Purdue Pharma pleads guilty to criminal charges for opioid sales
Purdue Pharma
Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges related to its marketing of the addictive painkiller and faces penalties of roughly $8.3 billion, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. The settlement could pave the way for a resolution of thousands of lawsuits brought against the company for its role in a public health crisis that has killed more than 450,000 Americans since 1999.
The company’s owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, have agreed to pay $225 million in civil penalties. Prosecutors said the agreement did not preclude the filing of criminal charges against Purdue executives or individual Sacklers.
In a statement issued after the announcement of the deal, Steve Miller, chair of the company board, said, “Purdue deeply regrets and accepts responsibility for the misconduct detailed by the Department of Justice in the agreed statement of facts.”
OxyContin, which came on the market in the mid-90s, is seen as an early, ferocious driver of the opioid epidemic; and Purdue is regarded as the architect of muscular, misleading drug marketing.
But it is unlikely the company will pay anything close to the $8.3 billion negotiated in the settlement deal. That is because Purdue sought bankruptcy court protection amid the onslaught of lawsuits, so the federal government will now have to take its place in a long line of creditors. Typically, creditors end up collecting pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy proceedings.
Purdue has long demanded that the federal charges against it be resolved before it would agree to a larger settlement with cities, tribes, states and individuals, who claim that its relentless marketing of OxyContin directly contributed to a crisis of addiction and overdoses, resulting in towering costs in health care, law enforcement and unemployment.
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In the federal settlement, the company agreed to plead guilty to felony charges of defrauding federal health agencies and violating anti-kickback laws.
The penalties include $3.54 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in criminal forfeiture of profits, the largest penalties ever levied against a pharmaceutical manufacturer. The company pleaded guilty to marketing opioids to more than 100 doctors it suspected of writing illegal prescriptions and lying about this to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Purdue also pleaded guilty to paying illegal kickbacks to doctors and to an electronic health records company, Practice Fusion.