Getting Off The Opioid Hook
“The maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, and its owners, the Sackler family, are offering to settle more than 2,000 lawsuits against the company for $10 billion to $12 billion. The potential deal was part of confidential conversations and discussed by Purdue’s lawyers at a meeting in Cleveland last Tuesday, Aug. 20, according to two people familiar with the mediation.
The states have brought their cases separately. But the Purdue settlement deal was presented as a global deal for all plaintiffs, including the states, according to people familiar with the potential deal.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/purdue-pharma-offers-10-12-billion-settle-opioid-claims-n1046526
“A White House analysis in 2017 estimated the cost of the opioid epidemic at $504 billion in 2015. Unlike previous reports, the White House Council of Economic Advisers looked at not only direct costs like health care expenses and lost potential earnings from work, but also the full value of all the activities that people could contribute to if they didn’t die prematurely. That gave the White House a much broader — and much higher — estimate of total costs.
In light of the 500 million dollar verdict against Johnson and Johnson, whose stock price ROSE after news of the verdict, 10/12 billion is, a drop in the bucket, a mere bag of shells compared to the degree and magnitude of the potential liability posed by 2000 cases…”
—-Vox.com
Purdue Pharma has earned more than $35 billion from the sale of OxyContin.
A 10/12 billion dollar ‘global’ settlement, approximately 1/3 of their earnings, would make getting off the opioid hook they created relatively inexpensive for Purdue, to say the least.
08/28/2019 @ 9:41 am
That has always been my thoughts. If you “murder” people for $35 billion and then have to pay a third as a “hand slap” murder tax, where are the negative consequences of murder?
08/28/2019 @ 10:07 am
It would be, yes, worthwhile to look at the potential for the murder statutes in this regard.
08/28/2019 @ 10:13 am
Verdicts for liability in class action cases, such as the cases against Purdue Pharma, generally include an element or component referred to as punitive damages which is the biggest piece of the monetary pie.
The ordinary or compensatory damages are not sufficient to act as a deterrent to future behaviors which are deemed violative of the public trust and general welfare or public good…
You are correct in stating that the offer of one third of the profit from the illegitimate excessive sales of opioid is little more than a tax which can be written off to the cost of doing business….
Sad but true…
01/15/2020 @ 3:24 pm
I am
on this like Crisco sizzling smelt, Dr. Powell
Albeit I am compelled to pen-mit-ink that Uthopia and a-yes let’s don’t not get
started with a bundtling bus-loads of anthropologist-stoners
news-flashing Thomas Mann’s truncation. Nor stop-start-pivot Minotarishly.
{yellow-mountain-blues 0 rue!) So icann spook around the Bikini Atolls with
my device and zero out as well as zum in.
?Do you think for one (1) hour it’s EZ
being an aphoristic rhymer?
Of all silk and mother’s milk,
that train at full
throttle,
show us one clean channel,
with no empty bottle.
Zow if one dwells once upon a time on
adderall just maybe the goose will be ready.
gerrymander($)
rhymes too well
:red:
Flander($).:
rhyme
larks
mit
arks
sublime