S A T U R D A Y, O C T O B E R 5 , 2 0 1 9 . T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T EZ SU A
plated by the settlement struc-
ture,’’ Purdue said in a filing last
month.
Purdue Pharma issued a state-
ment Friday that said the compa-
ny’s bankruptcy filing, and a halt
to litigation, was necessary to al-
low the settlement to proceed.
In addition to contributing
$3 billion over seven years, de-
rived in part from an overseas
drug company still owned by the
Sacklers, the family has pledged to
relinquish ownership of Purdue
Pharma. As part of the deal, it
would be set up as a public trust.
Proceeds from continued opioid
sales would be used to manufac-
ture and distribute addiction and
rescue antidote drugs.
“Purdue’s request for a stay can-
not be construed as an effort by
the company to use the bankrupt-
cy to evade responsibility or over-
sight,’’ the company said. “To the
contrary, the settlement structure
already offers 100 percent of Pur-
due without the plaintiffs having
to win a single court case. So,
bankruptcy is being used to give
Purdue to its claimants, not to
shield the company from them.’’
[email protected]misleading doctors about its ad-
dictive properties. In 2010, Purdue
introduced an abuse-deterrent
pill that made it impossible for
addicts to crush and snort or in-
ject.
Plaintiffs who have filed a wave
of lawsuits in the past two years
claim Purdue Pharma continued
to mislead doctors and the public
even after the guilty pleas.
Companies that file for bank-
ruptcy typically are given an auto-
matic stay of litigation. The attor-
neys general argued Friday that
because they are exercising their
state “police powers,’’ Purdue
Pharma is not entitled to an auto-
matic stay.
That question, as well as the
request to allow litigation to pro-
ceed against the Sacklers, will be
decided by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge
Robert Drain.
Purdue Pharma has suggested
in court filings that protecting the
family from lawsuits is a vital com-
ponent of the settlement.
“If forced to bear the risk of
adverse money judgments, the re-
lated parties may be unwilling —
or unable — to make the billions of
dollars of contributions contem-president, Richard Sackler, said in
a statement released Friday in re-
sponse to the states’ motion. “The
stay, if granted, will allow parties
to focus their efforts on this goal
rather than on litigation that will
waste resources and delay the de-
ployment of solutions to commu-
nities in need.”
Addressing the family's cash
withdrawals from Purdue Phar-
ma, Connolly added, “The distri-
bution numbers do not reflect the
fact that many billions of dollars
from that amount were paid in
taxes and reinvested in businesses
that will be sold as part of the
proposed settlement.”
Purdue Pharma introduced
OxyContin in 1996, and sales rep-
resented a small fraction of total
prescription opioid sales. But nu-
merous states and local govern-
ments contend the company’s ag-
gressive marketing of the drug,
combined with its highly addic-
tive nature, fueled a U.S. opioid
epidemic that spread from pre-
scription opioids to illegal fenta-
nyl and heroin and claimed
400,000 lives. Purdue and three of
its executives pleaded guilty in
2007 to federal criminal charges ofMassachusetts has previously
said in court filings, based on its
analysis of Purdue financial rec-
ords, that the family took $4 bil-
lion out of Purdue from 2008 to- Oregon, based on its own
analysis of Purdue records, has
said the number is up to $11 billion
from 2008 to 2018.
“The Sackler family is trying to
take advantage of the fact that
they’ve extracted nearly all the
money out of Purdue and pushed
the carcass of the company into
bankruptcy,’’ said North Carolina
Attorney General Josh Stein.
“That’s unacceptable. Multibil-
lionaires are the opposite of bank-
rupt.’’
Twenty-four states have signed
on to the tentative bankruptcy set-
tlement. The family has argued in
court filings that its withdrawals
from Purdue were not intended to
shield the money from litigation.
“The Sacklers have agreed to
relinquish their equity in Purdue
and to contribute at least an addi-
tional $3 billion to the fight
against the opioid crisis,’’ Daniel S.
Connolly, an attorney for the
branch of the Sackler family that
includes its former chairman and
cy to avoid their own individual
accountability.’’
