By Chris Schulz
The state’s efforts to seek a resolution to the opioid crisis has reached a major milestone.
West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey announced Friday that a $7.4 billion national settlement reached with Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, has become legally effective.
Over $50 million is scheduled to be paid to West Virginia on an accelerated, 9-year timeline due to the disproportionate impact the opioid crisis has had on the state. The money will be distributed under the terms of the West Virginia First Memorandum of Understanding. To date the amount of settlements from opioid litigation within West Virginia totals more than $1 billion.
This is the conclusion of a decade-long process that began with the state attorney general leading a multistate investigation of Purdue in 2016 that helped to uncover the company and the Sackler’s role in fueling the opioid crisis.
The settlement — reached after Purdue filed bankruptcy in 2019 — gives funds to communities across the country, as well as in individual victims and other groups who filed claims in the bankruptcy proceedings. The Sacklers are permanently banned from selling opioids in the U.S.
“The Sacklers and Purdue Pharma built an empire by aggressively marketing opioids and downplaying addiction risks, even as they watched the death toll climb. Their only concern was pushing more pills and getting rich. They chose profits over people, fueling an opioid crisis that has devastated families and broken communities in West Virginia. Now, despite their best efforts to avoid accountability, they are finally paying up,” McCuskey said in a press release. “The Sacklers and Purdue Pharma may not face the kind of accountability many believe they deserve in this system, and no settlement can fully answer for the harm that was done, but courts aren’t the only place where reckoning happens. One day, they will have to answer for what they did—and that is a judgment no bankruptcy can shield them from.”
The settlement also provides Purdue and the Sacklers make public more than 30 million documents related to their opioid business. Purdue’s manufacturing operations have also been transferred, effective Friday, to Knoa Pharma LLC, which will be overseen by a board of directors who had no connection to Purdue. Knoa is prevented by the settlement from marketing opioids and provides for an independent monitor to ensure it provides these medicines in the safest possible manner that limits the risk of diversion.
