It's more complicated than that. They knew it was killing people and turning thousands (millions) into addicts and they kept pushing doctors to use it at all costs. I'd recommend the John Oliver special on it.
They also designed it to be more addictive. The recommended dosage and timing causes the patients to repeatedly experience minor withdrawal during normal use, which is a standard technique for conditioning someone into being an addict.
All of this is documented in emails that were presented as evidence in court.
It was in jest. But part of the problem with nicotine that helps to lead to addiction is its short half-life. If you are a smoker you experience several episodes of abstinence throughout the day, so you lit just another one.
Yes - sort of. Many of the additives found in cigarettes are designed to increase the rate of absorption of nicotine. This gives you a distinct rush within seconds of consumption, as well as a more pronounced crash that triggers intense cravings.
That's very different from the effects of (freebase?) nicotine typically found in e-cigarettes which is slower to absorb and doesn't have a noticeable crash.
Why are doctors so easy to manipulate? They learn about addiction in medical school. Why would they believe a pharmaceutical company saying "...oh but this opioid is not addictive..."
>Why would they believe a pharmaceutical company saying "...oh but this opioid is not addictive..."
Because the pharma company offered them direct or indirect benefits for doing so. Doctors are just as human and just as susceptible to financial incentive as anybody else, that's why for decades there were doctors advertising the health benefits of smoking.
It’s easy to overlook that OxyContin was very effective. Even a doctor acting in good faith was likely to prescribe the drug— because it worked well. It really did help people struggling with pain management. The downside, of course, was that Purdue pharma was knowingly misleading doctors on the addictiveness of the drug. Also the amount of doctors that were willing to turn a blind eye to the clear signs of addiction is very worrying.
> Also the amount of doctors that were willing to turn a blind eye to the clear signs of addiction is very worrying.
No disagreement, but I think it's worth considering how stigmatized addiction is in our society. I expect many patients would hide any signs of addiction from their doctors - especially since it might result in losing their supply of OxyContin, or worse, their career.
Yes, whole heartedly agree. The social impact of addiction and the ostracism of those suffering with addiction has undoubtedly only made this situation worse. I was more leaning towards doctors/pharmacies that were operating as pill mills - I.e. the handful of regions in the Appalachias where there were more scripts for Oxy than there were people in the county
Because physicians don't get much if any training in evaluating evidence and research, they generally believe what they're told by scientists. Which is a shame, they should be taught critical evaluation of literature
They also don't have time because of the artificial limits of physicians graduating every year, combined with more bureaucracy being pushed on them day by day
We can trust the process of science but we need to be mindful of how to critically examine a body of literature. When I see most lay people examine literature all they do is cherry pick what they like and discard the rest and ignore any analysis or methodological concerns
Oh absolutely, science journalism is absolutely terrible for the most part. That's why I always try to find the original paper they're reporting on to see what's actually going on
Most journalists don't understand research either and I've even seen some PhD science writers get things wrong too but usually less often.
Science journalism is filled with incredible sweeping claims and jumps in logic that boggle the mind and are nothing like what's in the research being reported on, it truly makes me disappointed
I've seen a lot of research around nutrition, where the abstract/summary for the paper itself makes claims not reasonably backed in the paper itself. Then again, I think pharma, food and agriculture in particular have bent to financial forces over everything else.
It's incredibly hard to do anything else, since it's pretty easy to cherry pick methodological concerns for any given conclusion you don't care for, since it's incredibly rare for a given body of work to be free of methodological flaws.
Something I have noticed is that non scientists don't understand the methods so when they do try and critique the methods those critiques don't make sense because they lack the understanding of the underlying principles
There is a lot of basic science that is quite solid and is replicable yet people tend to throw it out with nonsense complaints
Well I work at med school, grad students get far more training on research, med students can take an optional research elective. This elective isn't a formal course either, what happens is a med student comes to our lab and we put them on a small project as an assistant doing data analysis or a simple experiment. They don't get formally taught how to evaluate research
You have to remember med students are training to be clinicians not researchers. They have to diagnose and treat patients based on information taught to them by clinicians and basic scientists
This is also why it annoys me when lay people refer to the opinions of physicians on some new research that just came out, like with covid stuff. They are not research experts, they're clinicians. They treat people and make diagnoses
It is largely true. Evidence in medicine widely exists but most doctors arent keeping up with it. There has been a bit of a movement toward evidence based medicine in the last decade but most docotrs are still relying on what they learned in med school instead of keeping up with literature.
Many physicians also tend to be very conservative in terms of adopting new treatments. They tend to stick with what they know "works" and don't want to take risks to try something new
Because doctors believe studies and health system policies pushed aggressive treatment of pain.
