The lawsuit, filed by state Attorney General Letitia James, is one of the few in a wave of opioid litigation across the country that name the Sacklers. It targets eight family members.
The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the United States. But they have come under scrutiny after new documents came to light in a Massachusetts case suggesting some family members helped direct misleading marketing efforts for OxyContin and ignored evidence the drug was being abused.
The lawsuit, filed in New York state Supreme Court in Suffolk County, seeks to recover the state’s costs for unnecessary prescriptions and related health care expenses, along with financial penalties.
The suit also seeks to claw back funds it alleges were transferred from Purdue Pharma to private or offshore accounts held by members of the Sackler family in an effort to shield the assets from litigation; to order the Sacklers to return any transferred assets; and to restrain them from disposing of any property.
A spokesman for Purdue Pharma said the company and its former directors “vigorously deny” the charges set forth in the complaint, and will defend themselves against the “misleading allegations.”
A spokesman for the Sackler family called the allegations “a misguided attempt to place blame where it does not belong for a complex public health crisis.”
The New York lawsuit alleges that Sackler family members methodically went about erasing a paper trail that could reveal Purdue’s profits. The complaint, which is heavily redacted, charges they abolished quarterly reports, insisted that numbers be recounted only orally to board members, and voted to pay themselves millions of dollars, often through offshore companies.
The lawsuit also goes well beyond other cases in spelling out in detail how pharmaceutical distributors played a role in the opioid epidemic by ignoring blatant “red flags” that indicated mountains of opioids were being diverted for illegal use.
The distributors — Cardinal, McKesson and Amerisource Bergen — are far less known than opioid makers and retailers, but they are among the wealthiest companies in the United States. (The lawsuit says all three are in the top 20 in terms of revenue.)
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.