Conn. is still owed $95M by Purdue Pharma
A year after settling with the Stamford-based company, the state is still waiting for the funds
STAMFORD — A year ago this week, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong announced that the state would settle one of its longest-running and most contentious lawsuits. Today, the state still awaits the tens of millions of dollars that would be provided by that resolution.
The wait goes on because of Stamford-based Purdue Pharma’s ongoing bankruptcy — a deeply complex and acrimonious process, started threeand-a-half years ago, that aims to settle several thousand lawsuits accusing the company of fueling the national opioid crisis with deceptive marketing of its Oxy Contin pain drug. But Connecticut does not rely solely on Purdue for funding because its share of multibillion-dollar settlements with other pharmaceutical companies is already helping to tackle an unrelenting epidemic that has taken thousands of lives in the state in recent years.
“The way I think about Purdue is in the context of all our work in fighting the opioid-and-addiction crisis and addiction industry,” Tong said in an interview. “I don’t think of any one case apart from the others. It’s all part of one giant effort to seek justice for victims and survivors and find resources to fund treatment, prevention and addiction science.”
Why Connecticut settled
For two-and-a-half years after Purdue’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2019, Connecticut and several other “non-consenting” states bitterly opposed an agreement with the company. Among the signs of their discontent, they appealed a bankruptcy judge’s approval in September 2021 of Purdue’s settlement plan because they were unhappy with the terms proposed by the company and the Sackler family members who own the firm.
In addition to their dissatisfaction with the proposed payout of about $4.3 billion, Tong and the other non-consenting states’ attorneys general had other misgivings. In particular, they criticized the approval by the bankruptcy judge, Robert Drain, of the plan’s stipulation for “third-party releases” that would have forced them to relinquish their claims against the Sacklers. The Sacklers, who did not personally file for bankruptcy, have denied allegations from Tong and other attorneys general that they have misused the bankruptcy process to shield themselves from liability.
But after a flurry of negotiations during the first two months of 2022, Connecticut and the other nonconsenting states forged the deal with Purdue and the Sacklers that was announced a year ago. The settlement amount increased to $6 billion. Approximately $95 million would be allocated to Connecticut, with those funds intended to support prevention and treatment initiatives.
Other opioid settlement funds on the way
As Purdue’s bankruptcy carries on, Connecticut has already secured hundreds of millions of dollars from settlements with other companies implicated in the opioid epidemic. Those funds are being disbursed across varying multi-year timelines.
Among other agreements, Connecticut will receive a total of about $300 million from pharmaceutical distributors Cardinal, McKesson and Amerisource Bergen, as well as drugmaker Johnson & Johnson.
“Money is coming in now to fund treatment, prevention and addiction science,” Tong said. “Our fight has recovered significant resources that aren’t waiting on Purdue and the Sacklers.”
In addition, the state would receive the following amounts from other opioid-focused settlements that it has joined since Tong became attorney general, according to estimates provided by his office:
Allergan: $28 million CVS: $62 million Endo: $6 million Mallinckrodt: $13.9 million McKinsey & Co.: $7.5 million Teva: $47 million Walgreens: $67 million Walmart: $45 million Those funds are urgently needed for treatment and prevention programs to tackle a relentless opioid crisis. There were 1,413 opioid-involved deaths in Connecticut in 2021 — up 11 percent from 2020, and nearly five times the number of such deaths in 2012, according to the most-recent annual statistics from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Nationwide, overdose deaths involving opioids increased from an estimated 70,029 in 2020 to 80,816 in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“One agency is never going to be able to have all the solutions to this multipronged, very complex problem,” Maria Coutant Skinner, chief executive officer and president of the McCall Behavioral Health Network, which operates across western Connecticut, with services including treatment for patients with substance-use issues, said in an interview. “When we’re talking about how to maximize the usefulness and sustainability of any programs that these dollars will go to, it really has to be looking holistically at the problem. And then the solution needs to be holistic too.”