Brian Mann:
Well, very simply, this deal benefits communities, states, counties, Native tribes much more than it does individual victims. Advocates say that’s cool because it means money is going to go to protecting people in the future, right, preventing addiction, healing people who are currently addicted, helping people still caught up in the fentanyl crisis that’s raging across the United States.
That’s going to be — most of the $7.4 billion will go to that kind of work. But that means only about $850 million will go to people who were devastated by OxyContin, people who lost family members to fatal overdoses, people who lost years of their own lives to this.
Some of them say they will only get a few thousand dollars in compensation out of this deal; $850 million sounds like a lot of money, but when you divide it up over all the people who say that they were addicted or lost loved ones, you slice that pie thinner and thinner. Some people will walk away with hundreds of dollars, a few thousand dollars, and some people are really angry about that level of payout.