And our unequal society forces a lot of people to damage their bodies in the pursuit of happiness (i.e. earning money). That damage becomes chronic pain.
And unfortunately, painkillers often have a euphoric effect. So people might use that effect to escape the grinding reality that they are trapped within. Consider how popular cannabis is, especially among older adults in states where recreational use is legal.
It seems that in the US there has been a trend to "de-regulate" or let businesses regulate themselves. It works for a while, but eventually it seems to go south. I think "regulatory capture" is the term. I think of Boeing being allowed to inspect there own planes.. I think drug manufactures submit there own studies, as the FDA doesn't have a budget to test all the things themselves.
The opiod manufactures are organized too. They have trade groups and conferences.
De-regulation and regulatory capture are almost opposite things. De-regulation is a solution to the problem of regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture is a central problem in America today. The big powerful entities- major corporations, large unions, special interest groups, etc have the time, resources and incentives to lobby for laws (regulations) to be written in their favor.
The result is the American public is very heavily regulated, but in ways that are beneficial primarily to the powerful incumbents. This spans everything from copyright law favoring big hollywood studios to USDA regulations favoring the handful of major meat producer corporations to medicine, manufacturing, retail, real estate, etc.
Regulatory capture is also why the divide between leftists saying more regulation and rightists saying less regulation are both often missing the real problem. The US already has millions of lines of text for regulation, the problem is that so much of the regulation is bad and written to favor whoever donated or could sway votes to whichever representative crafted the language.
Arguably, you have it backwards. Self-regulation doesn't work for a while, and then it works ultra well. Boeing got away with poor self-regulation for decades but now their business almost certainly will implode within decades and their market position will be taken over by those who were willing and able to self-regulate. They were rightfully punished and the US government was (theoretically) able to spend more resources regulating elsewhere.
That said, the lag time between the beginning of failing to self-regulate and the beginning of consequences showing up are likely too far apart to make it a sound doctrine for the US government.
> whether most would think a mechanic is more or less easily manipulated into unnecessary vehicle repairs.
That's different. This is closer to a mechanic using a part from Company X in the repairs of their customer's car, because a rep told them it was more durable.
You're right, that's a better example. But wouldn't you expect the mechanic to have a more discerning eye in that case as well? The more contextual knowledge you have, the better you should be able to tell legitimate claims from BS.
To catch some BS, sure. I wouldn't expect them to fall for obvious lies. I doubt a mechanic would be significantly educated metallurgy or production techniques to spot BS in part lifespans. Or to spot pseudoscience in air filters.
I would expect them to notice their repeat customers not getting the benefits. But keep in mind that doctors saw their patients appearing pain free and high functioning.
You may be right and I may be guilty of hindsight bias, but I would probably put this in the realm of BS. It’s not like opioids were unknown to cause addiction, and when physicians witness the company continuing to up the dosage and wordsmith terms like “breakthrough pain” I would expect a cognizant doctor to be throwing red flags.
To overextend the mechanic metaphor, it would be like making a part out of aluminum and claiming it has infinite fatigue life. We know aluminum doesn’t so the threshold of evidence needs to be very, very high or the mechanic should remain skeptical. If the part continues to fail, but the manufacturer keeps making new, novel excuses the mechanic should be throwing the BS flag about their infinite fatigue life claims.
Because society currently sees medicine as a pioneering field where scientists and bio/pharma engineers make discoveries and innovations that completely upend "truths" that had been taken for granted 10 or 20 or 50 years earlier.
Just like there are some software engineers who don't jump on every shiny new product or trendy practice, there are some doctors who approach their trade with the judiciousness that you describe. But just like investors and consumers in technology, administrators and patients in medicine get hyped on the new shiny and often don't appreciate those doctors, so there's quite a lot of pressure on engineers/doctors to conform to the marketed hype and naive optimism -- and most do.
A friend of mine recently died from cancer. I had looked up some particular things about it while he was still alive, and apparently some cookies got crossed and I was marked as an oncologist. I've had some ads on Facebook or Instagram telling me, the "oncologist," about particular cancer drugs. Of course, everyone in the US has probably seen regular ads for various cancer drugs.
Doctors pretty much need to be intelligent and hard working to get through med school and residency. After that, they might not necessarily keep up with things. You'd think oncologists would know the best treatments for each patient, but if that were true those ads would be worthless - and I doubt those companies like to throw money away.
Additionally, I recommend the book Empire of Pain for an excellent deep dive into the Sackler family and how they essentially created the opioid epidemic. You'll be infuriated as you read it.
