Divided Over Purdue Pharma Deal, SCOTUS Unites in Accepting a Dubious OxyContin Narrative
After OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019, members of the Sackler family, which controlled the company, arranged a resolution that included personal protection from civil liability for contributing to opioid-related deaths. That shield was part of a mass settlement that promised myriad litigants a total of $6 billion.
The Supreme Court narrowly rejected that deal today. “The bankruptcy code does not authorize a release and injunction that, as part of a plan of reorganization under Chapter 11, effectively seeks to discharge claims against a nondebtor without the consent of affected claimants,” Justice Neil Gorsuch writes for the majority in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, which overturns a contrary 2023 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
“Today’s decision is wrong on the law and devastating for more than 100,000 opioid victims and their families,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh writes in a dissenting opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Justice Elena Kagan. Yet both sides take for granted a highly dubious proposition: that “the opioid crisis” was triggered by OxyContin, a timed-release version of oxycodone that was introduced in 1996.
The Food and Drug Administration initially accepted the notion that OxyContin was less apt to be abused than other opioid pain medications because it was designed to gradually deliver the active ingredient. But that formulation proved easy to defeat by crushing the tablets for snorting or injection. In 2007 and 2020, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to federal charges related to its marketing of OxyContin, and the company faced thousands of lawsuits that blamed it for promoting addiction. It is therefore not hard to see why Purdue is widely portrayed as the central villain in deaths involving prescription opioids—a narrative that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh uncritically accept.
“Between 1999 and 2019, approximately 247,000 people in the United States died
from prescription-opioid overdoses,” Gorsuch writes. “Purdue sits at the center of these events.”
Purdue “aggressively marketed” OxyContin and “downplayed or hid its addictive qualities,” Kavanaugh says. “OxyContin helped people to manage pain. But the drug’s addictive qualities led to its widespread abuse. OxyContin played a central role in the opioid-abuse crisis from which millions of Americans and their families continue to suffer.”
Was OxyContin in fact “central” to the upward trend in opioid-related deaths? Estimates from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (now
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