Sackler Family’s OxyContin Firm To Face Suit From Native Americans
The prescription opioid painkiller OxyContin is displayed at a drugstore. Image by Getty Images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis January 10, 2018
The OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, along with two dozen other opioid makers, are facing a lawsuit brought by three Native American tribes in the Dakotas, claiming that the firms hid the drug’s risk.
Purdue is privately owned by the Sackler family, who are Jewish. (After the publication of this brief, a representative for one branch of the family, the descendants of Arthur M. Sackler, contacted the Forward to note that their branch sold their share of the firm in the 1980s and has never benefited from the sale of OxyContin.)
According to the Associated Press, the three tribes are asking for monetary damages and a fund to pay for addiction treatment.
“This epidemic has overwhelmed our public-health and law-enforcement services, drained resources for addiction therapy, and sent the cost of caring for children of opioid-addicted parents skyrocketing,” Brendan Johnson, a lawyer representing the tribes, told the AP.
Native American populations in South Dakota have been disproportionately affected by the opioid crisis.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
