The Trump administration is said to be poised to settle all lawsuits against Purdue Pharma for its role in the opioid epidemic, in a deal that would purportedly allow the founding Sackler family to retain billions of dollars—and let the president claim a victory for opioid victims. The settlement, as outlined by the New Yorker magazine, would include a $3 billion payment by the Sacklers—far less than the family’s accumulated wealth from Purdue profits—and also preclude any future legal liability against the family. This would leave the company and the Sacklers unaccountable for contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans over the past two decades, when the firm aggressively marketed highly addictive prescription painkillers as safe and effective.
The Purdue case is one of thousands of pending lawsuits brought by states, counties, tribes and the federal government against opioid makers, drug distributors and pharmacy chains, and a settlement with Purdue could encourage other defendants to seek a similar agreement that critics say would essentially them off the hook for the opioid epidemic.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post investigates the nation’s top drug agency—the Office of National Drug Policy Control (ONDCP)—and finds it has had an “unsteady performance” under Trump in response to the drug crisis. The ONDCP suffers from erratic management, the paper says, and has failed to come up with an annual strategy to guide more than a dozen federal agency and hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending.
And finally, voters in New Jersey will decide on marijuana legalization on the November ballot—making the state, if the measure is approved, the 12th to legalize recreational cannabis and one of the biggest new pot markets in the country. The debate over legalization, however, has focused less on public health and safety of marijuana and the dangers posed by the drug, and more on its role in criminal justice reform.