Oxycontin maker quietly tried to weaken laws that could send company executives to jail - Entrepreneur Generations

It's well known that Purdue Pharma made Oxycontin a popular drug through aggressive and misleading marketing tactics, which led to today's opioid epidemic. "What has not been previously revealed is that as the death toll mounted, officials at the company attempted to work behind-the-scenes to make it less likely that they could ever be successfully prosecuted for the carnage opioids were unleashing," Lee Fang reports for The Intercept.

Purdue quietly helped finance efforts to weaken the Responsible Corporate Office doctrine, a legal liability standard used to prosecute executives and board members of companies that affect public health and safety. Under the RCO doctrine, federal prosecutors could go after Purdue's higher ups for their role in the opioid epidemic without having to prove the executives had knowledge of or motivation for wrongdoing. That happened in 2007, when three Purdue executives pleaded guilty in federal court to charges that the company had misled doctors and patients about the addictive nature of Oxycontin, and agreed to pay $634.5 million.

"Purdue didn’t attach its name to the recent effort to weaken the responsible corporate officer doctrine," Fang reports. "Instead, the company provided funding to the Washington Legal Foundation, a legal nonprofit that litigates in support of business interests, to petition the Supreme Court last year to accept a case that would give it the opportunity to weaken the RCO doctrine. The foundation closely protects the names of its donors and the drugmakers’ ties to the group were unclear until recently."

The case is DeCoster v. United States, a lawsuit that challenged the conviction of executives at Iowa-based Quality Egg LLC who were found guilty after 56,000 people were sickened by salmonella-tainted eggs. In its petition to the Supreme Court, WFL argued that an executive could be imprisoned for little more than being a supervisor, and urged the court to revisit the RCO doctrine. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

WFL also went to bat for Purdue Pharma in 2014, when it petitioned the Supreme Court to support Purdue in a lawsuit to chip away protections for corporate whistleblowers under the False Claims Act. "Ties between Washington Legal Foundation and Purdue Pharma were reported by The Intercept in 2015 in a story detailing how the foundation had helped Purdue Pharma attempt to block the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from issuing voluntary guidelines to discourage the over-prescription of opioid narcotics," Fang reports. WFL, which routinely filed briefs in support of Philip Morris in the 1990s, has been accused of being a nonprofit legal front for corporations seeking to weaken public health and safety standards.

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2F17TyJ Oxycontin maker quietly tried to weaken laws that could send company executives to jail - Entrepreneur Generations

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

Tweet