A protest against Purdue Pharma in June 2019.Jessica Hill (AFP)
The pharmaceutical Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the opiate OxyContin (Oxycodone in Spain), presented at midnight this Monday a restructuring plan that provides for the reconversion of the entity to face thousands of lawsuits from States, municipalities and individuals due to the addictions caused from the use of the powerful pain reliever, a derivative of heroin.
The plan obliges the Sackler family, which owns the company, to pay almost $ 4.28 billion (about 3.58 billion euros), much more than initially expected, for the lawsuits attributed to its flagship drug, the one that reported the most benefits. For years, spurring the worst public health crisis in the US between AIDS in the 1980s and the current pandemic.
The financial contribution of the Sacklers, a family of philanthropists disgraced by the crisis, is key to closing the deal.
The restructuring filed Monday in a New York State court is the company's final offer to end the dispute and includes the multi-million dollar payment from the Sacklers' personal fortune over the next nine years to pay for States, municipalities, counties and tribes the costs derived from the epidemic of addictions and deaths from overdoses.
This roadmap of the pharmaceutical company, which filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2019 due to insolvency in the face of more than 3,000 lawsuits, must be approved by its creditors and by the judge in charge of the case.
Purdue Pharma's total payment will exceed $ 10 billion, according to company estimates cited by
Reuters.
"With overdoses still at record levels [increased by the crisis resulting from the pandemic] it is time to allocate all funds to respond to this crisis," said Steve Miller, president of the pharmaceutical company, in a statement.
"We are confident that this plan will achieve that critical goal."
Overdose deaths, which declined in 2018, increased in 2019 and 2020, when a total of 72,000 was recorded, a 5% increase over 2018.
Apart from class action lawsuits, the agreement also includes reparations and payments to private entities and individuals, such as hospitals, insurers and legal guardians of thousands of children born with withdrawal syndrome due to their mothers' addiction to Oxycontin.
For years, federal and state authorities tried to curb the drugmaker's aggressive marketing tactics.
In 2007, the Department of Justice reached an agreement for more than 630 million to resolve criminal charges in this regard.
The offensive of institutions and individuals against Purdue Pharma began in 2015, when the epidemic was sweeping the country.
Faced with the material impossibility of facing it - just in legal fees it involved an expense of two million dollars a week - the company filed for bankruptcy four years later.
Last October, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to overt deception about the drug's dependency, and to its massive administration.
Federal prosecutors considered it proven that the pharmaceutical company offered incentives to doctors who prescribed OxyContin to their patients as a pain reliever, hence one of the crimes that the firm assumes to have committed is the violation of the federal anti-bribery statute, in addition to another for deception of the US drug agency between 2007 and 2017.
The number of overdose deaths due to opiate use has quadrupled in the country in the past two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Since the turn of the century, opiate derivatives have killed more than 450,000 people, at a rate of 142 a day, according to the most recent count.
In 2015, two out of three overdoses were due to these substances, making this cause of death the most common, above homicides by firearms and traffic accidents.
Opiates are one of the causes of what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair” (the other two are those derived from alcohol consumption and suicides), which have particularly affected the white population without studies of middle age.
