US court move to reassess Sackler deal ‘opens window’ for victims’ families

Jayde Newton, an anti-Sackler protester, helps to set up cardboard gravestones with the names of victims of opioid abuse. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP

Activists are celebrating a US supreme court decision to review Purdue Pharma’s controversial $6bn settlement of opioid lawsuits for bringing “a sense of optimism to an otherwise bleak situation”.

“We’ve been saying that this is a misuse of the bankruptcy court, and that the Sacklers have been using it as defense because they were the ones that put Purdue into bankruptcy,” says Mike Quinn, a New York lawyer who represents Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (Pain), an organization that has questioned if some members of the Sackler family could be liable for the prescription opioid crisis that ramped up in the US in the early 2000s.