OxyContin Marketer Opioid Settlement $350M

Oxy signPhoto byPublic use

Advertising company Publicis Health has agreed to a large settlement to avoid trial for the country's opioid crisis responsibility. The money will go to all 50 states. Publicis did not admit any wrongdoing with the settlement.

This is the first time an advertising company has reached a settlement in the battle to eliminate opioids availability and punish those who created and marketed the drugs.

According to NY Attorney General Letitia James:

Publicis worked with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma from 2010-2019, helping campaigns for OxyContin and other prescription opioids, Butrans and Hysingla.

James' office, who led negotiations with the company," said the materials played up the abuse-deterrent properties of OxyContin and promoted increasing patients' doses."

Hikma Pharmaceuticals also agreed to pay $115 million in cash and provide $35 million worth of an overdose reversal drug to state, local and Native American tribal governments. The "opioid crisis" began in about 1996, with overprescribed generic pain killers. After a crackdown on this supply, heroin deaths increased dramatically.

Most deaths now involve illicitly produced fentanyl and other potent lab-produced drugs. (This would appear to be a completely separate issue from the valid needs of patients who can no longer get pain medicines they require due to doctors fear of prescribing them.) A doctor's first duty to his patients, in my opinion, is to relieve pain.

In painPhoto byengin akyurtonUnsplash

Most of the money will NOT go to the families of the hundreds of thousands of victims, as one might assume, but to "fight the opioid crisis." This presumably, though is not made clear, means the money will go to law enforcement.

( It makes one wonder; will the money "disappear into the general funds of state and local governments, as the tobacco settlements seemed to?) More settlements are pending.