The Sackler Shield: How Non-Consensual Third-Party Releases Protect the Bad Businessman

24 Wake Forest J. Bus. & Intell. Prop. L. 150.

Opioid misuse and overdoses have reached epidemic proportions in the United States.  Dopesick, a recent show adapted from a nonfiction book of the same name, depicts how this epidemic devastated a community.  The show chronicles the downfall of a small Appalachian town due to the mass overprescription of OxyContin, which was spurred by Purdue Pharma L.P.’s (Purdue Pharma) “effort to ‘turbocharge’ opioid prescribing” in an attempt to allegedly fight pain.  “Over the past two decades, more than 500,000 people in the United States have died from overdoses of prescription and illegal opioids . . . ”  Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, is widely believed to have ignited the opioid epidemic currently running rampant across the nation.  

Purdue Pharma was a privately-held pharmaceutical company principally owned by members of the Sackler family, descendants of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler.  In 2019, Purdue Pharma filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of New York to resolve more than 2,600 lawsuits that accused the company of contributing to the deadly opioid epidemic in the United States.  The bankruptcy filing was an attempt to shield the company and the Sacklers from the impending deluge of litigation.  
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