SUFFOLK COUNTY, NY- According to newsday.com, eight family members who worked for Purdue Pharmacy and pharmacy chains were added to the county’s opioid lawsuit. Purdue Pharmacy is the company that manufactures Oxycontin. The family members were controlling forces at Purdue Pharma.*
The Sackler family has yet to be included in earlier lawsuits. The Sackler family controlled Purdue, starting with the Sackler brothers, Mortimer and Raymond. The current family members are the defendants.
Also included in the lawsuit are major pharmaceutical chains, CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, and Walgreens. The pharmacies are facing counts for “public nuisance, unjust enrichment, and negligence.” The pharmacies were also sued for their role as wholesale distributors.
According to the lawsuit, the family members knew that Oxycontin started being abused as far back as 1999. The family chose to profit from and encourage the company’s wrong-doing.
The complaint states that the online monitoring carried out by the company in 1999 showed that the users of the drugs would take the coating off the pills, and crush them, cook them and then snort or injecting the opioid drug. It states that the Sacklers knew about how dangerous the drugs were, but ignored the risks. According to the complaint, if the family had taken actions based on the information that they had they could have prevented thousands of deaths.
The pharmacies are accused of flooding Suffolk County with opioids, and with failing to detect “suspicious orders,” and failing to prevent “diversion of their dangerous products.”
The opioid epidemic is largely to blame for the record number of overdose deaths in 2017. Last year 72,000 people died from drug overdoses.
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