made the Sackler family rich by producing OxyContin.” The Sacklers were required to listen, and weren’t allowed to respond. This was a catharsis session.
The Sackler family (profile here) owned Purdue Pharma, the company behind America’s opioid addiction crisis. Forbes estimated in 2019 they made $12 to $13 billion of OxyContin profits (read story here). They agreed to disgorge $4 billion in exchange for immunity from further civil lawsuits. In December 2021, a federal judge threw out that deal, ruling the bankruptcy judge overstepped his authority (see story here). But finding the billions the Sacklers kept could be difficult; at least some is stashed in offshore accounts.
A separate corporate settlement of $8 billion by Purdue Pharma put the company into bankruptcy (see my previous posting here).
Richard Sackler (photo below), the chairman and CEO of Purdue Pharma, downplayed OxyContin’s addictiveness while pushing the company to sell stronger doses, and blaming victims for their addiction. He’s widely considered the chief villain in the OxyContin scandal, but other family members were implicated too.
Think of them as pill hucksters whose company, Huffington Post says, “cost at least 500,000 American lives.” Some activists have compared the family to a drug cartel. At least one speaker at Thursday’s hearing called them “murderers.”
