Purdue Pharma pleads guilty in $8.3B settlement tied to U.S. opioid crisis
Drug manufacturer gets 3 felony counts for fraud and for violating anti-kickback statute from 2009 to 2017
Washington — The Justice Department announced Wednesday it reached an $ 8.3 billion settlement with OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, as a result of criminal and civil investigations by federal prosecutors into the company’s marketing of opioid painkillers.
Purdue Pharma agreed to plead guilty in federal court in New Jersey to three felony counts for defrauding the United States and violating the anti-kickback statute from 2009 to 2017 in what the Justice Department said was “the largest penalties ever levied against a pharmaceutical manufacturer.” The $8.3 billion global settlement includes a criminal fine of $3.544 billion, criminal forfeiture of $2 billion and a civil settlement of $2.8 billion.
Federal prosecutors alleged the company, which manufactured millions of opioid pills during the height of the epidemic, paid two doctors through Purdue’s doctor speaker program and an electronic health records company to drive up prescriptions for its opioid products, including its top seller OxyContin.
“The kickback effectively put Purdue marketing department in the exam room with their thumb on the scale at precisely the moment doctors were making critical decisions about patient health,” District of Vermont U.S. Attorney Christina E. Nolan said at the Justice Department briefing.
Purdue acknowledged the wrongdoing the company was resolving, saying Wednesday that it is a “very different company” today.
“Purdue deeply regrets and accepts responsibility for the misconduct detailed by the Department of Justice in the agreed statement of facts,” said Steve Miller, who has headed the company’s board since July 2018.
The criminal plea does not preclude the potential for criminal charges in the future against any executive or member of the Sackler family, who own Purdue Pharma.
In a statement, family members denied criminal culpability. They sought to distinguish between their ownership and leadership of the company and the individual criminal acts of managers.
“No member of the Sackler family was involved in that conduct or served in a management role at Purdue during that time period,” they said in a statement. But the family did strike a related $225 million civil settlement with the government as part of the deal, stemming from their drive to increase OxyContin sales.
The family members — including Richard Sackler, David Sackler, Mortimer D. A. Sackler, Kathe Sackler, and Jonathan Sackler ( who is now deceased) — demanded in 2012 that company executives come up with a plan to generate greater revenue in response to slumping sales, according to the settlement. They approved a new marketing plan called “Evolve to Excellence’’ in which “Purdue sales representatives intensified their marketing of OxyContin to extreme, high-volume prescribers who were already writing ‘25 times as many OxyContin scripts’ as their peers,’’ the Justice Department said.