New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office on Friday announced that Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma “has shut down and ceased operations as part of a bankruptcy plan secured by Attorney General James, a bipartisan coalition of 54 other attorneys general, and other stakeholders. A new public benefit corporation, Knoa Pharma, LLC (Knoa Pharma), will begin operating in its place today and will be overseen by independent directors and trustees who have no association with Purdue. Knoa Pharma will be entirely owned by the Knoa Foundation, a newly established nonprofit. All members of the Sackler family, who fueled the opioid crisis through their ownership and operation of Purdue, are barred from selling opioids in the United States and will not have any involvement in the new company. Knoa Pharma will manufacture medications, including opioid products, safely and responsibly to address public health needs. It will be subject to strict oversight by an independent monitor and will be barred from lobbying and advertising its opioid products. After operating expenses, Knoa Pharma’s excess revenue will be dispersed to state, local, and tribal governments and to the Knoa Foundation in support of opioid abatement.”

“Under the Sacklers’ control, Purdue developed, manufactured, and then misleadingly marketed its deadly opioids, destroying lives and communities across the country. This company that put profits over people for decades is now shut down forever. While nothing will ever fully repair the damage done and lives lost to the opioid crisis, ending Purdue’s operations is an important step towards justice,” said James at the tail end of an epidemic estimated to have directly killed, though overdoses, nearly 850,000 Americans. The true toll of premature deaths from secondary health effects, suicide, and collateral damage from crime, neglect of children, traffic accidents from junkies passed out behind the wheel, and all the other social and economic harms inflicted is incalculable.

Knoa will still manufacture the shit because people suffering from pain still legitimately need it, but no one’s getting rich of it anymore as the nonprofit will disburse all net profits to communities still suffering from the epidemic, one for which there can really be no doubt whatsoever about the Sacklers/Purdue – and other companies in the sector – bearing responsibility for inflicting on people.

And really there is no question. Heroin and other opioid overdoses claimed the lives of an estimated 7,000 Americans in 1995, the year before Oxycontin was approved by the FDA and made available by prescription. By 2023 nearly 90,000 were getting killed by opioid overdoses annually before a steep drop in 2024 thanks to the Biden Administration making Narcan available over the counter.

Now, did Oxycontin actually kill that many people directly? No. Likely low-single-digit percentages of all fatal opioid overdoses in the 21st century are attributable actual Oxycontin ODs. Its wide availability and perceived safety however – all the products of Purdue Pharma’s knowingly deceptive marketing and aggressive sales pitches to doctors and other practitioners – made it into a gateway drug. And EXACTLY in the way that parents would use the phrase lie to kids about marijuana.

Before Oxycontin if you tore a ligament playing soccer, got your tonsils removed, or suffered a broken arm in a car accident you’d be prescribed Vicodin or some other weak sauce to take the edge off, stuff that might as well have been Children’s Bubble Gum Flavor Tylenol if you were really hurting. A late 1990s ABC News 20/20 segment about morphine becoming less problematic to use featured a man whose chronic nerve pain in his foot was so excruciating he took a pistol and shot himself in that foot, just to use as an example of the market need the Sacklers had set out to fill.

And in making it more powerful than Vicodin and the other glorified Children’s Bubble Gum Flavor Tylenols they made it more dependence-forming. And thus more addicting. And then when you hear about your friend’s nephew, the bright kid and star athlete who had everything going for him until he got hooked on heroin and died of an overdose at 26 even after his parents spent so much on rehab, the part nobody mentions is the kid fucking up his knee in during varsity basketball practice,

That he had surgery on it and a doctor prescribed him Oxycontin so he could pay attention in class instead of biting his hand to tune it out. That by the time he was back on his feet he forgot he didn’t need the shit just to be able to get out of bed every day. That after the prescription ran out your friend’s nephew was looking under the couch for dimes he could scrap together to get the $50 worth of Oxycontin he could get off a dealer referred to him by his friends’ weed guy. That the dealer told him to fuck off with the loose change already and instead gave him heroin on the house, next time’s $5. That it wasn’t long before he was back to a $50/day habit and then much more. That he didn’t even bother going to college and instead showed up some of the time to his part time jobs at a pizzeria and the auto body detailing BOCES program. That his older sister stopped talking to him because she’d just started as an associate at that Wall Street law firm and didn’t have time for this shit when she still hasn’t gotten over the two laptops he’d stolen and pawned. That your friend’s nephew was scorned as a “low-life junkie” by your friend who didn’t want to talk about that fucking kid anymore, they were beyond tired of the drama and bullshit with him getting arrested again.

That when it was all over and you had to show up and look your friend’s sister and brother-in-law in the eyes and tell them how deeply sorry you were but didn’t have anything else to say. That as you drove away from the funeral home and remembered that you had to stop at Walgreens on the way home to grab Oreos and your spouse’s Vicodin the dentist prescribed for the root canal he/she got earlier that day, you might not have thought too deeply about the tragedy. You might have been able to draw a much straighter line if the kid had been killed when a defective roller coaster crashed. Or an energy drink that was mixed improperly at the factory, causing his heart to explode.

That would’ve been more straightforward in making sense of it all, but to you the trajectory was just a slower motion DWI accident, moral failure combined with poor impulse control resulting in fatal self-destruction. Every friggin Nickelodeon PSA told him to just say no to drugs and he said yes.

That it was a doctor who the 17 year-old B+ student with 1.5 girlfriends and looking forward to freshman year at Syracuse who was told to trust and respect a physician’s judgment when recovering from surgery. The doctor says these pills are safe and effective in managing the pain, per the pamphlets supplied by the Purdue guy who took the doctor golfing at Glenn Oaks and Brookville and Pine Hollow followed by a tomahawk at Prime. So they’re safe and effective for all patients.

That such a prescription was, thanks to Purdue’s generosity with doctors and pharmacists, all along like giving a toddler a box of multicolored thumb tacks and the company knew it.

Yes, Purdue did that to your friend’s nephew. It doesn’t matter if maybe there were some warning signs in him before the basketball injury, he could’ve grown up to be a high functioning alcoholic and/or degenerate gambler instead. That’d be preferable to the living death of being a junkie.

Say no to effective prescription painkillers, kids.