What the Sackler Family Won
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2022
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A very strange bankruptcy case is coming to a close. Its settlement hinges not on payments rendered or bills neglected, but on the pain of millions of American families who slid into the jaws of the opioid crisis. Now, the people who set off the crisis are about to settle their debts.
Guest: Brian Mann, reporter on addiction for NPR.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | At any one time, NPR's Brian Mann is probably following about a dozen legal proceedings, |
| 0:12.2 | all of them seeking some kind of accountability for the opioid crisis. |
| 0:16.1 | But none of them, quite like the hearing he went to a couple weeks back. |
| 0:21.0 | This was in bankruptcy court. It was over Zoom. |
| 0:23.8 | What made it remarkable were the two dozen people giving searing testimony about the way addiction had upended their lives. |
| 0:32.4 | And let me just say, bankruptcy courts don't usually do things like this. |
| 0:36.2 | This is not a normal thing in bankruptcy court to have |
| 0:39.0 | victim testimony, like you might have in a criminal case or in some civil cases. But this judge said, |
| 0:46.2 | this felt right to me. And as part of the agreement, three members of the Sackler family did agree to sit through it and to watch it and listen as these families held up photographs of the dead and talked about what they'd lost. |
| 1:07.5 | It was powerful and heart-wrenching. |
| 1:13.7 | To the people testifying, the billionaire Sackler family is a bunch of high-end drug dealers, executives who led Purdue Pharma as that company |
| 1:20.7 | aggressively marketed OxyContin in doctors' offices and hospital wards all over the country. |
| 1:34.6 | One parent forced the court to listen to a 911 call that still haunts her. |
| 1:38.3 | In it, she had just found her son dead from an overdose. |
| 1:42.2 | One of the things that kept being said by these family members over and over again is that you, members of the Sackler family, |
| 1:45.4 | deliberately tried to label people with addiction as criminals, as the problem. They are the people |
| 1:52.1 | who created this epidemic. They're the bad guys in this story. And what people kept saying to them |
| 1:57.5 | was, we want you to see us. We want you to see that we were a real family. |
| 2:04.0 | We had careers. We had hopes. We had a mortgage. You know, we were sending our kid to college. |
| 2:09.1 | And then he came home in a body bag. |
| 2:11.8 | This hearing was part of a settlement deal. The Sacklers, they've said they'll give up control of their drug company. They'll |
| 2:18.9 | even cough up $6 billion. But in exchange, they want to be shielded from personal liability. |
... |
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