It was, BTW, a 9-0 ruling.
No one involved was acting in good faith. Not Purdue, who promoted their product as being non-addictive. Not the distributors who sent millions of pills each year to small rural pharmacies. Not the pharmacies, who filled thousands of prescriptions a month. And the pill mill doctors weren’t either, but most of them put on a veneer, requiring an exam, consultation and sometimes an MRI.
And the doctors had been told the product had a low potential for addiction. It was a ridiculously blatant lie, the addictive potential of opiates has been known for centuries and historically, every new formulation promoted as being less addictive turned out to be more addictive than its predecessor.
The pharmaceutical companies had also been whipping up a lot of concern about patients in pain who faced barriers in accessing their medication, through astroturf patient groups and lobbying dollars, convincing congresspeople to weaken regulations around their medications, to the point where some doctors felt they might be sued for NOT prescribing.
It all should’ve been criminal but very little of it actually was, unless they could prove that no one really believed the lie they were all pretending to believe.
It was truly a massive systemic failure, the result of capitalistic profit motives gone wild in an economic sector that should be highly regulated if not completely socialized, and the fact that this was mostly legal is a large part of that failure.
It’s also a testament to how easy it is for some people to believe something that they know isn’t true, despite all evidence, if that believe is highly profitable or otherwise advantageous.