The maker of OxyContin admits to serious crimes. Why is no one going to prison?
By Editorial Board,
THE OPIOID addiction epidemic has engulfed the United States in three devastating waves, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the first, which began in 1999 and peaked in 2010, the primary killers were legal prescription pain medications. A crackdown on those drugs led some users to turn to heroin, which created a second wave between 2013 and 2018. Since then, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have predominated. Two key facts help put this history in perspective: Deaths from opioid overdose used to be rare, with only three for every 100,000 persons in 1999. Now they occur five times as frequently, and almost 450,000 people had died as of 2018.
Now comes the Justice Department to announce retrospective accountability for Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company whose heavily promoted OxyContin product probably did more than any other to start the first wave, and without which there probably never would have been the other two. Purdue has agreed to plead guilty to misleading the Drug Enforcement Administration in ways that resulted in otherwise-impermissible amounts of its drug reaching the market, and to paying doctors and others kickbacks for helping increase sales. These felony admissions, which cover conduct over the decade ending in 2017, come with an agreed-upon $8.3 billion worth of fines and other payments that also resolves potential federal civil complaints against the company. Members of the Sackler family — the owners for many years of the closely held Purdue — will be required to pay a $225 million civil fine.
As useful as it may be to the Trump campaign as Election Day approaches, this measure of justice is modest indeed. It closely resembles a 2007 deal in which Purdue as a corporation, and three executives as individuals, pleaded guilty to technical drug-law violations and paid fines, but no one went to prison — which is where the federal government sends illicit drug kingpins. Buffeted by state lawsuits seeking damages for the harm done by opioids, Purdue has already declared bankruptcy, so it’s not likely that the federal government will ever receive anything close to $8.3 billion from what’s left of the firm’s assets. Also, the Justice Department endorsed the Purdue-backed concept of converting the company into a for-profit public trust corporation to distribute OxyContin for legitimate medical purposes, along with anti-addiction and overdose rescue drugs, rather than selling it to new owners. This story should not end with the government somehow in business selling OxyContin.
Nor do any of the Sacklers — including Richard Sackler, the moving force behind OxyContin’s launch in 1996, and who became company president in 1999 — face individual criminal charges. The civil penalty they have agreed to pay represents a tiny portion of the $13 billion in profits that Sackler family members paid themselves out of the company prior to its bankruptcy.
To be sure, the new plea agreement does not foreclose the possibility of federal criminal charges against specific persons later; however, the challenges of winning convictions are considerable, given that the Sacklers and Purdue were at the top of a long chain of regulators, doctors, pharmacists and others involved in what was — like tobacco — a legal but deadly enterprise.
Read more: The Post’s View: The opioid crisis didn’t disappear amid the pandemic. It still calls for urgent action. Maura Healey: Why I and other attorneys general are saying no to Purdue Pharma’s settlement Lindsey J. Leininger and Harold Pollack: We’re public health experts. We need to do a better job of talking to conservatives. The Post’s View: Can justice be found in the rubble of Purdue Pharma? Letters to the Editor: Pain and the opioid crisis
