This just seems like a massively sympathetic view to the company. It's rare for any corporation to distribute most, if not all, of a companies FCF to shareholders. For most public pharmaceutical companies that spending goes to R&D. Furthermore even if you call it "normal", then this kind of shareholder enrichment could be argued to be a gross mismanagement of company funds. Trying to paint this as "normal" is incredibly odd, especially when they call out future litigation as a reason to hoard cash.
>On September 8, 2014, Mortimer D. A. Sackler emailed Jonathan Sackler, stating that there had been “a huge depreciation in [Purdue’s] bottom line and more importantly shareholder value over the past 5+ years” and that Purdue was in a “death spiral.”
And despite what the letter of the law says, I can't imagine wanting to support such a system where once can knowingly poison middle America for decades and run away with profits. At the very least it's incredibly unpatriotic and does more to threaten American hegemony than any quagmire in the middle east. This isn't a case where they were just "diversifying" as good financial advice - they foresaw their litigation issues in 2008. The fact it took more than 10 years to get to the court has more to do with the slowness of our justice system rather than the Sackler's financial savvy.