Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,38

just take their money, and it’s not really their money anyway.

“The corporation feels no pain.”

Van Zee and Sister Beth viewed the settlement with both satisfaction and regret. Though the executives were placed on probation for three years and ordered to perform four hundred hours of community service in a drug abuse or drug treatment program, Van Zee and Sister Beth were furious that the Purdue fine would not be allocated to provide drug treatment in the medically underserved region. “This little county was left with nothing, even though we’ve been disproportionately impacted” by the drug, Sister Beth said.

The $634.5 million fine was instead divided among law enforcement, state, and federal Medicaid programs (to reimburse it for claims resulting from the misbranding); to create Virginia’s Prescription Monitoring Program; and to settle $130 million in civil claims.

The only thing the Lee County sheriff’s office got from Purdue was placebo OxyContin pills for use in drug stings.

Many anti-opioid activists were mad, too, that technically it was Purdue Frederick, Purdue Pharma’s holding company, that was banned from participating in the federal insurance programs Medicaid, Medicare, and Tricare as part of its five-year probation—rather than Purdue Pharma itself, which was still permitted to participate, and therefore to continue selling OxyContin. (“They are independent, associated companies,” a spokesman explained.) The executives were likewise banned from doing business with federal health programs, a decision they repeatedly appealed in intervening years and lost, leading one federal district judge to scold: “Plaintiffs appear to misunderstand or misstate the basic elements of their conviction.”

“It’s very typical for these companies to have an entity that is a shell company, basically, set up to plead guilty to the crime, rather than the actual corporate entity taking the fall,” Meier said.

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Flanked by state and federal flags, Judge Jones admitted that the lack of jail time frustrated him. But the Abingdon federal judge’s hands were tied by the plea agreement struck between Purdue and the prosecutors, he said. He would have preferred that parts of the fine be funneled into treatment, adding that prosecutors were reluctant to “direct treatment funds in a manner beyond their expertise and possibly contrary to national policy.”

Asked nearly a decade later about the aftermath of the Purdue Pharma settlement on the communities his court covers, Judge Jones told me: “Opioid addiction continues to be, frankly, a terrible concern.…It’s rare that I don’t have a case today involving substance abuse.”

He declined to divulge the details of the executives’ probation, citing privacy concerns, other than to say they completed it, to his satisfaction, in their home state of Connecticut.

When Howard Udell died unexpectedly of a stroke, in 2013, at the age of seventy-two, a local newspaper heralded him for having turned his community service into a redemptive experience. After counseling veterans at a Veterans Administration hospital on job skills, Udell went on to found the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center, helping hundreds of veterans navigate problems including evictions, dishonorable discharges, and substance-abuse-related crimes. Even after his community service hours were completed, Udell stayed on to assist the legal center. “It was very unpleasant for Howard, who was scrupulously honest and careful, but we endeavored to make the most out of it,” said Friedman, who also performed his community service at the site, according to the newspaper, which described the executives’ initial service there, euphemistically, as “volunteer.”

A lesser person would have crawled into the basement, said Udell’s son, Jeffrey, himself a former federal prosecutor. His dad’s fingerprinting at the guilty plea, his three years of supervised release, the fact that Udell had to check in with his probation officer before he visited his grandchildren across state lines—the younger Udell was still incensed that his late father had been forced to endure such indignities. He pointed out repeatedly in an hour-long phone call that the government presented zero proof of his father’s wrongdoing.

“The idea that someone of his caliber and his integrity could have the ignominy of a federal crime is so outrageous and unjust,” said Jeffrey Udell, describing his dad as a humanitarian and a law-and-order saint, the kind of restaurant patron who would correct a waiter when presented with a mistakenly small bill.

“I know there are unfortunately some very sad and unfortunate people who are parents of kids who abused drugs and overdosed. I feel horrible for those people, as my father did, and for the loss they’ve suffered.”

But again, he insisted, Team Brownlee presented no evidence that Howard Udell had any knowledge of what was happening in the company “some twenty-five