The crimes of Purdue Pharma

Drug maker Purdue Pharma is now a convicted felon. It pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to its two decade long sale of painkiller OxyContin. That drug not only killed pain…it fueled the killing of over 450,000 since 2000 from OxyContin and associated opioids, including heroin and fentanyl.

But the end of the fed’s sensational case was buried deep in the print media and largely absent from cable/network news. That is a disservice to the American people and especially to the family and friends of that nearly half million deep-sixed by Purdue Pharma and other drug peddlers.

How did Purdue Pharma make so many billions from OxyContin? It falsely told federal regulators OxyContin was not addictive. It peddled a fairy tale it had a program to prevent the drug's sale on the Black Market. It paid illegal kickbacks to doctors for overprescribing the drug. It bribed Practice Fusion, an electronic health records company to send out alerts to doctors to encourage over prescribing the death pills.

Purdue Pharma was fined $3.5 billion and required to forfeit $2 billion in profits. Civil penalties will raise total fines to $8.3 billion. The Sackler family which owns Purdue Pharma was also fined $225 million, a tap on the Sackler wallet bulging with $13 billion in blood money.

But no company individual or member of the Sackler family is headed to prison, just yet. Such proceedings are still possible. While luxuriating in billionaire wealth, the Sacklers claim all family conduct was “ethical and lawful”, charging they were simply duped by company execs. The only people duped were the millions who used the drug marketed as safe. Many thousands now lay dead.