They’re accused of “turbocharging” the opioid epidemic that has sunk its teeth into the U.S., and now, some of the nation’s largest corporations could owe around $32 billion over the next two weeks as fines and payouts are finalized by the courts.
With Texas set to receive around $1.1 billion of that total, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said last week in a statement that the pharmaceutical companies who created and sold the opioids were “at the root of the problem.”
“We've lost more than a million Americans to this epidemic, and sadly, it's at an all-time high as overdose deaths continue to rise,” Paxton said, adding that the payments will be used to treat “those currently still struggling with opioid addiction.”
Drug overdoses accounted for a historic amount of deaths – 104,000 – across the country, according to the most recent 12-month span of numbers compiled by the CDC.
With resources for combatting opioid addiction dwindling in communities all over the country, negotiations have been underway for some time to hold the manufacturers of the drugs accountable for the damage.
One deal that encompasses drug distributors and wholesalers AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson as well as health and hygiene goliath Johnson & Johnson would require those companies, who still maintain their innocence in the epidemic, to pay around $26 billion to states and Native American tribes to aid in the fight against opioid addiction, a deal that NPR is reporting could be announced by Friday.
The other deal being worked out involves Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family. Purdue Pharma are the manufacturers of Oxycontin.
The deal’s mediator, Judge Shelley Chapman, said in a report last week that there is “substantial progress” being made, and that it could be worth up to $6 billion.
While the Sacklers have also continued to state they did nothing wrong, their company has continued to face consistently growing amounts of bad press, bearing the brunt of the fervor over the growth of drug addiction and overdose death in the U.S. because of their persistence in pushing their product as a pain medication.
An earlier settlement suggestion, negotiated as part of Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy case, would have seen the corporation pay around $4.5 billion, but a federal judge rejected that amount in December. That has led apparently to an increased sum that Chapman said would total “not less than $5.5 billion and up to $6 billion” when she issued her report last week.
In return for that additional billion or so dollars, the Sackler family has continued to demand a full “release” from future opioid liabilities, a stipulation that would shield any family members who run the company from any future lawsuits over their role, real or perceived, in the Oxycontin addiction epidemic.
However, “the unanimous acceptance” the Sacklers want as part of the deal “has not been achieved,” Chapman said, with many states yet to respond about whether they would remove their opposition to this stipulation in return for the higher sum of cash.
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