By Friday, the company that lit the fuse on America’s opioid epidemic will no longer exist. Purdue Pharma — maker of OxyContin — is being dissolved after a federal judge approved its criminal sentence on Tuesday, clearing the way for a settlement that has been winding through bankruptcy court since 2019.

US District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo called the company’s conduct “a purposeful, intentional and sophisticated crime scheme.” Purdue admitted it lacked an effective program to keep its painkillers off the black market, paid doctors to prescribe opioids, and paid an electronic medical records company to push doctors toward more prescriptions.

But no individual faces prison. Not the executives who greenlit the strategy. Not the Sackler family members who owned the company and collected $10.7 billion in payouts from 2008 to 2018.

“It is not lost on me that those who started the epidemic will not serve a sentence,” Arleo said.

The numbers tell a story of accountability that falls short of harm. More than 900,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses since 1999, according to federal data. The Sacklers will contribute up to $7 billion over 15 years — stretched out, the judge noted, because “they’d rather pay it from future money than pay it now.” Individual victims or their survivors can expect payments of roughly $8,000 to $16,000, provided they can produce decades-old prescription records. Many cannot.

Alexis Pluis, a New York mother who lost her son to opioids in 2014, told the court she doesn’t expect to receive anything because she can’t locate 23-year-old medical records. “We still deserve justice,” she said. “And this isn’t it.”

Purdue will be replaced by Knoa Pharma, a public-interest company governed by a state-appointed board with a mandate to combat the opioid crisis. Thirty million internal Purdue documents will be made public through the University of California San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University. The Sacklers have agreed not to object if institutions strip their name from buildings.

The corporate death sentence is real. Everything else — the scale of the dying, the absence of individual accountability, the modesty of the checks heading to families who lost children — is the settlement’s honest accounting of what justice looks like when the damage is too vast to repair.

Sources