Among other things, the states
cite deposition testimony stating
that the Sackler family took
$12 billion to $13 billion in cash
out of Purdue Pharma. In light of
those sums, the states contend,
the Sacklers’ proposed $3 billion
contribution to the settlement is
not enough.
“The Sacklers want the bank-
ruptcy court to stop our lawsuits
so they can keep the billions of
dollars they pocketed from Oxy-
Contin and walk away without
ever being held accountable.
That’s unacceptable,’’ Maura Hea-
ley, the Massachusetts attorney
general, said in a statement.
The claim that the Sacklers took
up to $13 billion out of Purdue
Pharma is contained in a tran-
script of a deposition that was
taken late last month of one of
Purdue’s business advisers, Jesse
DelConte, a director at consulting
firm AlixPartners. DelConte, who
referred to financial information
he had reviewed while doing work
for Purdue, did not provide in his
deposition a time frame for those
withdrawals.BY CHRISTOPHER ROWLANDThe vast wealth of the Sackler
family was thrust into the spot-
light Friday in Purdue Pharma’s
bankruptcy case, as two dozen
states and the District of Colum-
bia sought to block the family
from winning a nine-month re-
prieve against OxyContin law-
suits.
Purdue Pharma last month
asked the bankruptcy court to
temporarily halt litigation against
its Sackler family owners, a step
that the company said is necessary
to allow progress on a tentative
multibillion settlement with more
than 2,600 plaintiffs who have ac-
cused Purdue of deceptively mar-
keting its blockbuster opioid pain
pill.
States opposing the settlement
strongly objected in a joint motion
filed Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy
Court in White Plains, N.Y.
“The Sacklers used the profits
from their illegal scheme to be-
come one of the richest families in
the world — far wealthier than the
company they ran,’’ the states said.
“Now, the Sacklers seek to lever-
age Purdue’s corporate bankrupt-
Purdue Pharma bankruptcy being used to shield opioid profits, states say
BY SARAH KAPLANAfter a rigorous search in the
rapidly melting Siberian Arctic,
researchers on the world’s biggest
North Pole expedition have finally
found an ice floe on which to set
up camp.
Soon the scientists will cut the
engine on the research vessel Po-
larstern and lodge their ship in
ice. Trapped, the ship will spend
the next 12 months floating with
the floe across the central Arctic
as its passengers collect crucial
information about the effects of
climate change in the fastest-
warming part of the world.
The multination, $134 million
Multidisciplinary Drifting Ob-
servatory for the Study of Arctic
Climate (MOSAiC) is the first ma-
jor modern research project to
drift across the North Pole. A ro-
tating cast of some 300 scientists
is slated to live and work aboard
the Polarstern this year; by docu-
menting an entire year of change
in the north, they hope to improve
models of how Arctic melting will
affect weather in the rest of the
world.
Organizers spent months
combing through satellite im-
agery and historic records, weeks
conducting helicopter survey
flights and days crisscrossing ice
on snow machines and sleds be-
fore making their selection of a
floe this week.
The process was made more
difficult after a summer of record
warmth; by September, there
were very few ice floes thick
enough to support the expedition.
On Sept. 28, scientists aboard
the Polarstern set foot on an oval-
shaped floe about 1.5 miles indiameter. Viewed from space, the
floe looked mostly dark — a signa-
ture of thin ice riddled with melt
ponds.
But when researchers surveyed
a bright white region in the floe’snorthern edge, they found several
feet of firm, highly compressed ice
— an ideal surface on which to set
up camp. They named this stable
area “the fortress.”
“We’ve found our home for themonths to come,” MOSAiC’s expe-
dition leader, Markus Rex, a polar
scientist at Germany’s Alfred We-
gener Institute, said in a state-
ment. “It may not be the perfect
floe, but it’s the best one in thispart of the Arctic and offers better
working conditions than we could
have expected after a warm Arctic
summer.”
Arctic ice extents at the end of
this melt season were the third-
lowest on record. About 800,
square miles more open water was
exposed in the middle of Septem-
ber than is typical for that time of
year. This meant the Polarstern
and its support ship, the Fedorov,
had to sail farther and search
harder for a suitable ice floe.
