OxyContin maker reportedly rejects settlement
Photo | State House News Service
Attorney General Maura Healey
The family that owns Purdue Pharma has reportedly rejected demands from a group of state attorneys general that they give up a greater share of their personal fortune in a potential settlement to resolve thousands of lawsuits against the company that makes and sells OxyContin.
Attorney General Maura Healey is thought to be among a group of state AGs who have been resistant to a reported $10 billion to $12 billion settlement that would resolve many of the suits against Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family.
Reuters reported last week that "their main sticking point is how much Purdue's controlling Sackler family will pay."
[Related: Settlement talks said to stall with opioid maker]
Over the weekend, the Associated Press and National Public Radio reported that the Sacklers rejected demands that they forfeit $4.5 billion in their own money as part of the settlement. Previous reports had pegged the amount from the Sacklers' pockets at $3 billion over seven years and another $1.5 billion from the sale of another family-owned company.
Healey has declined to talk about the high stakes settlement talks with the painkiller maker, but North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein shed some light on the situation in an interview that aired Monday morning.
"We needed more security on the part of the Sacklers that the money that they were pledging they would, in fact, pay," North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein told NPR. "And we didn't have that commitment. The Sacklers rejected those proposals. The deal was there to be made and they refused and so this is where we find ourselves."
In June 2018, Healey filed the first state lawsuit against individual members of the Sackler family as well as Purdue Pharma, alleging that they "engaged in a deadly, deceptive scheme to sell opioids in Massachusetts" and profited from the drug epidemic they helped create.
Healey was not made available to the News Service last week, but said in a statement that her office's suit against Purdue and the Sacklers is about "exposing the facts, making them pay for the harm they caused, and shutting them down for good."
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