Other LanguagesFlawed plan gives Sackler family lifetime legal shield
OLYMPIA — Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced today he will appeal Purdue Pharma’s flawed bankruptcy plan. Ferguson asserts that the plan is inadequate, and that a bankruptcy court doesn’t have the authority to prevent attorneys general from enforcing state law, including the decision to pursue the company’s owners, the Sackler family, for their illegal conduct.
“This order lets the Sacklers off the hook by granting them permanent immunity from lawsuits in exchange for a fraction of the profits they made from the opioid epidemic — and sends a message that billionaires operate by a different set of rules than everybody else,” Ferguson said. “This order is insulting to victims of the opioid epidemic who had no voice in these proceedings — and must be appealed.”
Purdue’s bankruptcy plan, approved today by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain, requires the Sackler family pay $4.3 billion over nine years to the group of states, municipalities and private plantiffs, including Washington, that sued or have claims against the company. In exchange, the plan includes a lifetime legal shield for the Sackler family, which denies Washington or any other state the power to go after the Sackler family in the future.
An audit of Purdue introduced during the bankruptcy proceedings in late 2019 showed that the Sackler family has pulled nearly $11 billion out of Purdue since 2008.
During testimony before the bankruptcy court last week, Dr. Kathe Sackler conceded that, as she wrote in a 2001 email, her family “amassed a vast fortune” and created “layers and layers” before their “true support system would be affected.”
As noted in a New York Times op-ed published last month, by the time they are finished paying this settlement, the Sacklers will be wealthier than they were when they started: “Their current fortune is estimated to be at least $11 billion. Conservatively, with interest and investments, this means they can expect a 5 percent annualized rate of return on that fortune. If that’s the case, they’ll be able to pay the fine without even touching their principal. When they’re done paying in 2030, they will probably be richer than they are today.”
As Ferguson detailed in July, Washington’s share is only about $70 million, spread out over nearly a decade. Factoring in inflation, the estimated total value in today’s dollars is $53 million to $60 million.
Case background
Washington is one of 48 states that sued Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, for fueling the opioid epidemic. Washington’s lawsuit asserts Purdue embarked on a massive deceptive marketing campaign to convince doctors and the public that OxyContin is effective for treating chronic pain and has a low risk of addiction, all without evidence to support its claims. This deceptive marketing resulted in the deaths of Washingtonians and devastation to Washington families.
The lawsuit contends Purdue conducted an uncontrolled experiment on the American public without any reliable clinical evidence that opioids are effective at treating chronic pain. To doctors and patients, Purdue consistently downplayed the risks of addiction from long-term use and deceptively represented opioids as safe for treating long-term chronic pain.
The opioid epidemic continues to rise. The CDC recently reported that more than 93,000 Americans died from an opioid overdose last year, a record number and a 30 percent jump from 2019.
The lawsuit sought damages, injunctive relief, and civil penalties. Washington estimated that Purdue would owe $2 billion in penalties alone.
In October 2019, shortly before the lawsuit was set to go to trial, Purdue declared bankruptcy, and then obtained an injunction halting all state legal actions against the company. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, Purdue had to draft a plan that, once approved by the judge, governs how the company will pay back all its creditors — including the 48 state attorneys general that filed suit.
After Purdue submitted its proposal in March of this year, a subset of 25 attorneys general including Ferguson issued a statement opposing the plan. Ferguson issued another statement earlier this July opposing the plan’s lifetime legal shield and insufficient settlement amount.
Assistant Attorneys General Tad Robinson O’Neill and Laura Clinton are leading the case for Washington.
Ferguson’s work on the opioid epidemic
For the last several years, the Attorney General’s Office has taken on complex cases to hold major corporations accountable for their role in the opioid crisis. Earlier this year, a multinational consulting firm that worked with Purdue was legally required to pay $13.4 million to the Attorney General’s Office. The consulting firm, McKinsey, discussed ways for Purdue to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin.
In January 2020, Ferguson filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, one of the largest suppliers of the raw materials used to produce opioid pain medications, accusing the multinational company of playing a key role in driving the entire pharmaceutical industry to vastly expand the use of prescription opioids.
Ferguson also sued the three largest distributors of opioids — McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp. — in 2019, asserting they made billions of dollars feeding the opioid epidemic by shipping huge amounts of oxycodone, fentanyl, hydrocodone and other prescription opioids into the state even when they knew or should have known those drugs were likely to end up in the hands of drug dealers and addicts.
In the summer of 2017, the Attorney General’s Office hosted a summit on Washington’s opioid epidemic in partnership with the Washington State Patrol and the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. A report developed by the organizations after the summit included a range of recommendations, several of which became the subject of Attorney General request legislation in the 2018 legislative session. Those proposals included limits on new opioid prescriptions, which failed to pass the Legislature. However, in the first half of 2019, state medical boards implemented new opioid prescription limits in Washington state similar to those requested by Ferguson.
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