The Sacklers Bought Closure, Not Justice -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Purdue Pharma is dead. Not the machinery that enable wealth to outstrip accountability.

OxyContin’s manufacturer stopped doing business on May 1, 2026, and came out of bankruptcy as a not-for-profit company called Knoa Pharma that was supposed to sell overdose-reversal and addiction treatment medicines. The change prompted a $7.4 billion settlement paid mainly by Sackler family members.

That is the what and when. The who is Purdue, its billionaire owners, reimbursement-seeking governments, addiction-wracked communities and people who must now makes months or years later prove that a specific pill manufactured by Purdue ruined their lives.

The wheres is America, but the warning is worldwide. Purdue aggressively marketed OxyContin starting with its introduction in 1996 while downplaying addiction risks associated with the drug. Purdue eventually took a plea deal twice, pleading guilty to federal charges for its promotion of opioids. However, corporate criminal convictions are not the same as imputing individual guilt upon the humans who exercised control over and profited personally from it.

The why is a staggering number of absent bodies. Since 1999, more than 900,000 US deaths have been attributed to. opioid epidemic While Purdue did not produce all opioid that caused overdose, its marketing naivete only helped re-institutionalize high-volume prescribing and move pain management into an industrial channel of addiction.

The how reveals the moral weakness of bankruptcy law. Purdue filed for Chapter 11 in 2019. A previous debt-repayment scheme required releases barring the Sacklers from suing over opioids and had been criticized as inappropriate when they had not themselves declared bankruptcy. That maneuver was rejected by the Supreme Court in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, 5–4 (June 2024) which determined that nonconsensual releases extinguishing claims against non-debtors were not authorized by Chapter 11. The ruling was intentionally narrow, holding only that consensual releases are not void as a matter of law and leaving to another day the determination whether other forms of third-party protection would survive any one or more state laws.

That was a US bankruptcy case, not international law binding precedent. It matters elsewhere in the world: it declared that corporate insolvency cannot simply turn into a private debt-free pass for rich owners.

The plan that finally prevailed survived by becoming able to command almost all creditor support and then restructuring the releases as usual through consent and opt-out rights. The settlement eventually involved every US state; the Sacklers are to pay at least $6.5 billion, gave up control of Purdue and will never again be allowed to sell opioids in America.

You may also: Settlement Is Not Justice Roughly US$865 million was set aside for individual victims; the majority went to governments and opioid-abatement programs. As of April 2026 nearly four in ten individual claims have been said to be denied, frequently as families have been unable to trace prescriptions, pharmacy records or pill bottles dating back decades. After years of ignoring corporate obfuscation, the system expected grieving families to do documentary precision.

Three reforms are imperative. Congress needs to ban nonconsensual third-party releases, and make owners seeking protection answer for worldwide assets, off-shore trusts and pre-petition transfers. Settlement planning has to be focused on direct victims, based on presumptions of lost medical records, and recognizably chaotic determination of addiction. Finally, national governments should create an international corporate-harm framework that ties individual knowledges and behaviours to corporate consequences, with clear accountability of not just boards but also executive leadership participants across companies within the relevant jurisdictions.

Knoa Pharma may save lives. But as there are no successor nonprofit to cleanse the sin, the primary sordidness remains: a firm can admit to crimes, vanish via insolvency and leave civil society arguing about whether or not anyone who ever worked for it was held accountable for the disaster.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia