The Sackler family – the wealthy owners of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma – started taking far more money out of the company AFTER it was fined for misleading marketing of the powerful prescription painkiller.
A court filing made by the company Monday evening shows Purdue made payments for the benefit of members of the Sackler family totaling $10.7 billion from 2008 through 2017. Family members received $4.1 billion in cash over that period. By contrast, distributions for the benefit of family members from 1995 through 2007 totaled $1.3 billion.
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Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, the first attorney general to sue Sackler family members, said in a statement:
“Today’s report confirms what we revealed in our lawsuit: The Sacklers pocketed billions of dollars from Purdue while thousands of people died from their addictive drugs. This is the very definition of ill-gotten gains.” 1
The Sacklers’ wealth has received intense scrutiny from Healey and 23 other states attorneys general who are opposing a plan to settle some 2,700 lawsuits against Purdue over the toll of opioids, including those filed by nearly every state.
The objecting attorneys general say that the settlement does not do enough to hold the family accountable for an opioid crisis linked to more than 400,000 deaths in the U.S. since 2000. The settlement calls for the family to contribute at least $3 billion in cash over time and give up control of the company. In all, the plan could be worth up to $12 billion over time.
However, the offer comes with a significant catch: The company says the family may back out if lawsuits against family members are allowed to move ahead. They’re all on hold for now as the company’s settlement efforts play out in bankruptcy court.
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The report, by consultant Alix Partners, made public for the first time just how much the family was paid year by year. It was included in a court filing Monday and outlined the most detail to date on how much the family benefited from Purdue.
Beginning in 2008 – the year after Purdue agreed to pay a federal fine of $635 million for misleading the public about OxyContin’s addiction risks – the payments jumped.
Federal data made public earlier this year showed that OxyContin sales grew even after the fine. And the death toll from opioids, a class of drug that includes prescription painkillers as well as heroin and illicitly made fentanyl, rose, too, peaking in 2017.
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The new filing also shows that Sackler family members brought in far more money. In each year from 2008 through 2013, the distributions to the family — or tax payments on their behalf — totaled well over $1 billion. The number went down to less than $800 million in 2014 and 2015, $651 million in 2016 and just over $200 million in 2017.
Daniel Connolly, a lawyer for some family members, told The New York Times in a statement:
“This filing reflects the fact that more than half was paid in taxes and reinvested in businesses that will be sold as part of the proposed settlement.”1
The Sackler family, listed by Forbes magazine in 2013 as one the nation’s 20 wealthiest, has stopped taking distributions from Purdue, although family members remain owners of the company.
