The Purdue Pharma opioid litigation settlement announced last week continues to draw scrutiny as well as criticism. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Ryan Hampton, who worked on the case on behalf of victims, writes that the settlement does not provide justice for some 130,000 family members, who will receive only about $750 million of the $4.5 billion paid in by the firm’s founding Sackler family. “Purdue’s victims find themselves double victimized,” Hampton writes, noting that the amount they will receive is far less than will be paid to a handful of lawyers and consultants in the case. He also says that a controversial bankruptcy mechanism used by Purdue ended up shielding the Sacklers from ever being sued in civil court for its role in the overdose crisis.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has finally issued its long-awaited verdict on e-cigarettes, rejecting applications for nearly 1 million products, mainly due to their potential appeal to underage teens. But the FDA did not rule on products from Juul, the most popular brand with adult smokers and many teens, saying more work needs to be done to complete the reviews. The action is part of a sweeping review by the agency to bring scientific oversight to the multibillion-dollar vaping industry after years of regulatory delays, and accusations that manufacturers are deliberately targeting young people.
And finally, Colorado legalized marijuana in 2013, promising that the system established to sell legal weed would not endanger public health. But a new report indicates that easy access to pot is hardly safe: traffic deaths where drivers tested positive for marijuana had increased by 138 percent compared to 29 percent for all Colorado traffic deaths, and that past months use of marijuana for those 12 and older increased 26 percent. And the percent of suicide incidents in which toxicology results were positive for marijuana has increased from 14 percent in 2013 to 29 percent in 2020.