Patrick Radden Keefe:

There are dozens and dozens of lawsuits right now ongoing across the country. More than half of the states in the United States are suing Purdue Pharma. And so it's unclear where these are going to go. Some people think there will ultimately be a big settlement along the lines that there were with the tobacco companies back in the 1990s. I think the interesting thing for the Sackler family is that what this Massachusetts case has done is kind of pierce the corporate veil. It's no longer just Purdue Pharma and the Sackler's are somehow at a distance. Now the Sacklers have all been named and it does seem that there may be some real liability on the part of these individuals who were clearly directing the company. So if I were them I'd be worried. I think you're going to see more lawsuits. You will ultimately see some sort of big settlement and the really interesting case now is that for decades part of the reason the saddlers were able to kind of burnish their own reputation was by giving huge amounts of money to elite cultural institutions to museums like the Guggenheim to universities like Yale. So at what point do these institutions start saying no to that money and potentially taking the Sackler name off of their various institutes and buildings.