Pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma—which made billions of dollars selling its prescription painkiller OxyContin—has filed for bankruptcy after giving way to financial pressure from thousands of lawsuits alleging the company helped fuel the United States’ opioid epidemic.
The Sept. 15 filing at a federal bankruptcy court in New York is part of a tentative agreement Purdue reached “in principle“ with 24 state attorneys general and analogous officials from five U.S. territories, in relation to settling their opioid litigation. Since the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, addiction and overdoses have surged.
