Washington will receive $183 million from Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family as a result of the state’s 2017 lawsuit over the widely abused prescription painkiller OxyContin, Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced Thursday.
The settlement amount is more than double what the state was initially supposed to get under a previous bankruptcy plan announced last year. Under that plan, which Ferguson objected to in August, Washington would have gotten $70 million. Ferguson and nine other state attorneys general argued that the proposed settlement had been far too lenient and allowed the Sackler family, which founded and owns Purdue Pharma, to walk away with a “legal shield for life.” As part of that proposal, the Sackler family did not file for personal bankruptcy but contributed $4.5 billion in exchange for immunity from future claims. The family has pulled nearly $11 billion out of Purdue since 2008, according to an audit introduced during the company’s bankruptcy proceedings. A federal judge in New York agreed with Ferguson’s argument and rejected the proposed settlement in December.
The plan agreed to Thursday must still be approved by the bankruptcy court. Under the new plan, the Sacklers would still receive immunity from future civil lawsuits. But their personal cash contribution has gone up by at least $1.2 billion, to close to $6 billion, and they expressed regret for the damage caused by their product, without acknowledging wrongdoing.
The settlement money must be used to battle and recover from the opioid epidemic, which has killed an estimated 500,000 Americans over the last two decades. Opioids have killed at least 600 people a year in Washington for the last decade, with deaths skyrocketing in 2020, when the drugs killed an estimated 1,200 people. (Seattle Times)
