Purdue Pharma No Longer Exists. Proving It Wrecked Your Life Just Got Harder Anyway.

Mary Jannotta is 77 years old. In 2008, a botched back surgery left her in enough pain that a doctor put her on OxyContin, and by the time anyone asked whether that was still a good idea, she had a dependency she didn’t ask for and didn’t understand. Years later, her teenage grandson Tyler found her pills in the house and started taking them the way plenty of teenagers do — testing something that was sitting right there, prescribed by a doctor, so it couldn’t be that dangerous. Tyler Cordeiro died of an overdose at 24. This month, the trust set up to compensate people exactly like Mary Jannotta rejected her claim, despite pharmacy records showing sixteen qualifying Purdue prescriptions in her name. She told ProPublica what it felt like: “After everything I went through, what my family went through, and to find out nobody was really being held responsible really hit me in the gut. It was a punch in the gut.”

Purdue Pharma does not exist anymore. The company that built OxyContin into a $35 billion franchise dissolved this year as part of a $7.4 billion national settlement, and the state attorneys general who spent a decade suing it are now taking a victory lap. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that the state will collect $108,179,642 from this settlement alone, on top of the roughly $1.1 billion Arizona has already secured from opioid litigation. That is real money, headed toward real programs.

A settlement can hold a company accountable and still fail the people it claims to be paying back. Both things are true of this one, at the same time, in the same document.

Here’s the part that doesn’t make the press releases: the $870 million set aside specifically for individual victims — the people who were prescribed OxyContin, got hooked, and either survived it or didn’t — is being administered through a claims process that is quietly rejecting people at scale. If you’ve ever tried to prove something happened to you a decade ago using paperwork nobody told you to keep, you already know how this goes.

The math changed after most people had already filed

When claimants first filed against Purdue’s bankruptcy back in 2021, the trust told them a fatal overdose tied to Purdue’s drugs could be worth up to $48,000. Five years and one renegotiated plan later, that same category of claim is worth as little as $8,000 — ProPublica’s review of trust records found. The minimum qualifying payment did go up, from $3,500 to $8,000. But for a family whose son or daughter died, the number that mattered dropped by more than 80%.

The trust also quietly removed something called the “sworn affidavit option” — a mechanism that let people without surviving pharmacy records swear, under penalty of perjury, that they or a family member used Purdue’s drugs. In plain terms: if you couldn’t produce a decade-old prescription bottle, you used to be able to just tell the truth under oath instead. Now you can’t. That single change is why Ellen Isaacs, whose son Ryan died at 33 in 2018 after an OxyContin prescription following a high school injury, can’t get her claim approved: “I can’t turn up prescriptions for my son back when he was young, years ago,” she told ProPublica. “They’re not available anymore.” Cindy Singer, whose son Rory died at 28 in 2015 after starting on OxyContin post-construction-accident, didn’t even know the affidavit path had existed until it was gone. “We never even knew it existed,” she said.

Here’s the layman’s version of what “trust” and “expungement” mean in this context, because the legal language is doing a lot of work to obscure something simple. The trust is a pot of settlement money with a judge-appointed administrator deciding who gets paid. Expungement means the administrator formally removes a claimant from the list entirely — not “denied, try again,” but erased, no longer a claim that exists. A judge approved expunging roughly 80,000 people who missed a July 2025 evidence deadline most of them never knew existed. Of the roughly 140,000 people who originally filed, only about 63,000 submitted evidence in time.

Expungement means the administrator formally removes a claimant from the list entirely — not “denied, try again,” but erased, no longer a claim that exists.

Judge Sean H. Lane, who approved the plan, called the evidence bar “an exceedingly low bar,” a “very modest burden of substantiation.” He is technically correct that the paperwork requirement, read as a legal standard, is modest. He is describing a different experience than the one Mary Jannotta, Ellen Isaacs, and Cindy Singer are living through. Modest for a lawyer reading a motion is not modest for a mother who buried her son a decade ago and was never told which drawer to keep the receipts in.

