The company was responsible for developing and aggressively marketing the opium-based painkiller Oxycontin in the 1990s and 2000s, creating a massive addiction problem that caused tens of thousands of deaths each year in the United States. During that time, the Sacklers raked in some $10 billion in profits off the drug sales.
By late 2019, when Purdue Pharma declared bankruptcy, it was facing well over 2,000 lawsuits attempting to hold them responsible for the deaths, including from the state governments of more than half of all US states.
In addition, Purdue pleaded guilty to three felonies in a separate case in 2020 and agreed to pay the DoJ $8.3 billion.
In December 2021, a federal judge threw out the bankruptcy deal, saying the law didn't allow the Sacklers to be protected from legal claims against them. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel in a federal appeals court reversed that decision, saying that giving the Sacklers protection from future lawsuits was the best way to "ensure the fair distribution" of the settlement money.
In response to the ruling, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, whose state government was one of those that sued Purdue Pharma in 2018 and rejected the deal, accused the Sacklers of hiding behind the nation’s broken bankruptcy code "to escape justice and shield their blood money."
"Our settlement was both significant and imperfect - there will never be enough justice to match the depths of pain and suffering the Sackler family caused," Tong said. "But we recognized that we had pushed this as far as we could, and that it was necessary to get communities, victims and their families the resolution and billions of dollars [of] funding desperately needed to save lives and fight the opioid epidemic."
In its own statement on Tuesday, Purdue Pharma said its mission now is to "deliver billions of dollars of value for victim compensation, opioid crisis abatement, and overdose rescue medicines."
The magnitude of the impact has been so severe, it has caused life expectancy to decrease in the US. In 2022, that statistic sat at 76.2 years - the level it was at two decades ago.
"We have a wonderful sick care system that takes care of very sick people," Asaf Bitton, the director of Harvard University's Ariadne Labs, said podcast last month, "but a very inadequate health care system."
Michelle Williams, the dean of Harvard's T. H. Chan School of Public Health, agreed, noting that although the US is a leader in medical and health innovation, "I think where we are different [than other high-income countries] is that we emphasize rescue care, acute care at the expense of investing in, supporting, and enabling health promotion and disease prevention."