The years long legal effort to hold OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma responsible for its role in the opioid epidemic is moving ahead, after a bankruptcy court judge approved a controversial plan to collectively settle the lawsuit and send it to claimants to have their say. While the judge has the right to make a final decision, more than 600,000 claimants will weigh in on a deal that many say lets Purdue—and its founding Sackler family—largely escape responsibility for causing the deaths of tends of thousands of people by falsely marketing their highly-addictive prescription painkillers. Claimants who lost relatives would receive between $3,000 and $48,000 while Purdue would contribute $4.5 billion to a national opioid abatement trust fund. The Sacklers would relinquish ownership of Purdue, but also receive blanket immunity from civil lawsuits, a provision that many claimants and states oppose. Meanwhile, the proportion of U.S. workers who tested positive for marijuana in urine climbed higher in 2020, in parallel with more and more states legalizing the drug. Quest Diagnostics said about 2.7 percent of workers tested positive, up from 2.5 percent the year before, while the overall share of positive drug tests had leveled off.  The uptick took place amid a changing legal environment for cannabis and shifting cultural attitudes that has prompted many employers to drop drug screening altogether, in part to more easily recruit workers as the economy recovers. And finally, a new study shows that remote prescribing of the addiction withdrawal medication buprenorphine—which was allowed for the first time during the pandemic, as a safety measure—now accounts for roughly one-third of all such prescriptions. The study also showed that just 5 percent of those who prescribed remotely, without an in-person exam, reported patient difficulties with the drug, a component of medication-assisted treatment (MAT).