Opioid billionaire patents an opioid treatment

Richard Sackler, whose family and company made billions from the sale of highly addictive opioid painkillers, has now patented a new and potentially lucrative treatment for opioid addiction, the Financial Times reports.

Why it matters: More than 200,000 people have died from prescription opioid overdoses since 1999. And Purdue Pharma, which the Sackler family owns privately, has become a poster child for the opioid crisis because of the way it aggressively marketed OxyContin despite rampant abuse of that drug.