A federal judge sentenced OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma on Tuesday, ordering the company to pay over $5 billion in criminal penalties.
The pharmaceutical company will soon dissolve, as the sentencing was the last step before Purdue Pharma had to legally move to close. The company will be replaced by Knoa Pharma, a company aimed at providing relief to and addressing the opioid crisis. The sentencing marks an end to the Department of Justice’s criminal fraud case against Purdue Pharma.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called the sentencing a “prime example of the Department’s effort to redress past wrongs by rooting out and punishing unlawful conduct by companies that have contributed to the national crisis.”
The $5.5 billion in criminal penalties is related to the company’s fraud and kickback conspiracy charges the DOJ brought against the company, which it pleaded guilty to in 2020. $225 million of these liabilities will be paid to the DOJ. The rest of the liabilities will be used in settlement payments.
“Purdue Pharma put profits over patient health and safety,” Blanche said in a statement. “The company willfully rejected the law and ignored the diversion of their highly addictive prescription drugs. Their actions contributed to the opioid crisis that claimed countless lives and destroyed entire families and communities.”
The sentencing allows Purdue Pharma to move forward with its settlement payments related to the thousands of individual opioid-related lawsuits filed against the company. The settlement plans allot for $865 million payments to each victim.
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The Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, has to contribute $6.5 billion to these settlements.
However, several victim families, who have filed lawsuits against Purdue Pharma for how the company’s opioid OxyContin has affected their loved ones, have said the settlement does not go far enough, with some calling for criminal charges for the owners, according to the Associated Press. Around 200 individual claimants stood against the settlement, while over 50,000 accepted it.