The Sacklers Pulled $10.7 Billion Out of Purdue Pharma Before It Collapsed. They're Paying Back $7.4 Billion.

Between 2008 and 2018, as OxyContin was fueling an overdose epidemic that would help kill more than 800,000 Americans, the Sackler family withdrew roughly $10.7 billion from Purdue Pharma — the company they owned outright. That figure, from an audit later commissioned by Purdue itself, works out to more than eight times what the family had taken out of the company in the previous thirteen years combined. The withdrawals accelerated as litigation mounted, not before it.

In 2020 Purdue pleaded guilty to three federal felonies. In 2024 the Supreme Court threw out the settlement that would have let the Sacklers keep most of their money in exchange for permanent immunity from civil lawsuits. In 2025 the family agreed to pay more — but by then the money had already been sitting offshore, in trusts and holding companies, for years.

A Drug Sold on a Number That Was Never Tested

Purdue's sales force was trained to tell doctors that fewer than 1 percent of patients who took OxyContin would become addicted. According to court filings and reporting from NBC News and other outlets, that figure was not the product of any clinical study of OxyContin — it traced back to a 1980 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine describing hospitalized patients on short-term monitored painkillers, a population with essentially no relationship to people sent home with a month's supply of pills. The FDA later said the claim had not been substantiated. In 2007, Purdue and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to federal charges of misbranding OxyContin as less addictive and less prone to abuse than rival painkillers, agreeing to pay $634.5 million in fines and forfeitures.

The company's own internal correspondence, unsealed in 2019 as part of Kentucky's lawsuit against Purdue and reported by STAT News and ProPublica, shows that in 1997 Richard Sackler and sales-and-marketing chief Michael Friedman discussed a related problem: many physicians believed OxyContin was weaker than morphine, milligram for milligram, when in fact it was roughly twice as potent. Correcting that misconception would have made doctors more cautious about dosing. Sackler's response, preserved in a sealed 2015 deposition later obtained by ProPublica, was to agree with a plan not to correct it.

"Sell, Sell, Sell": The Bonus Structure

• Purdue paid its sales representatives bonuses tied directly to the volume and dosage strength of OxyContin prescriptions written by the doctors they visited — a structure the GAO and multiple state lawsuits later documented as giving reps far greater incentive to push OxyContin than Purdue's older, already-approved painkiller MS Contin.
• By 2001, the company's roughly 600 sales reps were sharing a bonus pool that paid out around $40 million that year alone; individual bonuses reportedly reached as high as $240,000, on top of average base salaries near $55,000.
• Internal training materials instructed reps to tell physicians that higher doses were simply for patients who needed them, rather than a sign of developing tolerance or addiction — encouraging escalation to stronger, more profitable pills.
• In 2013, according to litigation later filed by state attorneys general, Purdue hired McKinsey & Company for an engagement called "Evolve to Excellence," which recommended targeting the highest-volume prescribers and refreshing sales messaging around moving patients to higher, more lucrative doses.

The Rebate McKinsey Proposed

In a 2017 presentation to Purdue executives, reported by the New York Times and other outlets after the documents surfaced in litigation, McKinsey consultants modeled a rebate program under which Purdue would pay distributors and pharmacies a set amount — cited in the documents as $14,810 — for each customer who overdosed on opioids the company had supplied, as a way of offsetting the business costs of overdoses among their customer base. One slide reportedly estimated Purdue would owe CVS $36.8 million in 2019 under the formula, projecting roughly 2,484 CVS customers would either overdose or develop opioid use disorder that year. Purdue said the rebate program was never implemented. McKinsey later paid $573 million to settle claims by state attorneys general over its opioid work and, separately, reached an agreement with the Justice Department; a former senior partner was charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly deleting documents related to the Purdue engagement.

