A federal judge in the US state of New Jersey sentenced pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma on Tuesday. Purdue is the manufacturer of the controversial painkiller OxyContin, which was at the root of the opiate crisis in the United States. The company must be dissolved by May 1.
Source: Belga
An agreement on a settlement of 7.4 billion dollars (approximately 7.1 billion euros) was previously reached.
Purdue and the Sackler family, who own the company, knew about OxyContin’s highly addictive nature and made tens of billions of dollars from its sales. They also bribed doctors to further distribute the product.
Sorry
Judge Madeline Cox Arleo listened to testimony from victims and survivors for more than six hours Tuesday before ordering Steve Miller, the chairman of Purdue Pharma’s board of directors, to apologize to them.
The judge himself also presented an apology, but in the name of the US government, which failed to protect the population against the “greed-driven” practices of Purdue Pharma, it said.
Hundreds of thousands of overdoses
According to the US government organization CDC, almost 727,000 people in the US died from an opioid overdose between 1999 and 2022. In 2023, more than 115 million doses of illegal fentanyl were seized by law enforcement. That is 2,300 times more than in 2017.
The media has extensively covered the problem in recent years, in books such as ‘Empire of Pain’ and television series such as ‘Dopesick’ and ‘Painkiller’, which show how hundreds of thousands of Americans who were prescribed the painkiller by their doctor became addicted. Many died of overdose.
