'We need prison time': Purdue's belated guilty plea gets skeptical reaction

Lawyers and public relations firms for the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma have spent months pushing an aggressive campaign to deny that the company’s powerful painkiller, OxyContin, unleashed the devastating US opioid epidemic.

They manipulated statistics and attacked critics to paint the company and the Sacklers as victims of an unwarranted smear campaign driven by a sensationalist media and grasping addicts trying to lay their hands on the billions of dollars of profits generated by a legitimate drug.

Related: OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to plead guilty to three criminal charges – report

But on Wednesday, Purdue Pharma laid that strategy to waste by agreeing to plead guilty to three criminal charges and pay $8bn in fines and damages. The company admitted to bribing doctors to unnecessarily prescribe OxyContin and to lying to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) about controls on sales of the painkiller. It also paid illegal kickbacks to a health records company to promote opioid prescribing to physicians.

“Purdue deeply regrets and accepts responsibility for the misconduct,” said the chairman of its board, Steve Miller.

But while Purdue’s long-awaited admission of wrongdoing over an an epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives over the past 21 years was widely welcomed, there was also anger over the US justice department’s failure to prosecute company executives responsible for the crimes, and suspicion about the timing of the announcement just before the election.

Lawyers for 2,800 cities and counties suing Purdue Pharma and other drug companies separately from the federal case welcomed the guilty plea as stripping away the persistent denials of responsibility by the opioid maker and its owners.

“Though only one facet of the sprawling opioid industry, Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family were directly responsible for inflicting immeasurable harm on communities around this country. With the guilty plea, the Sacklers lose their name, their company, and substantially more,” said the lawyers for plaintiffs in the National Prescription Opiate Litigation case.

But Emily Walden, chair of the Fed Up! coalition of families harmed by opioids, said that with Purdue already bankrupt there is little chance of the money being paid to help the victims.

“I was very glad to hear, finally, the federal government saying that this is a felony and what they did was absolutely wrong. At the same time, they’re already in bankruptcy. What penalty is there? There’s none really,” said Walden who lost a son to opioids. “This is a free country. You can make as much money as you want to, and that is all fine and good. But when you start killing people, we need prison time for some people.”

Other critics dismissed the deal as a political stunt intended to allow Donald Trump to present it as another promise fulfilled after he pledged to hold the drug industry to account for an epidemic that has run on for more than two decades.

The Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, who is suing Purdue and members of the Sackler family for flooding her state with opioids, said the US justice department has “failed” and accused the administration of selling out families hit by the epidemic.

“Justice in this case requires exposing the truth and holding the perpetrators accountable, not rushing a settlement to beat an election. I am not done with Purdue and the Sacklers,” she said.

Prosecutors said that the deal did not prevent criminal charges against Purdue executives and members of the Sackler family. But the plea agreement has to be approved by a New York bankruptcy judge, Robert Drain, who is considering a request from the family’s lawyers to ensure that a final settlement of the raft of lawsuits against the Sacklers precludes criminal prosecutions.

Even as the company and family negotiated a deal with communities ravaged by prescription opioids that – if it goes ahead – would see the Sacklers relinquish control of Purdue and hand over $3bn as part of a settlement worth $10bn in total, they continued to deny wrongdoing.

Their legal and public relations teams persistently pushed a claim that OxyContin was just a bit player in the opioid crisis because, according to DEA statistics, it never accounted for more than 4% of total narcotic painkiller sales in the US. Purdue Pharma’s legal team said in court that the DEA numbers showed that “the notion that Purdue has created this epidemic is a serious misconception”.

Critics dismissed that claim as a misrepresentation because the DEA statistics count only the number of individual pills sold not their strength. OxyContin, with 10 or 20 times the narcotic content of many regular painkillers, accounted for a much larger proportion of the total drug on the market reflected in sales of up to $2bn a year, more than any other opioid.

Mike Moore, the lawyer who won the $200bn payout by tobacco companies in 1998 and who now represents clients suing opioid makers, said that without OxyContin “we would never have had an epidemic”.

“It is unequivocal that OxyContin and the marketing of OxyContin contributed greatly to the opioid epidemic,” he said. “Now that the company is in bankruptcy it is apparent that some of the Sacklers are all about denial and self-image.”

Others accuse Purdue and the Sacklers of attempting to divert attention from the company’s instrumental role in pushing opioids to the medical industry as safe and effective, and manipulating doctors into widely prescribing them as a default treatment for pain at rates much higher than any other country.

That position will be harder to maintain after Wednesday’s admission of guilt. But it is not Purdue’s first criminal conviction.

In 2007, it pleaded guilty to charges of illegally marketing OxyContin and paid a $600m fine. But the company’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who went on to represent Trump, pulled political strings to keep its executives out of prison. He was also able to avoid a bar on Purdue doing business with the federal government which would have killed a large part of the multibillion-dollar market for the drug.

Last year, an adviser to the company found that Purdue paid out more than $10bn to the Sacklers in the years after the 2007 criminal conviction as OxyContin sales continued to increase.

In recent months, the Sackler family’s representatives have attempted to paint the agreement to pay $3bn as part of a final settlement as evidence of their “deep compassion for people who suffer from opioid addiction and abuse”. But they continued to insist that people who became addicted to OxyContin are “abusers” who only have themselves to blame.