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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49711618
In the face of thousands of lawsuits about the alleging abusive practices contributing to the opioid crisis in the US, Purdue Pharma (makers of OxiCotin) are filing Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. If the courts agree, this would allow them to restructure their debts and continue operations.
"Under the terms of the [proposed] deal, Purdue is to be dissolved and the money raised - estimated to be about $10bn-$12bn (£8bn-£9.7bn), including a minimum cash contribution of $3bn from the Sackler family - will go towards settling the lawsuits. The Sacklers have also offered an additional $1.5bn from the eventual sale of Mundipharma, another pharmaceutical firm owned by the family.
Several of the states that oppose the deal, such as New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, have questioned how Purdue came up with the contribution figure.
The states want the Sackler family to put in more of its own money into the deal."
Note: Bankruptcy is not what regular people think it is. Similar to the "kill" command in Unix/Linux, there are lots of versions which may or may not do what people think. As an example, see: https://www.credit.com/debt/filing-for-bankruptcy-difference-between-chapters-7-11-13/
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday September 17 2019, @05:41PM
Prescribers have responsibility to adhere to the Standard of Care for a patient. If a licensed practitioner is told by, say, a pharmaceutical company that their product is less addictive than X,Y, and Z and therefore it should be prescribed over those substances, then they rely on that until either their personal work or peer reviewed sources say something different. If all Doctors, more or less, do that equally at a given time then that is the Standard of Care. That is what Perdue was accused of - promoting their opioids as being safer than what they had data to establish was correct. Not unleashing a live plague upon the land intentionally.
Prescribers also have the responsibility to inform their patients that a substance is addictive (if it's an opioid or benzo for example), why it is being given, what potential side effects it may have, when to take it, that it is important to take it exactly as prescribed and not more or less than that (if it's an opioid or benzo), and to follow up that the patient does that and stops it as prescribed. In some states now prescribers have responsibility to check a state database of how many other schedule prescriptions the user has been given before deciding to issue an opioid prescription. They have a responsibility that if the patient is honest with the prescriber that they have become addicted to get that person treatment help - but by this point the patient most likely is actively lying to their prescriber if they have cut them off appropriately. And an intelligent prescriber is smart enough to know there are patients who can lie and fake it well enough to fool the prescriber yet also be able to make the call that they believe someone is being truthful and needs that level of help.
They also, by the way, have a responsibility to try other things if the patient still reports intractable pain through the limits of what they can therapeutically do. And they have the responsibility to judge if a patient may be better served by something less strong then to do that.
The problem with opioid prescription is that many of them start out for quite legitimate concerns. People can even take them and then stop them at a time, but later encounter life circumstances which have them start seeking out the effects the opioids gave them when they really needed them.
This is all an evolution, though, from the days when pain was mostly ignored. "Your being in pain is less important than making sure you are recovering," was the mantra through the early 80s. Patient reports of pain were considered unreliable at best and often ignored. Then things changed to recognize that pain is subjective and it is hard to stack up two people with the same type of condition and universally say all persons in the same condition have the same pain - because they don't. So the pendulum swung to accepting whatever the patient reported is legitimate (more or less - some common sense prevailed for some providers). The goal was to have patients as pain-free as possible. Now the pendulum is swinging back a bit and requiring there be functional deficits in addition to the patient report of pain - what isn't the patient achieving because of the pain and what level of moderation will allow them to do that. There are still good and valid exceptions to this rule, namely cancer and most especially hospice care. I do hope if I live long enough to get there that pain I would have as a hospice patient will be well managed with whatever can help from the toolbox.
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