Opioid epidemic has the US in its grip

The company filed for bankruptcy on Sunday night in White Plains, New York, and announced a $10 billion plan to settle the lawsuits.

Under the proposed settlement, which is backed by about half the states and thousands of local governments that are suing Purdue, the Sacklers will hand the company's assets over to a trust controlled by those states, cities and counties. Money generated by the reformed company will be used for drug treatment.

The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the US, with an estimated net worth of $13 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

On Friday, the New York State Attorney General's Office said it had tracked about $1 billion in wire transfers by the Sacklers, including through Swiss bank accounts, suggesting that the family tried to shield its wealth as it faced the lawsuits.

Before Sunday, 27 US states and 2,000 cities and counties had agreed to the settlement, but at least 20 states had refused.

The lawsuits allege that Purdue Pharma, based in Stamford, Connecticut, put profit above health by aggressively marketing OxyContin, the brand name for oxycodone, knowing it could lead to addiction and death by overdose.

From 1999 to 2017, some 702,000 people in the US died from drug overdoses, including 399,000 from of all types of opioids, including oxycodone, heroin and synthetics such as fentanyl. In 2017, 68 percent of the 70,000 people who died from a drug overdose, or 47,600, were killed by a prescribed or illicit opioid, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, or CDC.