Purdue Pharma

Purdue Pharma L.P. is a privately held American pharmaceutical company founded in 1892 by physicians John Purdue Gray and George Frederick Bingham as the Purdue Frederick Company in Manhattan, later acquired and expanded by the Sackler family starting in the 1950s. The firm specializes in developing, manufacturing, and marketing prescription medications, achieving commercial success with extended-release opioid formulations such as MS Contin in the 1980s and especially OxyContin launched in 1996, whose sales escalated from $48 million to nearly $1.1 billion annually by minimizing represented risks of addiction and promoting it for broad chronic pain treatment. Purdue's aggressive sales tactics, including incentives to physicians and dissemination of misleading data on abuse deterrence, fueled widespread overprescription and contributed causally to the U.S. opioid epidemic, resulting in overprescribing that led to dependency and overdose deaths exceeding 500,000 since the late 1990s. In response to multidistrict litigation alleging deceptive practices, Purdue pleaded guilty to federal misdemeanor charges in 2007 and faced further civil and criminal probes, culminating in a 2019 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing; by October 2025, creditors overwhelmingly approved a restructured $7.4 billion settlement plan providing funds for victim compensation and abatement programs, resolving claims against the company and Sackler family members without admitting liability for third-party harms.