I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, August 13th.

Yesterday was the first day of Purdue Farmer's bankruptcy trial. The company behind the painkiller

Oxycontin is looking to settle damages related to the role that Oxy has played in the opioid crisis.

Those damages, by the way, come in at around $40 trillion, according to one estimate that's

double the entire United States GDP last year.

According to the National Institutes of Health, over 70,000 people in the U.S.

died of drug overdoses in 2019.

Nearly 50,000 of those 70,000 were opioid overdoses.

And the crux of the legal claims against Purdue allege a very troubling version of how we got here.

It's about the company's efforts to downplay the addictiveness of their drug and their campaigns in the late 90s to incentivize

physicians to prescribe it. At a bankruptcy court in White Plains, New York, Purdue has proposed the

following settlement. The Sackler family, which owns Purdue, would pay $4.5 billion over 10 years or so

and hand over control of the company to the government in exchange for personal immunity from future

lawsuits. Earlier this week, protesters gathered. They're taking aim

at the proposal, which they argue lets members of the Sackler family off too easy. They adorned the

green space outside the courthouse with cardboard headstones bearing the names of overdose victims.

They chanted, Sacklers lie, People Die, and staged a die-in.

One of the signs reads, DOJ, Department of Justice, must prosecute the Sackler cartel.

So while those bankruptcy proceedings are ongoing, we wanted to bring you a different angle on this conversation. Last month, I had a

conversation with Sesse Kua Barra Blanchard, harm reduction outreach worker at a New York City

syringe exchange, program director of the Democratic Socialists of America's Opioid Overdose Prevention

Program and a freelance journalist. We were discussing a rise in

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