Lawsuits up pressure on family owning opioid company

The legal pressure on the prominent family behind the company making OxyContin, the prescription painkiller fueling the nation's opioid epidemic, is likely to get more intense.

The Sackler family came under heavy scrutiny this week when a legal filing in a Massachusetts case asserted family members and company executives sought to push prescriptions of the drug and downplay its risks. Those revelations are likely to be a preview of the claims in a series of expanding legal challenges.

Members of the family controlling Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma are also defendants in a lawsuit brought by New York's Suffolk County. Few, if any, other governments have sued the family so far.

But Paul Hanly, a lawyer representing the county, said he expects to add the Sacklers to other opioid suits. He explained last year he was targeting the family, known for its donations to some of the world's great museums and universities, in part because they took "tens of billions" of dollars out of Purdue Pharma.

Looming as potentially the biggest legal and financial risk for the family is a massive consolidated federal case playing out in Ohio.

More than 1,000 government entities have sued Purdue, along with other drugmakers and distributors, claiming they are partly culpable for a drug overdose crisis resulting in a record 72,000 deaths in 2017. The majority of those deaths were from legal or illicit opioids.

The company documents at the heart of the Massachusetts claims also could be evidence in the Ohio lawsuits, which are being overseen by a federal judge. The allegations ramp up pressure on the industry -- and perhaps the Sacklers -- to reach a settlement, said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who studies the role of state attorneys general.

Having Sackler family members named as defendants in Massachusetts "indicates that the government attorneys believe they have the 'smoking guns' necessary to broaden the potential liability of those at the top of the organization," he said in an email.

The allegations could tarnish a name best known for its generosity to museums worldwide, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a Sackler wing, and London's Tate Modern. The Sackler name also is on a gallery at the Smithsonian, a wing of galleries at London's Royal Academy of Arts and a museum at Beijing's Peking University. The family's best known and most generous donor, Arthur M. Sackler, died nearly a decade before OxyContin was released.

The Cleveland-based judge, Dan Polster, has been pushing for a settlement since he took over the federal cases a year ago, arguing the parties involved should find ways to end this man-made crisis, rather than hold years of trials. A court order prohibits participants from discussing most aspects of settlement talks publicly.

In its lawsuit filed last year, the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office went after members of the Sackler family and Purdue, which is structured as a partnership and is not publicly traded.

The company's flagship drug, OxyContin, was the first of a generation of drugs using a narcotic painkiller in a time-release form. That meant each pill had a larger amount of drug in it than other versions and could get abusers a more intense high if they defeated the time-release process.