A department of the Sackler household has launched an internet site denying accountability for the US opioid epidemic even after agreeing to pay billions of {dollars} to settle lawsuits over the disaster.
The web site, referred to as Choose for Yourselves, claims that the household and the corporate it owns, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, are victims of a smear marketing campaign by legal professionals looking for to revenue from a “strategically invented false narrative” that the agency’s high-strength prescription painkiller, OxyContin, drove an epidemic that has finally claimed greater than 500,000 lives over the previous 20 years.
It says the Sackler household regrets that the drug “unexpectedly grew to become a part of the opioid disaster” however that these members who ran Purdue “acted lawfully and ethically”.
Nonetheless, the positioning additionally downplays Purdue’s responsible pleas to federal crimes on two events, in 2007 and final yr, over its enormous advertising push to promote OxyContin to the lots, which included false claims that the drug was much less addictive than different narcotic painkillers.
It claims that the household is ready handy over part of its fortune, although it insists there was no wrongdoing, as a result of it “doesn’t need funds accessible for a public profit to be consumed by attorneys’ charges”.
The publicity marketing campaign by the department of the household descended from Raymond Sackler, one in every of two brothers who owned Purdue Pharma when the corporate entered the opioid painkiller market, comes amid accusations that it’s misusing chapter proceedings to maintain maintain of among the billions of {dollars} the household produced from OxyContin.
Final week a choose authorised a plan for the 2 branches of the Sackler household who’ve made their multibillion-dollar fortune from OxyContin to pay $4.5bn to settle greater than 3,000 civil lawsuits. The plan would additionally flip Purdue Pharma right into a non-profit firm.
However, in a extremely uncommon transfer, the deal would protect the Sacklers from additional lawsuits, though not felony prosecutions, and permit them to maintain billions of {dollars} in income from opioids although the household itself has not sought chapter.
The publicity drive additionally follows publication of a damning biography of the household, Empire of Ache by the New Yorker author, Patrick Radden Keefe.
The Sacklers stated the web site was meant to counter “the various false allegations” by legal professionals looking for to “vilify Purdue and the Sackler household”.
On the core of the denial is a selective use of statistics to say that OxyContin by no means accounted for greater than 4% of prescription opioid gross sales within the US and due to this fact couldn’t have been a explanation for the epidemic.
Analysts have referred to as the declare “a authorized and a public relations technique” that cherry-picked information on the gross sales of particular person tablets with out taking account of the influence of their excessive narcotic content material or their main position in creating dependancy.
When the quantity of opioid within the medication is taken into consideration, OxyContin accounted for about 20% of the market.
The Sacklers’ claims are at odds with a large physique of research into the roots of the epidemic.
In 2017, Donald Trump’s presidential Fee on Combatting Drug Habit and the Opioid Disaster stated Purdue’s “aggressive promotion” of OxyContin, and its broader influence on using opioids for ache therapy, was a number one explanation for the epidemic.
Two years in the past, the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis launched a research of the influence of OxyContin which concluded that “the introduction and advertising of OxyContin clarify a considerable share of overdose deaths during the last 20 years”.
Purdue used its wealth to affect politicians and regulators, conserving open the floodgates to ever bigger prescribing of opioids within the US, far past different developed nations, even because the proof grew of a public well being disaster within the making.
The billionaire Sacklers face a wrestle to revive the repute of a household whose identify is stamped on museums, artwork galleries and medical centres around the globe because of their giant donations from the income of OxyContin.
Raymond Sackler sat on Purdue’s board from 1990 till his dying in 2017. His son, Richard Sackler, was the corporate’s head of promoting and ramped up gross sales of OxyContin whereas portray individuals who overdosed on the drug as criminals in charge for their very own situation.
At hearings final yr, one member of Congress referred to the Sacklers who personal Purdue because the “most evil household in America”, after Kathe Sackler, a robust former member of Purdue’s board, drew scorn when she stated that whereas “my coronary heart breaks for the mother and father who’ve misplaced their youngsters”, the corporate was not at fault.
“There’s nothing that I can discover that I’d have performed otherwise,” she stated.
Chris McGreal is the creator of American Overdose, The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts
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