Drug company payouts bring awareness to opioid epidemic, advocate says
Posted August 28, 2019 10:07 am.
Last Updated August 28, 2019 10:27 am.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – As American drug giant Purdue Pharma sits on the cusp of a $10- to $12-billion payout to victims of the ongoing opioid epidemic, a B.C. mom says lawsuits are bringing much-needed awareness to the crisis.
British Columbia’s Leslie McBain, co-founder of Moms Stop the Harm, lost her son to opioids in 2014. She says he was prescribed medication but his doctor cut him off when it became apparent he was addicted. McBain says that’s when he turned to street drugs.
“From there it was a downward slide,” she says.
While the dollar figure in the Purdue lawsuit is impressive, McBain says it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what Purdue brings in each year.
“Sometimes that what it takes, it’s dollars and cents. These numbers are huge and it makes people pay attention,” she says. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t really affect most of the big pharma companies because they make 10 times that in a year.”
RELATED: OxyContin maker negotiating settlement worth a reported $12B
Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, faces huge changes under the potential settlement. Under the proposal, the family that owns the company would contribute $3-billion of their own money toward the payout. Purdue would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and transform itself into a “public beneficiary trust,” with all profits from drug sales going to the plaintiffs, according to the New York Times.
Documents obtained by the paper say the company would also provide addiction treatment drugs to the public at no cost.
On Monday, a judge ordered another drug-maker, Johnson & Johnson, to pay over half a billion dollars for its role in the ongoing opioid crisis. McBain says while these settlements don’t solve the opioid epidemic, it is encouraging that the drug problem in North America is being looked at more closely.
“The awareness factor is fantastic,” she says. “It makes people aware of the deaths and of the culpability of the pharmaceutical companies.”
Moms Stop the Harm, McBain’s organization, works to support families with loved ones who have died from drug overdoses and improve policy at the municipal and federal level.
-With files from the Associated Press
