April 10, 2022 – A cottage outside Floyd, Virginia, is a tranquil stage-set for Ellen Isaacs to wage one of the longest-running wars of the opioid epidemic: the battle to hold OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, its owners and executives, to just account.
It’s battle that Isaacs, a former mortgage fraud expert at Citigroup, has been fighting since she and her son Ryan became dependent on OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s “non-addictive” painkiller that has played a central role in an epidemic that has cost 500,000 lives over two decades.
Isaacs is one of just two individuals holding out against a controversial bankruptcy settlement that would effectively shield Purdue’s former owners, the Sackler family, from further litigation. “I’m a truth seeker on a fact-finding mission,” she says plainly from under her cowboy hat. But she’s also a grieving mother. Her son died of an overdose four years ago, aged 32, and she now travels with boxes of Narcan, the opioid overdose treatment that might have saved Ryan if it had been administered sooner.
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