In his blog, MOSAiC researcher
Marc Oggier described the ships
slicing through fragile, soupy
“grease ice” until at last, on the
horizon, the voyagers spotted the
thin white line of the ice edge.
Now the researchers must work
to swiftly set up camp. The six-
month Arctic night is fast ap-
proaching; as of Friday, the sun no
longer rises above the horizon.
Soon, all daylight will disappear.
The camp will resemble a small
city, lit by floodlights and linked
by pathways made of wooden
planks to ensure that no wayward
explorers accidentally walk across
a colleague’s experiment. Ocean-
ographers, geophysicists, meteo-
rologists, biologists and a host of
other researchers will collect in-
formation on every imaginable
aspect of the sea, ice, sky and their
inhabitants. The data will be fed
into a gigantic database shared
first with the hundreds of MOSA-
iC collaborators, then with scien-
tists all over the world.
“The data will be the legacy of
this expedition,” said Don Per-
ovich, a Dartmouth geophysicist
and one of the co-leaders for MO-
SAiC’s sea ice experiments.
[email protected]BY VALERIE STRAUSSChicago teachers have voted to
strike Oct. 17 if contentious con-
tract negotiations with city offi-
cials are not resolved, affecting
more than 300,000 public school
students in the nation’s third-
largest district.
School support staffers and
park district workers — who are
represented by a different union
— also set Oct. 17 as the day to
strike if their contract talks are
not resolved, meaning unionized
teachers could be striking outside
the classroom at the same time
public parks could be closed. The
city’s contract with the Chicago
Teachers Union expired in June.
If Chicago teachers walked off
the job, it would be the latest
strike by educators in a string of
job actions that began in early
2018 in states controlled by Re-
publicans as well as Democrats.
This year, teachers went on strike
in Los Angeles, Denver, Sacra-
mento and Oakland, Calif. Educa-
tors have been seeking higher pay
along with more resources for
cash-strapped schools.
Chicago teachers voted over-
whelmingly Wednesday to strike
in two weeks if their demands —
including higher pay and ben-
efits, fully staffed schools, and
smaller class sizes — are not met
by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s admin-
istration. Some classes exceed 40
students, the union said, and
many schools do not have suffi-
cient staff, including nurses, so-
cial workers and librarians.
Other union demands involve
social-justice issues, including af-
fordable housing for teachers,
students and parents; an expan-
sion of community schools that
provide services for students and
their families (including counsel-
ing, medical and dental care, and
food support); and an extension
of the city’s moratorium on char-
ter schools, which are publicly
funded but privately operated.
Lightfoot and Chicago Public
Schools chief executive Janice K.
Jackson said that even though
they are doing “everything in our
power to reach a fair deal” to
avoid a strike, they are making
preparations for one, and they
pledged to keep schools open
during regular hours “to ensure
students have a safe and welcom-
ing place to spend the day and
warm meals to eat.”
The Chicago Teachers Union,
which represents about 35,
educators, says city officials have
rejected many of its positions,
and union leaders derided a con-tract negotiation website that
Lightfoot unveiled Monday with
details of the administration’s
proposals.
“This new website does not
replace open bargaining, which
we’d still like to see,” the union’s
president, Jesse Sharkey, said in
an email. “Those who are most
impacted — including more than
25,000 teachers, paraprofession-
als and clinicians and the families
they serve — deserve a seat at the
table, and livestreaming bargain-
ing would be a step towards that.”
If the teachers strike, it would
be the third walkout in Chicago
since 1987, when the union won
pay raises, small class sizes and
other concessions during a three-
week strike. Chicago teachers
went out on strike again in 2012
with strong community support,
seeking higher wages, fair teach-
er assessments and job security.
[email protected] More at washingtonpost.com/
answer-sheetChicago teachers set to strike Oct. 17
Scientists on historic Arctic expedition find their floe
politics & the nation
ALFRED WEGENER INSTITUTE/ESTHER HORVATH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gunnar Spreen, left, and Matthew Shupe examine a potential ice floe for the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of
Arctic Climate (MOSAiC). Researchers recently found a patch of ice to support their year-long expedition across the North Pole.Ice sheet will serve as
base for research effortRed Line’s
Twinbrook Station
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