As Purdue Pharma pushes to finalize a deal with the Trump administration's Justice Department that will let the billionaire Sackler family off the hook for the opioid crisis, Professor Ralph Brubaker's July op-ed in the New York Times has been referenced in several recent publications.
In The New Yorker article "The Sackler Family's Plan to Keep Its Billions," author Patrick Radden Keefe writes, "The notion that the Sacklers might “get away with it” was raised this past July in a Times Op-Ed written by Gerald Posner, a journalist, and Ralph Brubaker, a bankruptcy scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law. They suggested that Drain could “help them hold on to their wealth by releasing them from liability for the ravages caused by OxyContin.” When one of the lawyers in the case subsequently invoked the Op-Ed in a hearing, the judge exploded."
Brubaker's op-ed was also quoted in the article "Billionaire family 'on verge of deal' over opioid" in The Times of London.