[Barraketh]

This is being framed is as miscarriage of justice, and from a moral perspective it definitely is. The problem is that the legal grounds on which Purdue (and the Sacklers) can be sued are actually kind of weak.

Broadly, the things Purdue is accused of are 1) Aggressively marketing opioids to doctors, and 2) Lobbying the states to change various laws around prescription and marketing of opioids

The problem is that for direct liability, there are two more actors that need to be considered - the doctors, and the patients themselves. Doctors are considered to be experts, and patients are often breaking the law when they misuse opioids. Both of these facts break the chain of liability, and so arguing that Purdue is legally liable for the ultimate addiction of the patient is difficult.

As a result, people have tried to sue Purdue under more general "public nuisance" statutes, rather than regular tort liability. A public nuisance is when someone interferes with a right that the general public shares in common. However, this area of law is not very well developed - a lot of it is carryover from old British law, and winning those cases isn't a slam dunk. So there are certain objectors to the settlement, but I don't know why people think that it would be easy to hold the Sacklers criminally responsible or to get more money than this settlement.

[shrewduser]

> the doctors, and the patients themselves. Doctors are considered to be experts, and patients are often breaking the law when they misuse opioids.

The doctors were fed dodgy studies and information that what they were prescribing was safe. And you can hardly blame a patient who receives pain treatment and gets addicted to opiates when they were also informed they were safe.

[Barraketh]

I totally agree. I'm just saying that from the point of view of legal liability the doctor is considered an expert. Purdue would argue that the doctor is getting information from a variety of sources (including the FDA), and so when they prescribe a medication and then the patient gets addicted, the responsibility lies with the doctor.

And I also agree that you can't blame a patient for getting addicted. However, in US law there is something called the "clean hands doctrine", which denies remedies if the accuser has acted in bad faith wrt the subject of the claim. In practice this might translate to arguing that because the patient is breaking the law in misusing opioids, they don't deserve damages.

All I'm trying to say is that while Purdue is definitely morally responsible, legally it's kinda difficult.

[8ytecoder]

I think you mean well but I’d say you have to read up more about this case. The owners were not mere stockholders. Nor were they innocent bystanders. They convinced doctors to prescribe their addictive drugs with false information and studies and a very high pressure marketing and sales campaign. It’s on them.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZEUVRzNt0U

[john_yaya]

One of Purdue’s specific misdeeds was lying to doctors about the addictiveness of OxyContin and leading them to believe that it had a very low risk of abuse. Much of the litigation against the company focuses on this.

[OrvalWintermute]

Taking nothing away from the Sackler situation which appears to be entirely self-inflicted, and allegedly, a reprehensible criminal conspiracy.

I think you may want to consider the doctors' perspectives, by general theme, that may or may not coincide with groups of years, but maybe not quite decades.

(1) Pain is inadequately treated, some patients are in a lifetime of pain.

(2) Pain is being adequately treated, we have these new non-addictive pills "Pain as the 5th vital sign" [1]

(3) Doctors are experiencing litigation due to OD-by-misuse and patients doctor shopping, dropping of "Pain as a 5th vital sign" [2]

(4) Doctors recoiling in general from any type of narcotic prescriptions, issuing very tiny doses, doses which cannot be used for, sending the patients onto a pain management doctor that has become the de facto only doctor willing to withstand the DEA scrutiny [3]

[1] https://www.bjanaesthesia.org/article/S0007-0912(17)54182-3/...

[2] https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2016/6/16/ama-drops-...

[3] https://www.hcrcenters.com/blog/doctor-refuses-to-prescribe-...

[fighterpilot]

There were a handful of doctors that behaved absolutely reprehensibly by running pill mills and prescribing Oxy to anyone who would walk in the front door. These were purely cynical ventures and the doctors that engaged in this knew that these patients were just addicts. These were a minority of doctors but they definitely deserve a small slice of the blame for what happened.

[OrvalWintermute]

Definitely there were a number doctors operating pill mills, and they have become DEA scalps, rightly so.

But now, we have swung too far to the opposite extreme.

Get a major surgery, and a 3 day script for the weakest narcotic.

[Barraketh]

Incidentally, similar arguments are going to play out around trying to sue oil & gas companies for climate change (and will probably use the same public nuisance statutes). The o&g companies lobby against emissions standards / carbon regulations, but ultimately selling oil and gas is legal, and it's the job of the government to regulate, so there isn't a simple legal doctrine to say "hey, you guys bought off a bunch of politicians and thus are still liable for damages".

[akerl_]

Hopefully nobody decides in a decade that cryptocurrency or social media damaged society, I guess?

The reason it’s hard to prosecute somebody for something that was legal at the time is because that’s a giant can of worms to open.

[spfzero]

I'm guessing that in a civil tort suit, going in front of a jury would not work out well for the Sacklers. Too many prospective jurors know of someone damaged by, or lost to opioids.

[Drunk_Engineer]

Many of those doctors were nothing more than "pill-mill" outlets. Building a criminal case would have been easy.