Washington will receive $183 million from Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family as a result of the state's lawsuit over the widely abused prescription painkiller OxyContin, Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced.
The settlement amount is more than double what the state was initially slated to get under a prior bankruptcy plan, announced last year. Under that plan, which Ferguson objected to in August, Washington would have gotten $70 million.
Ferguson and nine other state attorneys general argued that the proposed settlement had been far too lenient and allowed the Sackler family, which founded and owns Purdue Pharma, to walk away with a "legal shield for life."
As part of that proposal, the Sackler family did not file for personal bankruptcy but contributed $4.5 billion in exchange for immunity from future claims. The family pulled nearly $11 billion out of Purdue since 2008, according to an audit introduced during the company's bankruptcy proceedings.
A federal judge in New York agreed with Ferguson's argument and rejected the proposed settlement in December.
"We stood up to the Sacklers and forced them to relinquish more of their fortune to help undo the damage they caused," Ferguson said in a statement Thursday.
The plan agreed to Thursday must still be approved by the bankruptcy court.
Under the new plan, the Sacklers would still receive immunity from future civil lawsuits. But their personal cash contribution has gone up by at least $1.2 billion and they agreed to apologize.
"While the families have acted lawfully in all respects, they sincerely regret that OxyContin, a prescription medicine that continues to help people suffering from chronic pain, unexpectedly became part of an opioid crisis that has brought grief and loss to far too many families and communities," the apology reads, in part.
The Sacklers also agreed not to fight museums, universities and cultural institutions who take the family name off of buildings that were funded with the family's money. The University of Washington cut ties to a Sackler-funded postdoctoral program in 2017. And, more prominently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art removed the name from its buildings late last year.
The settlement money must be used to battle and recover from the opioid epidemic, which has killed an estimated 500,000 Americans over the last two decades. Opioids have killed at least 600 people a year Washington for the last decade. And deaths skyrocketed in 2020, when the drugs killed an estimated 1,200 people.
In February, seven Democratic U.S. senators wrote to the Justice Department, urging them to consider criminal charges against members of the Sackler family.
Washington is one of 48 states that sued Purdue Pharma for OxyContin's role in fueling the opioid epidemic. Facing those and thousands of other lawsuits from local governments, tribes, hospitals and individuals, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2019.
Congress has considered legislation that would prohibit the kind of protections granted to Sackler family members, but the bill has stalled.
Representatives of the Sackler family have said in court, depositions and congressional hearings that they have not done anything improper and are not responsible for the opioid epidemic.
Ferguson's office is currently in trial in King County Superior Court in a lawsuit against the nation's three largest opioid distributors (as opposed to manufacturers), McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen.
