Purdue Pharma Is Gone. The Sacklers Are Not.

What Happened, in Order

Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in September 2019, facing thousands of lawsuits from states, municipalities, Native American tribal governments, and individuals who attributed the opioid crisis to the company’s marketing practices. In 2020, the company pleaded guilty to three federal felony charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and paying kickbacks to doctors through a speaker program that functioned as a prescription-driving engine.

The plea agreement included $8.3 billion in total forfeitures, fines, and penalties. The DOJ agreed to collect $225 million, with the remainder redirected toward the bankruptcy settlement intended to maximize funds for addiction treatment and victim compensation. The criminal sentencing, repeatedly delayed, finally occurred April 28, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey before Judge Madeline Cox Arleo.

On May 1, Purdue officially ceased operations. Its manufacturing assets and distribution operations transferred to Knoa Pharma LLC, entirely owned by the Knoa Foundation, a newly formed nonprofit. Knoa’s board members have no prior connection to Purdue. The Sackler family is barred from selling opioids in the United States and will have no involvement in the new company. Settlement funds will flow through a series of trusts over the next 15 years, funding addiction treatment, prevention, and recovery programs across the country.

The Accountability Gap That the Headlines Bury

The coverage of Purdue’s closure has been largely framed around the scale of the settlement. Seven-point-four billion dollars is a large number. It is also a number designed to be reported without a denominator.

The Sackler family received payments from Purdue totaling approximately $10.7 billion between 2008 and 2018, according to auditors. That is the period during which the opioid crisis was escalating into a public health catastrophe. The New York Attorney General’s office accused family members of wiring at least $1 billion from company accounts to personal accounts overseas as litigation pressure mounted. The family has retained the vast majority of an estimated $11 billion fortune.

The contrast at the center of this case is not subtle. Purdue’s guilty plea covered a conspiracy to deceive federal regulators, pay kickbacks to physicians, and use patient medical records to drive prescriptions of a drug the company knew was highly addictive. Those are not regulatory oversights. They are deliberate choices made by identifiable people over many years. None of those people are going to prison.

Compare that to how the legal system has treated people whose addiction to opioids led to drug-related offenses. Possession charges, distribution charges, property crimes committed to fund addiction: those cases have filled Michigan’s jails and prisons and built the carceral infrastructure that now defines how the state responds to drug use. The people who created the supply-side conditions for that addiction have paid a civil settlement and moved on.

What Knoa Pharma Is, and What It Is Not

Knoa Pharma will continue manufacturing opioid medications, because opioids remain medically necessary drugs for legitimate pain management and palliative care. The settlement prevents Knoa from marketing opioids, which is a meaningful structural constraint given that Purdue’s marketing operation was the engine of the crisis. An independent monitor will oversee operations. The foundation model means any profits are directed toward mission rather than shareholder return.

That structure is better than simply allowing the assets to be liquidated or absorbed by another pharmaceutical company with no accountability conditions. It is worth saying so directly. The settlement also funds opioid addiction treatment infrastructure that has been chronically underfunded for decades, and the 15-year payment schedule means states and localities will have sustained resources to build and maintain that infrastructure rather than managing a one-time disbursement.

Connecticut expects its first payment in fall of 2026. New York secured $250 million from the Purdue settlement directly, along with $3 billion in additional funding from other opioid manufacturers and distributors. Michigan’s allocation and its designated uses should be a matter of public record and public scrutiny.

The Structural Question This Case Raises

The Purdue resolution demonstrates the operating logic of corporate criminal accountability in the United States. A company can admit to deliberately deceptive conduct that contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths, pay a settlement sized to be manageable within its bankruptcy framework, dissolve the legal entity, reconstitute under a new name, and continue operations. The individuals who made the decisions that drove the conduct walk away.

That is not a critique of the prosecutors or the judge in this case. Judge Arleo was accurate: she could not sentence people who were not charged. The DOJ’s decision to charge only the company, and not individual executives or Sackler family members, is where the accountability gap was created. That decision reflects longstanding patterns in how the Department of Justice approaches corporate crime, particularly in industries with sophisticated legal defenses and political connections.

For criminal justice reform advocates, this case is a precise illustration of a two-track legal system. Track one: a person with an opioid addiction commits a drug offense and enters the criminal legal system, potentially for years. Track two: a family whose company manufactured and aggressively marketed the drug that drove that addiction pays a negotiated settlement, retains their fortune, and is never charged. Both tracks are operating within the law as written. The question is whether that is the law as it should be written, and who has the political power to change it.