The people who released opioids upon the American public didn't get fines like this. Insane
Pharmaceutical companies, in general, know how to listen to their lawyers and shut the hell up.
There are also two important distinctions:
1. The American court system is inherently adversarial and judges/juries have a lot of discretion. The strategy employed by the defense does matter and a bad strategy can be expensive. If the lawyers in the opioid cases had employed the strategies used by Jones and his lawyers -- instead of working hard to get a settlement -- their damages would likely have been an order of magnitude larger than $26B & the executives behaving like Jones would be in jail. Jones, in many ways, has only himself to blame for the size of these damages. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
2. The $26B and counting will actually be paid. I would guess that Jones will only ever end up paying a small faction of the <$1B.
Note that gp said "people who released opioids upon the American public". How much of those $26 billion fines are towards individuals that profited from those opioids rather than some fictional entity that can just be re-created as needed.
The Sackler family was listed alongside Purdue pharma. More importantly, personal liability in opioid cases goes FAR beyond civil damages. Dozens of physicians have received fines comparable in net worth to that fine Jones received. Much more important, those physicians have also received prison sentences. Opioid litigation is still ongoing, so the $26B is a floor not a ceiling, and the settlement didn't preclude further prosecution or litigation against a large number of potential defendants.
Jail time and additional financial penalties remain on the table and a real possibility, including for individual drug company execs and major shareholders. In fact, at least one drug co exec has already been charged criminally, found guilty, and received a prison sentence.
If any drug company exec or investor acted as brazenly as Jones has, they will certainly receive a huge financial penalty and a stiff prison sentence. Unfortunately, most of those people are much smarter than Jones so prosecution won't be nearly as open-and-shut.
Those companies aren't even fined or put behind a prescription-wall.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...
It's insane that they didn't.
If you look at the fine, you will see that many families were affected. There is nothing unreasonable about that amount of money awarded from that perspective.