WASHINGTON – O Supreme Court Thursday rejected a national agreement with Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin This would have protected members of the Sackler family, which owns the company, from civil lawsuits over the number of opioids, but it would also have provided billions of dollars to combat the opioid epidemic.
After deliberating for more than six months, the judges in a 5-4 vote blocked an agreement reached with state and local governments and victims. The Sacklers reportedly contributed up to $6 billion and relinquished ownership of the company, but retained billions more. The agreement provided that the company would emerge from bankruptcy as a different entity, with its profits used for treatment and prevention.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said “nothing in current law authorizes Sackler’s dismissal.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
“Opioid victims and other future victims of mass illicit acts will suffer greatly in the wake of today’s unfortunate and destabilizing decision,” Kavanaugh wrote.
The high court had put the deal on hold last summer in response to objections from the Biden administration.
It’s unclear what happens next.
“Today’s Supreme Court decision marks a major setback for families who have lost loved ones to overdoses and for those still struggling with addiction,” Edward Neiger, an attorney who represents more than 60,000 overdose victims, said in a statement. .
“The Purdue plan was a victim-centered plan that would provide billions of dollars to states to be used exclusively to alleviate the opioid crisis and $750 million to victims of the crisis so they could begin to rebuild their lives. As a result of the government’s senseless three-year crusade against the plan, thousands of people have died from overdoses, and today’s decision will lead to more unnecessary overdose deaths.”
An opponent of the deal praised the outcome.
Ed Bisch’s 18-year-old son, Eddie, died of an overdose after taking OxyContin in Philadelphia in 2001.
The elder Bisch, who lives in New Jersey, has been speaking out against the Purdue and Sackler family members ever since and is part of a relatively small but vocal group of victims and family members who have opposed the settlement.
“This is a step towards justice. It was outrageous what they were trying to do,” he said Thursday. “They mocked the justice system and then tried to mock the bankruptcy system.”
He said he would have accepted the deal if he thought it would have affected the opioid crisis.
He is now asking the Department of Justice to pursue criminal charges against members of the Sackler family
Arguments in early December lasted nearly two hours in a packed courtroom, while the justices appeared, in turn, unwilling to upset a carefully negotiated agreement and reluctant to reward the Sacklers.
The question for the judges was whether the legal shield that bankruptcy provides can be extended to people like the Sacklers, which did not declare bankruptcy. Lower courts have issued conflicting rulings on this issue, which also has implications for other major product liability lawsuits resolved through the bankruptcy system.
The US Bankruptcy Administrator, an arm of the Justice Department, argued that bankruptcy law does not protect the Sackler family from being sued. During the Trump administration, the administration supported the agreement.
The Biden administration argued to the court that negotiations could resume, and perhaps lead to a better deal, if the court halted the current deal.
Supporters of the plan said third-party disclosures are sometimes necessary to forge a deal, and federal law imposes no prohibition against them.
OxyContin first hit the market in 1996, and Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing is often cited as a catalyst for the national opioid epidemic, with doctors persuaded to prescribe painkillers with less regard for the dangers of addiction.
The drug and the Stamford, Connecticut-based company have become synonymous with the crisis, even though most of the pills prescribed and used were generic drugs. Opioid-related overdose deaths have continued to rise, reaching 80,000 in recent years. Most of them come from fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
The Purdue Pharma settlement would have ranked among the largest reached by pharmaceutical companies, wholesalers and pharmacies to resolve epidemic-related lawsuits brought by state, local and Native American tribal governments and others. These deals totaled more than $50 billion.
But the Purdue Pharma settlement would have been only the second to date to include direct payments to victims from a $750 million fund. The payments would have ranged from about $3,500 to $48,000.
Members of the Sackler family are no longer on the company’s board and have not received payments from it since before Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy. In the previous decade, however, they received more than $10 billion, about half of which, according to family members, went to paying taxes.
The case is Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, 22-859.
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This story has been corrected to show that Chief Justice John Roberts was a dissenter, not Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill contributed to this report from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
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