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Purdue claims it's "making millions from litigation-related litigation" over OxyContin,

June 27, 2019 by James Ashley

Purdue claims it's "making millions from litigation-related litigation" over OxyContin, and claims a portion "of the profits will go towards medical research and development." Yet in both 2014 and 2015, it made $17.6 million in cash payments and had a $20.7 million asset and $28.2 million in "unfair tax-advantaged assets" under the company's "tax-efficient" model, according to court filings. In other words, the company is taking all the money that it earns from the lawsuits, making $17.6 million in cash payments and having a $20.7 million "unfair tax-efficient asset" under its "tax-efficient" model.

The Sackler brothers' claim that Purdue should have sued the company for deceptive marketing of OxyContin was the cornerstone of the lawsuit. As ProPublica reported, the lawsuit was brought by Purdue, not Purdue itself. The Sacklers had an extensive history as a pharmaceutical producer, which included a stint as vice president of Purdue's Division of Pharmaceutical Safety and Manufacturing (DPMS), where Purdue first marketed OxyContin in 2007, and as a senior vice president of Purdue Pharma in 2009 when it was acquired by U.S. company Novartis for $5 billion.

As the company claimed, the company's "law firm" in Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, brought the lawsuit in May 2015, and in August 2015, it was brought in the final stages of the case before the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, where the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio awarded a $50 million award. The settlement involved both Purdue and the U.S. Department of Justice in a federal civil lawsuit, alleging in part that Purdue had violated Purdue's "law firm" by making false claims in its drug trial and selling OxyContin in violation of a federal law.

Purdue told ProPublica that in the beginning, the company's own lawyers approached the U.S. Justice Department and requested the case be dismissed. The company's lawyers then "gave the DOJ an opportunity [to] try to get it to drop the case, and then they told the D.C. district judge [David] M. Stiles that they didn't feel they could take any action in our case," said Stiles in a statement. "So we went to the DOJ where they tried to appeal the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Virginia."