(Washington) The US Supreme Court on Thursday canceled a compensation agreement of some $6 billion in the opioid crisis, on the grounds that it exempted the Sackler family, owner of the Purdue laboratory, from any future lawsuits from victims.
The Sacklers are accused of having aggressively promoted their pain medication OxyContin for years while being aware of its highly addictive nature. The sale of this product brought them tens of billions of dollars.
Overprescription of the opioid is widely considered to be the trigger for the crisis that has killed more than half a million people in the United States over 20 years.
The Justice Department criticized the settlement, reached in 2022 with all 50 states, local governments and individual victims and upheld by a federal appeals court, for shielding the Sackler family from future lawsuits, including from victims who did not agree to the settlement.
“The Bankruptcy Code does not authorize […] “immunity from prosecution without the consent of affected plaintiffs,” wrote majority judge Neil Gorsuch, joined by three other conservative justices and one progressive.
“What the Sacklers have agreed to put on the table for opioid victims is nowhere near their entire estate,” he says, recalling that they had “siphoned” some $11 billion from the Purdue lab in the years before it declared bankruptcy in 2019.
“This does not, however, prevent them from seeking a judicial decision that would virtually extinguish any prosecution against them for fraud, willful injury and even wrongful death, all without the consent of those who have brought such proceedings or would like to do so,” the ruling said.
“Lottery ticket”
In his dissent, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by another conservative, Chief Justice John Roberts, and two progressives, denounced on the contrary “a decision that is wrong in law and devastating for more than 100,000 opioid victims and their families”, pointing out the uncertain nature of a better agreement in the future.
“Each victim or creditor will receive the equivalent of a lottery ticket for possible future compensation for [tout au plus] “a few,” he worries.
Purdue also deplored the “despairing decision, as it invalidates an agreement […] which would have provided billions of dollars for compensation for victims, redress for the consequences of the opioid crisis and medications for drug overdoses and addiction.”
He assured in a press release, however, that this will not deter him from pursuing “the dual objective of using the dollars from the agreement to remedy the harm caused by opioids and of transforming the company into an agent of good.”
Targeted by an avalanche of lawsuits, Purdue declared bankruptcy in 2019 and has since negotiated a plan, the latest version of which provides for its closure in the United States for the benefit of a new entity and the payment of at least 5.5 billion dollars over 18 years. The Supreme Court suspended this agreement in August at the request of the government.
During the debates in November, the nine judges showed themselves to be unusually torn, balancing between the risk of compromising the victims’ compensation, and that of recognizing a court, in a bankruptcy case, the right to immunize the Sacklers against future prosecutions.
The lawyer representing the victims who signed the agreement, Pratik Shah, said it was “irresponsible for the bankruptcy trustee to suggest that there is some kind of secret alternative to obtaining compensation,” saying that “without the exemption, the plan will unravel.”