The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a controversial settlement that would have sent billions of dollars to treatment programs and victims of the nation’s opioid epidemic but also“The Sacklers seek greater relief than a bankruptcy discharge normally affords, for they hope to extinguish even claims for wrongful death and fraud, and they seek to do so without putting anything close to all their assets on the table,” Gorsuch wrote.
“As a result, opioid victims are now deprived of the substantial monetary recovery that they long fought for and finally secured after years of litigation,” he wrote in the dissent, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “The Court’s decision will lead to too much harm for too many people for Congress to sit by idly without at least carefully studying the issue,” Kavanaugh wrote.As the nation continues to grapple with the opioid epidemic, the Sackler family had agreed to pay $6 billion to families and states as part of an agreement to wind down Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. In exchange, the Sackler family would be immunized from future civil liability claims.
But the Justice Department said it was a raw deal for victims – particularly potential future victims. While such third-party “release” arrangements are not uncommon in bankruptcies, the department argued that nothing in the law explicitly authorizes a court to bar future lawsuits forever.