Purdue Pharma pleads guilty, will pay billions for role in opioid epidemic
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Purdue Pharma and the United States Department of Justice announced that they have reached a deal that resolves multiyear civil and criminal investigations into the pharmaceutical company’s marketing practices related to its opioid medications.
The agreement is subject to the approval of the bankruptcy court, both sides said.
According to DOJ and Purdue Pharma press releases, Purdue Pharma has agreed to plead guilty to three federal criminal charges. It will pay criminal fines of more than $3.5 billion, a criminal forfeiture of $2 billion and a civil settlement in the amount of $2.8 billion. In addition, the Sackler family — Purdue Pharma’s owners — agreed to pay $225 million in damages to resolve its civil liability.
The DOJ release also said these agreements do not include the criminal release of any individuals, including members of the Sackler family, the company’s executives or employees. Purdue Pharma said in its statement that the agreement relates to specified misconduct that took place before June 2017 and resolves allegations regarding conduct between 2007 and February 2018.
“Today’s resolution is the result of years of hard work by the FBI and its partners to combat the opioid crisis in the U.S.,” Steven M. D’Antuono, assistant director of the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office, said in the DOJ press release. “Purdue, through greed and violation of the law, prioritized money over the health and well-being of patients.”
Steve Miller, Purdue Pharma’s board chair, said in the company statement that Purdue Pharma “deeply regrets and accepts responsibility for the misconduct detailed by the Department of Justice in the agreed statement of facts.”
The company statement also indicated “the overwhelming majority” of the settlement funds will be directed to state, local and tribal governments to address the opioid crisis and that Purdue Pharma will work to provide free or at-cost millions of doses of opioid addiction treatment and overdose reversal medicines.
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We must not forget that in 2007, some of Purdue Pharma executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges and agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines stemming from claims that OxyContin was less addictive and less subject to abuse and diversion than other opioids. In 2019, they settled for $270 million with Oklahoma. Other opioid manufacturers that are still part of pending litigation might be a bit shaken by the terms of the newest Purdue Pharma agreement, but given the market share and optics of Oxycontin, it is unlikely they will have the legal liability Purdue Pharma is facing.
Despite all that we know about the limited benefit of opioids to treat chronic pain and the risk of inappropriate use for acute pain, there are still millions of people around the world who are using opioids to treat those conditions. There are parts of the world, such as the United Kingdom, where use of opioids is rising even though the downstream consequences of opioid addiction have been well documented. Clearly, there are people who need opioids for pain, and nobody's arguing that. Although improving, many U.S. physicians had become lax in their decision-making about how to use opioids effectively and safely and were lulled into complacency because of the misleading promotional programming and misaligned incentives to prescribe them. Due to this settlement, the truth about opioids has finally come out.
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