Purdue Pharma Owner To Pay $4.3B Over Opioid Crisis

Introduction

A source recently said that the owner of Purdue Pharma LP is now ready to contribute $4.275 billion to resolve the nearly 3,000 lawsuits filed against the company over fueling the opioid epidemic across the U.S.

The Sackler family owns the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma and the members of the family have raised the initially proposed settlement of $3 billion to roughly $4.3 billion. The company and the representatives for the family have not yet commented on the new proposal.

The details of the settlement are expected to be outlined in a Purdue reorganization plan filed in a U.S. bankruptcy this week. In 2019, the company filed for bankruptcy after facing a torrent of lawsuits, and last year it pleaded guilty to three criminal charges and agreed to pay $8.3 billion to settle federal probes over its marketing practices of the highly addictive painkiller.

According to the latest proposal, the sources said that the family could still use profits from sales of those businesses to cover the higher $4.275 billion payouts. The settlement is expected to happen over a period of years.

The litigation against the company and the family has been put to a halt since the company filed for bankruptcy, following which it has been working towards proposing a reorganization plan that would help resolve thousands of outstanding lawsuits.

Recently, the New York attorney general's lawsuit over the opioid crisis also got delayed due to the concerns related to COVID-19, and the Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Jerry Garguilo indicated that the trial will likely begin on June 8.

Last month, a study was published in the medical journal The BMJ in which Harvard researchers highlighted the side effects of opioid use during pregnancy and indicated that the use increased the risk of a cleft palate, cleft lip, or other birth defects.

The data for research was collected from two sources, the Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) from 2000 to 2014 and the MarketScan Research Database from 2003 to 2015, which included more than 1.6 million publicly insured pregnant women. The researchers had set the eligibility to at least three months before pregnancy to one month after delivery with infants’ eligibility for at least three months after birth.

The women with two or more prescription dispensations of an opioid painkiller, like Vicodin or OxyContin, during the first trimester of pregnancy, were considered by the researchers. Out of the total, nearly 70,000 publicly insured women and around 12,000 commercially insured pregnant women had two or more prescription dispensations.

The research revealed that in the MAX cohort the risk of abnormalities overall was 41 per 1,000 pregnancies as compared to 32 per 1,000 unexposed pregnancies and in the MarketScan cohort, the data revealed a risk of 42 per 1,000 exposed pregnancies as compared to 37 per 1,000 unexposed pregnancies. The researchers further noted that other birth defects, like heart malformations, club foot, or neural tube defects were comparatively lower.

In conclusion, the researchers stated that prescription opioids used in early pregnancy are not associated with a substantial increase in risk for most of the malformation types considered, although a small increase in the risk of oral clefts associated with their use is possible.

The same month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) indicating that from 2013 to 2019 overdose deaths related to opioids, which involved fentanyl, and other synthetic versions of the addictive pain killers had skyrocketed.

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