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Purdue Pharma settles opioid lawsuit for $270m
Purdue Pharma, the drug-maker owned by the billionaire Sackler family, has reached a $270m settlement in a lawsuit which claimed its opioids contributed to the deaths of thousands of people.
The deal with Oklahoma is the first settlement the US firm has struck amid some 2,000 other lawsuits it is facing linked to its painkiller OxyContin.
Purdue is one of several firms named in the claim which alleged they used deceptive practices to sell opioids.
[...]Under the settlement, Purdue will pay $102.5m towards the creation of a National Centre for Addiction Studies and Treatment at Oklahoma State University.
The Sacklers themselves said that they will contribute $75m over five years to the centre.
Previously: OxyContin Maker Purdue Pharma May File for Bankruptcy to Disrupt Lawsuits
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Barenflimski on Wednesday March 27 2019, @02:11AM (2 children)
I'm not convinced that just because there is a drug available that availability is the primary reason people do drugs. I'm no phan of pharma, but I don't think it is right to blame them for all of the issues related to drug use. From what I have seen with people over my life, most people bumped into these drugs and simply had no way off once they were knee deep in. Almost no one can take a week off to detox from opiates. Its much easier and in many cases the only way to keep your job, to just keep taking a low maintenance dose until it becomes an even larger issue. By that point, society shames them into a corner by themselves because they let a problem get so bad. I have never seen a case where shaming a person changes their behavior. In most cases this simply confirms what the person already was feeling, and the whole point is to help them move on. This isn't helpful.
Until we learn as a society how to help each other through tough times in life, we will never change anything. If we don't bottle up the knowledge we have and pass it on to our kids, they will have to re-learn all of it from scratch. Some of the lessons we learn in life are generational lessons, and this is one of them. Unfortunately our system is setup to not be helpful at every turn when someone wants to change their behavior. From being told they have to accept their shortcomings, they are defective at self help groups, to the upfront and mostly un-affordable cost of help, to not being able to take the time off of work, to most of their friends not having any idea how to talk to them about this, to losing all sorts of certifications, gaining a permanent medical record with a pre-exisiting condition, and never being able to qualify for certain jobs ever again, for most it pays to keep this to themselves. The current system has many shortcomings.
I'm glad a good portion of this will actually go to treatment. It speaks volumes about the conversation when the only way we deal with any of this, on any level is with lawsuits, criminal cases, and locking people up. Maybe it's time to get ahead of this and start a real conversation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tizan on Wednesday March 27 2019, @02:48AM
Most cases where it was being prescribed could be treated with ibuprofen or other such drugs..This is an addictive drug that should be used in cases when others don't work...and the risk of addiction is downweighed by the gain in quality of life (another e.g morphine).
Doctors were being told by pharma people that it is not addictive...A dentist prescribed it for me after a crown work and told me people in pain don't get addicted !...they thought it was an effective pain killer with no side effects...and that thought was being driven by the sales people talking to them. Nobody was giving morphine willy nilly 2 years ago...but they were for oxycontyn.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday March 28 2019, @12:21PM
Anyone who does believe that is an idiot, and that's not what this case was about.
THAT is what this case was about. Purdue lied about the potential risks and dangers of this drug, because they knew that telling the truth would hurt their profits. They withheld information that could have saved lives because they felt it was profitable to do so.
The way I see it, there's two options. One way or another, we've gotta ensure that people aren't being rewarded for this kind of bad behavior. Lawsuits and prison sentences *are* one way of doing that, although they don't seem to do it very well. Take away a significant portion of their profits (which does not seem to be what happened here...) so that it's more profitable to tell the truth and actually sell medicine instead of pushing pills. Or lock up the people responsible so they can't use those profits. The alternative is to try to rebuild the entire system so that there's no profit motive involved to begin with. The latter would be my preference...but if we must keep it capitalist then we need some way to punish bad behavior.