The Withdrawal Timeline

Purdue's own bankruptcy-ordered audit found that Sackler family members withdrew more than $12.2 billion from the company between the mid-1990s, when OxyContin was approved, and 2018 — with roughly $10.7 billion of that pulled out from 2008 onward, according to reporting by NPR and CBS News. That later window overlaps almost exactly with the period after Purdue's 2007 guilty plea, when the company's legal exposure was already a matter of public record, and continues through the years when state attorneys general were filing the wave of lawsuits that eventually forced Purdue into bankruptcy in September 2019. Roughly $4.1 billion of the withdrawals went out as direct cash distributions to family members; about $4.7 billion was set aside to cover the family's tax liability on the payouts.

The Plea, the Shield, and the Reversal

In October 2020, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to three federal felonies — conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-Kickback Statute — as part of a deal the Justice Department valued at $8.3 billion in penalties and forfeitures, including a $3.544 billion criminal fine and $2 billion in criminal forfeiture. Because Purdue was already insolvent and in bankruptcy, the government collected only a fraction of that sum in practice. No Sackler family member was charged criminally; the family separately agreed to pay $225 million to resolve civil False Claims Act liability, without admitting wrongdoing.

Purdue's 2021 bankruptcy plan proposed to have the Sacklers contribute about $4.5 billion over roughly nine years, later raised toward $6 billion, in exchange for a release shielding family members from all current and future civil opioid lawsuits — even though the Sacklers themselves were not filing for bankruptcy. A federal district judge vacated that plan in December 2021, finding the bankruptcy court lacked authority to impose it. On June 27, 2024, the Supreme Court agreed, ruling 5–4 in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P. that the Bankruptcy Code does not permit a Chapter 11 plan to extinguish claims against non-debtors like the Sacklers without the consent of the people bringing those claims. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion; Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, dissented, warning the ruling would delay compensation to victims.

The 2025 Deal, and What Changed

A revised settlement, announced in January 2025 and confirmed by the bankruptcy court on November 18, 2025, raised the total to $7.4 billion — about $1.4 billion more than the plan the Supreme Court had struck down. Under the new terms, the Sackler family agreed to pay up to $6.5 billion over 15 years, with Purdue's remaining assets contributing roughly $900 million; creditors were given the ability to opt in or out of releasing claims against the Sacklers individually, as the Supreme Court's ruling required. Purdue's operating business is being transferred to a newly created public-benefit company, Knoa Pharma, which is intended to direct future profits toward opioid treatment and reversal medications. The plan went effective on April 1, 2026 — roughly six and a half years after Purdue first filed for bankruptcy, and more than a decade after the company's own sales data showed which prescribers were writing the most OxyContin scripts.

No member of the Sackler family has been criminally charged in connection with OxyContin's marketing, and under the 2025 settlement none has admitted personal wrongdoing; the $7.4 billion they and the company will pay out over the next decade and a half is being financed, in significant part, from money the audit shows they had already moved out of Purdue's reach years before the bankruptcy filing that was supposed to hold it there.

Filed from public reporting:

• U.S. Department of Justice — Opioid Manufacturer Purdue Pharma Sentenced for Fraud and Kickback Conspiracies
• U.S. Department of Justice — Purdue Frederick Company plea agreement documents (2007)
• CBS News — Sackler family took $10.4 billion from Purdue Pharma as the opioid crisis grew
• NPR — Sacklers Withdrew Nearly $11 Billion From Purdue As Opioid Crisis Mounted
• STAT News — Purdue's Richard Sackler proposed plan to play down OxyContin risks
• ProPublica — Sackler Embraced Plan to Conceal OxyContin's Strength From Doctors, Sealed Testimony Shows
• The Daily Beast — McKinsey Suggested Purdue Pharma Offer a Rebate for Each OxyContin Overdose
• NPR — McKinsey Apologizes For Helping Purdue Pharma 'Turbocharge' Opioid Sales
• CDC — Understanding the Opioid Overdose Epidemic
• Justia / U.S. Supreme Court — Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., 603 U.S. ___ (2024)
• NPR — Purdue Pharma and Sackler family members to pay $7.4B in national opioid settlement
• STAT News — Judge approves opioid settlement for Purdue Pharma and Sackler family members who own the company