WA Solicitor General Appears In Court To Oppose Purdue Bankruptcy

Seattle WA

30 November, 2021

1:17 PM

Description

OLYMPIA, WA — Washington Solicitor General Noah Purcell was in New York Tuesday, continuing the state's fight against Purdue Pharma's bankruptcy plan. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson first announced he would be fighting back against the proposal back in September, saying the bankruptcy filing did not require the company — or its owners, the Sackler family — to pay nearly enough for their part in driving the opioid epidemic, and grants the Sacklers a lifetime legal shield against other complaints in return. "This order lets the Sacklers off the hook by granting them permanent immunity from lawsuits in exchange for a fraction of the profits they made from the opioid epidemic — and sends a message that billionaires operate by a different set of rules than everybody else," Ferguson said following the settlement's approval. "This order is insulting to victims of the opioid epidemic who had no voice in these proceedings." In an effort to prevent the bankruptcy plan from moving forward, Solicitor Purcell appeared in federal court in New York City Tuesday, part of a larger effort to appeal the bankruptcy plan. "The Sacklers are attempting an unprecedented abuse of the bankruptcy process," Ferguson said. "The Sacklers fueled the opioid epidemic by repeatedly violating the law to increase their company's profits, extracted over $10 billion from the company, steered their company into bankruptcy after depleting its value, and then conditioned any contribution from their personal fortune on a lifetime legal shield. The public rarely pays attention to bankruptcy matters, but here they are rightly outraged by what the Sacklers are attempting to perpetrate. If this isn't an abuse of the bankruptcy process, nothing is." Washington is leading a coalition of five states, including Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Virginia to fight for the appeal. Attorneys General for all five states say they believe the approved bankruptcy plan is unlawful, and "abuses the bankruptcy process." "No federal court, anywhere, has ever approved a non-debtor release remotely like the one Appellees seek here," the five attorneys general wrote. "This Court should not be the first, especially when the beneficiaries of the release — the Sacklers — are so uniquely unworthy of that unprecedented relief." Purdue's bankruptcy plan was approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain in September. It requires the Sackler family pay $4.3 billion over nine years to a coalition of private plaintiffs, municipalities and states — including Washington — that had sued Purdue Pharma for fueling the opioid epidemic. Purdue produces OxyContin, and the suit alleges that Purdue deceptively marketed the drug to falsely convince the public that it was effective for treating pain with a low risk of addiction. Ferguson says Purdue's deceptive marketing helped drive an addiction epidemic that took the lives of 8,000 Washingtonians between 2006 and 2017. At the peak of the opioid epidemic in 2011, Washingtonians had been prescribed a combined 112 million daily doses of opioids — 16 opioids for every person in the state. In 2015, Asotin, Clallam, Grays Harbor, Columbia, Garfield, Pend Orielle, Lewis and Benton Counties had more opioid prescriptions than living people. If Washington had accepted the bankruptcy plan, its share of the payout would've been around $70 million, received in payments over the next decade. Considering that the Sackler family withdrew nearly $11 billion from Purdue at the height of the opioid crisis, the Attorney General's Office says the proposed settlement is inadequate — so inadequate the Sackler family would still likely end up richer by the time they were finished paying it off. This is not the first time Ferguson has turned down a settlement from an opioid producer: Just this July Ferguson's office rejected a $527 million settlement proposed by defendants McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and Johnson & Johnson.