Oregon took a $95 million hit Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected part of a multi-billion-dollar opioid settlement that would have shielded the wealthy Sackler family from future liability while funneling money to states to pay for the devastation wrecked by the highly addictive class of drugs.
The $95 million is Oregon’s estimate of what it would have received had the deal with the manufacturer of the painkiller OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, gone through. Members of the Sackler family had agreed to pay up to $6 billion as owners of the company, which has been blamed for sparking a decades-long drug crisis that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead.
