Billionaire Sackler family and opioid crisis

"The Sackler family has not previously said it wants to settle the litigation globally, said Joe Rice of Motley Rice, co-lead counsel in multi-district litigation consolidating about 1,500 opioid suits against Purdue and others in federal court in Cleveland. “It appears Ms White has now made public the willingness to settle,” he said in an email. “The issue is who are ‘they,’ what are they willing to settle, how, when, and for what consideration.”

[Sackler atty] White acknowledged that settling more than 2,000 cases will not be easy. “You have municipalities and counties as well as state attorneys general involved in these matters,” she said. “And getting all of those plaintiffs in a global resolution is very difficult.”

White does not represent all eight Sackler family members named in the opioids litigation. A different wing of the family has counsel from Paul Weiss, Rifkind Wharton & Garrison and Joseph Hage Aaronson. A representative from that branch told Reuters, however, that the entire family shares White’s view.

Purdue and its billionaire owners, who have been named individually in more than 200 suits, have been singled out for public opprobrium, especially after a Massachusetts state-court judge unsealed a 277-page complaint by the attorney general Maura Healey in January. The Massachusetts complaint accused members of the Sackler family of orchestrating a marketing scheme aggressively to push sales of OxyContin, netting them billions of dollars at the expense of patients who became addicted to prescription painkillers."

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/24/sackler-family-opioid-lawsuit-settle

"Raymond and Mortimer, who lived into the 2000s, split control and ownership of the business equally, a structure that made it difficult to resolve disagreements. Other family members were active in the company, and up to 10 of them at a time were on the board of directors. The two sides selected their own nonfamily directors and set their pay under separate guidelines.

Board meetings were raucous, casual affairs attended by dozens of people, like a “family picnic with PowerPoint presentations,” said one former employee. The meetings, held monthly for many years, could go on for days. The longtime corporate counsel usually ran them.

Mortimer’s side of the family was known by staff and advisers as the “A Side,” for the share type they owned, and Raymond’s as the “B Side.” Relations between the brothers were strained for years. The brothers sat on opposite sides at board meetings and communicated through intermediaries, said people who attended.

At one meeting years ago, according to a person who was present, Mortimer tried to punch Raymond but, missing him, hit a company attorney in between."

Aww, dumplings, w/your billions to cushion the many blows of life.

My heart goes out. Really.

It's as tragic as the life of the single mom of a child whose medicines you make unaffordable.




Here's a disgusting comment:

Ms. Sackler criticized the family’s communications strategy and said she was through serving as the nation’s punching bag. She expressed concern about how the criticism of the Sacklers was affecting her family. “Lives of children are being destroyed,” she wrote.


Does she mean children of addicts which her family helped make into addicts by the way they marketed and profited BILLIONS on over-prescribing oxy?!??

Nope. She means her little rich darlings who now have to go through life w/the Sackler name. You don't want the burden of the damage done by previous Sackler execs?!?! But you still want the billions those previous Sackler execs made for your family, AmIRite, Jacqueline?