History already ran this experiment once

We have watched a legal system decide that the burden of proof for surviving an opioid company belongs on the survivor before. Purdue launched OxyContin in 1996 marketed as having a lower abuse potential than other opioids because of its time-release coating — a claim the company’s own sales reps were trained to repeat to doctors, and a claim that turned out to be false in exactly the way that mattered: people crushed the pills, and the company knew people were crushing the pills, for years, before it said anything. In 2007, Purdue and three executives pleaded guilty to federal charges of misbranding OxyContin “with intent to defraud and mislead” and paid $600 million — a fraction of what the company had made, and a fraction of the $7.4 billion figure that gets quoted today as if it settles the account. Nineteen years and roughly a quarter-million opioid overdose deaths later, the same basic dynamic is playing out in the claims process: the company that caused the harm gets a clean, final number attached to its name, and the people who lived through the harm get a form, a deadline, and a rejection letter.

If you are in recovery right now, or you’re the parent who found the pill bottle, or you’re the grandmother who still doesn’t understand why doctors kept refilling something that was hurting her — none of this is a referendum on whether you deserve to be believed. The system built to hold Purdue accountable was never actually built around your evidence. It was built around a deadline, a settlement number both sides could agree to, and a bankruptcy court’s need to close the file. You can know exactly what happened to you and still lose to a spreadsheet.

What Arizona does with its $108 million is not settled yet — and that part you can still affect

The $108.2 million Arizona is collecting from this tranche doesn’t go to individual victims at all. It goes to the state and to counties, to be spent — under a court-approved list of allowable uses — on treatment, prevention, and recovery support. That decision is not locked in the way the federal claims process is. Maricopa County has already run one funding cycle, putting $2 million in opioid settlement dollars into 12 local organizations doing frontline treatment and recovery work, selected through a public application process. When the next tranche lands, that process runs again.

That’s the actionable thing for anyone reading this who runs a treatment program, a recovery house, or a peer-support organization in Arizona: track your county’s opioid settlement dashboard and apply when the window opens. This is one of the only places in this entire settlement architecture where a program on the ground — not a bankruptcy trust administrator in another state — decides where the money goes. It is worth thirty minutes of a Monday to find out when Maricopa or Pima County opens its next cycle, what the eligible-use categories are this round, and whether your program’s existing outcomes data is already in the shape a county reviewer wants to see.

It’s also worth naming plainly what this settlement is not undoing. The same federal government now distributing opioid settlement dollars has, this year, gone the opposite direction on the tools that keep people alive long enough to reach treatment at all: SAMHSA issued guidance in April barring federal funds from paying for fentanyl test strips and syringe service supplies, cutting roughly $2 billion combined from block grants and overdose-prevention funding in the same stroke. One hand is collecting $7.4 billion from the company that got a generation of people addicted. The other hand just made it harder to fund the strip that tells someone what’s actually in the pill before they take it.

The other hand just made it harder to fund the strip that tells someone what’s actually in the pill before they take it.

None of that changes what’s still true and still yours tonight: naloxone access hasn’t been touched by any of this — it remains funded, it remains legal to carry, and Arizona is still receiving pharmaceutical-company naloxone shipments as part of separate settlement terms. If you’re worried about someone using alone, that door is still open regardless of what a bankruptcy court decided about paperwork this month.

Mary Jannotta stood in a federal courtroom and said the thing plenty of people watching this settlement close out are thinking but haven’t been asked to say out loud: that a legal system built to hear the powerless was, in this instance, being used to shield the powerful instead. She’s not wrong about what happened to her claim. She may also not be done. The Melenski family, in Connecticut, was initially expunged from the list too — and successfully appealed using a 2009 letter they’d kept, warning a doctor to stop prescribing their son OxyContin. The record existed. They just had to be the ones who happened to have kept it. That’s not justice. It’s a filing cabinet with a body count attached, and Arizona just got the invoice.