Closure mechanism
Family-controlled board approves dividends to family trusts during opioid crisis litigation; ~$10.7B extracted 2008-2017 per court-monitor and state AG findings. Purdue files Chapter 11 in 2019; the reorganization plan would have channelled victim claims into a settlement trust and released individual Sacklers — who had not filed for personal bankruptcy — from related civil liability. SCOTUS strikes the releases in June 2024.
Trigger event
regulation · 2019-09-15 00:00:00+00 · proximity: documented · policy influence: sponsor
Purdue Pharma files Chapter 11 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. 19-23649); proposed plan would release individual Sacklers from related civil liability via non-consensual third-party releases. Family had not filed for personal bankruptcy.
Profit mechanisms — money flows benefiting
Public cost
civil liberties harm
qualitative
Opioid epidemic mortality and morbidity attributable to OxyContin marketing — CDC documented over 500,000 opioid-related deaths in the US during 1999-2019, with prescription opioids (including OxyContin) implicated in roughly a third of those during the period when Purdue's marketing practices were under active DOJ investigation. Cost is qualitative; the dollar reconciliation is the multi-state AG settlement framework that the Sackler releases would have shielded from individual liability.
CDC Drug Overdose Mortality Data ↗
taxpayer dollars
$26.00B
$26B national opioid settlement framework (2021) covering states, counties, and tribes — explicitly intended to recoup Medicaid, treatment, foster-care, and law-enforcement costs accrued during the OxyContin marketing period. The Sackler family's separate $4.5B (later revised) settlement contribution was the focus of the SCOTUS Harrington case.
National Opioid Settlement framework ↗
How this score was computed
- Financial position: $10.70B → score 1.00
- Proximity to trigger: documented → score 1.00
- Policy influence: sponsor → score 1.00
- Public cost: $26.00B → score 1.00
- Vanish penalty: 1/1 chains vanish before orchestrator → ×0.50
- Raw = (1.00 × 1.00 × 1.00) ÷ 1.00 = 1.00
- Final = 1.00 × 0.50 (clamped) = 0.50
Score = (financial position × proximity × policy influence) ÷ public cost, then multiplied by a vanish penalty (chains that go dark before reaching the orchestrator weaken the evidence). Every input is documented above; nothing is hidden inside the number.
View closed-loop dossier with full component breakdown →
