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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

The judge ruled the bankruptcy court exceeded its authority by attempting to shield the Sacklers from litigation when they themselves had not filed for bankruptcy protection. According to the article this can happen in “unique” situations. So this isn’t about the merits or fairness of the settlement, merely the technical authority.

The Sacklers were I guess contributing $4.5B for this liability shield? IANAL so genuinely curious: wouldn’t the thousands of cases be rolled up into a few class action lawsuits so $4.5B could be viewed as a settlement of those suits?

Don’t get me wrong: the Sacklers are disgusting people who contributed to the opioid crisis. Can a link be established that meets the relevant legal threshold for liability? Again, genuinely curious.

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> who contributed to the opioid crisis

Pretty sure they single-handedly created the opioid crisis. It seems strange that physicians did not or could not head it off at the pass, but they were incentivized and lied to by Purdue and Sacklers to write as many prescriptions as possible.

Though I think you are correct that this change is not about fairness, a $4.5B settlement is not fair because it is not punitive for the Sackler family members that have blood on their hands. When you kill half a million people for profit and cause incalculable suffering in survivors, all the ill-gotten gains should be forfeit. There's at least $10B left to recover, and even that won't make it fair. I think fair may be unattainable in this case, even if a judge orders capable Sacklers to be forced on oxycontin until addicted and then forced into withdrawal, over and over again, for the rest of their lives.

> Pretty sure they single-handedly created the opioid crisis.

Created and perpetuated knowingly, ignored memos describing how oxy is harvested for black market for years.

They also created marketing pills to doctors schemes.

> Don’t get me wrong: the Sacklers are disgusting people who contributed to the opioid crisis. Can a link be established that meets the relevant legal threshold for liability? Again, genuinely curious.

There's a ton of internal Purdue emails, showing that the management was aware of the problems from 1996/1997 with their drug and it's potential for addiction.

There's a superb synopsis of the case by an investigative journalist who wrote a book on this case, exploring the players involved as all the aspects to this case:

https://peterattiamd.com/patrickraddenkeefe/

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