Drugmaker Purdue Pharma, which along with its owners came to symbolize greedy indifference to surging opioid overdose deaths, will soon cease to exist, after a bankruptcy judge said Friday that he would give final approval to a plan to settle thousands of lawsuits against the company.

The agreement comes more than two decades after the first legal actions were filed against Purdue over its aggressive sales tactics and promotion of the opioid painkiller OxyContin as nonaddictive. It requires members of the billionaire Sackler family to relinquish ownership of the company and pay as much as $7 billion over 15 years to states, communities, tribes and others harmed in what became a decades-long national opioid addiction crisis.

“I will tell you now that I’m going to confirm the plan,” Judge

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