When the Justice Department in 2007 settled its criminal investigation into the maker of OxyContin, a high-powered painkiller, federal officials claimed a “victory” that would deter other companies from illegally marketing opioids.

But now we know thanks to a once-secret Justice Department report that the case’s real winner was OxyContin’s producer, Purdue Pharma, and its billionaire owners, the Sackler family. According to the report, prosecutors wanted to charge three top Purdue Pharma executives with covering up evidence of OxyContin’s early abuse. But senior Justice Department officials rejected the recommendation, settled the case for $634.5 million and consigned some of the investigators’ findings to secrecy. The company’s executives denied any wrongdoing.

Today, state and local officials who have filed scores of lawsuits against companies that make or distribute prescription opioids face a similar choice — whether to settle those cases or insist that the facts detailing the opioid industry’s disregard for public health finally be revealed.

There are good reasons to resolve these cases quickly. Settlement funds could be used to pay for addiction treatment. At the same time, plaintiffs’ lawyers hired by government officials to pursue their claims are eager for a payday.

But it is also an uncomfortable truth that public officials and plaintiffs’ lawyers, by failing to use lawsuits to hold the opioid industry to account, have allowed a containable crisis to mushroom into catastrophe. Repeatedly, they ended lawsuits quickly for the sake of political and financial expediency rather than digging out information that would have alerted the public to the dangers of these drugs.

Consider the case of Florida, which in 2001 became one of the first states to investigate Purdue Pharma. Its attorney general at the time, Robert Butterworth, pointing to a growing number of overdose deaths, declared that he would discover when Purdue Pharma first knew about OxyContin’s abuse.

That never happened. Instead, state investigators interviewed only a single former OxyContin sales representative, and Mr. Butterworth, who was running for a State Senate seat, ended the case soon after it was filed.

He lost his election and the case’s settlement proved empty. While Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $2 million to fund a system that would monitor how Florida doctors prescribed opioids, state legislators blocked its creation. David Aronberg, the state attorney for Palm Beach County, told me that nearly all of the $2 million was returned to the drug company and Florida went on become a major center of the opioid crisis.

The decision by Justice Department officials in 2007 to forgo felony charges against the executives of Purdue Pharma also resulted in the loss of a critical chance to slow the epidemic’s trajectory. Without a public trial, doctors remained unaware about the extent of Purdue Pharma’s deceptions and increasingly prescribe opioids. During the five years that followed the Justice Department settlement, 80,000 people died from overdoses involving pain pills, federal data shows.

Also, in striking these settlements, government officials have agreed to demands by drug companies that information gathered during legal discovery about corporate practices be sealed. Three years after Kentucky settled its lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, a media organization that covers health care, STAT, won a court order this month that will result in the release of records from that case. Those records include the pretrial testimony of Richard Sackler, the son of a founder of Purdue Pharma and the company’s president when the abuse of OxyContin was becoming rampant.

It is not known what Mr. Sackler said under oath in the Kentucky case. But the report complied a decade ago by Justice Department prosecutors — another document that was supposed to remain secret — indicates that he was briefed about OxyContin’s growing abuse years before government officials became aware of it.

There is little question that settling the current wave of opioid-related lawsuits could bring much-needed addiction treatment to communities nationwide. But in taking the industry’s money quickly, the public will lose its last opportunities to find out about the reckless ways that makers and distributors of opioids acted in pursuit of profit. For years, for example, companies continued to ship millions of pain pills to states like West Virginia that were already rife with addiction.

Forcing the opioid industry to reveal the truth will likely take years, but it could prevent a similar catastrophe in the future. Just as important, forcing out those truths will serve as a measure of justice for those most deeply affected by one of the biggest public health catastrophes of the 21st century — the parents, companions and loved ones of the more than 220,000 Americans who have died from overdoses involving prescription painkillers.

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Barry Meier, a former reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic” and “Missing Man: The American Spy Who Disappeared in Iran.”

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