>The court on a 5-4 vote ruled that the bankruptcy court did not have the authority to release the Sackler family members from legal claims made by opioid victims. As part of the deal, the family, which controlled the company, had agreed to pay $6 billion that could be used to settle opioid-related claims, but only in return for a complete release from any liability in future cases.
Is this actually a positive outcome or a kick-the-can?
What an amusing slip of the tongue given the settlement means their profits are only slightly less with the $6B immunity buyout. The "income" from their "deal" was still positive and I'm not entirely convinced they don't see it that way.
It also makes sense to me. If someone didn't join the class action, they should not be bound by its settlement, and should be free to pursue damage claims on their own.
> In a 5-to-4 decision, written by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a majority of the justices held that the federal bankruptcy code does not authorize a liability shield for third parties in bankruptcy agreements. Justice Gorsuch was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
> GORSUCH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, ALITO, BARRETT, and JACKSON, JJ., joined. KAVANAUGH, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and SOTOMAYOR and KAGAN, JJ., joined.
The number the Supreme Court used in its decision was 247,000 deaths over a twenty year period. That's the verified number and therefore almost certainly lower than reality.
deaths of thousands is a massive understatement. Just overdose deaths is probably getting close to a million. But they are also responsible for:
The people who don't OD but have their lives destroyed by opiods.
The family and friends who suffer because someone they know is an addict.
The time, money and energy society has spent trying to help addicts.
All the crimes, victims of crime and criminal justice costs that are a result of addiction.
They didn't kill thousands of people, they killed millions, affected every single person in the country negatively and contributed to the destabilization of our society.
The settlement was really a bit insane to me - we’re giving immunity to a family that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed who knows how many more, and the money is being paid to local governments. In my area they planned on spending their share on things like “outreach” and free-to-the-addict narcan so they could continue to run around causing local mayhem.
Speaking as a man with a deceased father and aunt as a result of the Sacklers, really it’s a spit in the face kind of outcome that was shot down. They ought to be locked up next to El Chapo in ADX Florence.
The recipients of the settlement are mixed about this. Some raised this suit because they felt the Sacklers were not sufficiently punished. Others felt that this was likely to be the best deal that could realistically achieved and dragging out proceedings in court for years and adding uncertainty of any settlement or victorious law suit was not worth the risks and emotional turmoil.
US$ 6bi to be disbursed across hundreds of local governments to use for settlements over millions of individuals is nothing compared to the damage the Sacklers inflicted. On top of that having a sweet deal to never see any future liability case is an egregious misjustice.
The minimum would be for them to be arrested, if we pushed drugs to someone who eventually dies from it we wouldn't be getting just a fine. At the scale they did it's simply inconceivable to me that paying a fine which is less than their profit is anywhere close to justice.
It really depends on what you mean by "pushed drugs". If you or I recommended that someone should get an oxycodone prescription from their doctor, and they eventually died after getting that prescription, I don't think we'd get arrested or fined. (And the Sacklers were never getting criminal immunity in the first place.)
If you wanted the outcome of the case to be at least some money going towards opioid treatment, then this decision could jeopardize that outcome.
However, if you thought that the Sackler family being able to escape any personal liability despite the myriad of evidence of many of their involvement in stoking the opioid epidemic— and they still got to keep a very sizeable amount of the family fortune— is morally repugnant and legally dubious, then this court decision is a positive.
I would personally prefer many of the executives and members of the Sackler family to be held liable, their assets seized, and formal charges brought against them. But that’s unlikely
> A number of trials were conducted by the Chinese government resulting in two executions, three sentences of life imprisonment, two 15-year prison sentences, and the firing or forced resignation of seven local government officials and the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ). The former chairwoman of China's Sanlu dairy was sentenced to life in prison.
Many of the most high profile names involved in Purdue Pharma or the Sackler family have retired or have passed away, so garnishment wouldn’t be as impactful as asset seizure (directly or from the estate of those that died)
> Harrington objected to the release of additional claims against the Sacklers, saying it would be unfair to potential future plaintiffs.
> Purdue criticized Harrington’s role, saying that groups representing thousands of plaintiffs have signed on to the settlement, which could not have happened without the Sackler family contribution.
The concern is the set of current plaintiffs is incomplete and those plaintiffs who are missing are going to be hurt by this and the bankruptcy judge over this decision does not have the authority to approve this deal despite the current set of plaintiffs wanting it.
Negative outcome. Some important points that the article here did not emphasize:
1) The Sackler family was not actually a party to this litigation. They came to the table (with most of the settlement money) specifically to get these so called '3rd party releases'.
2) Purdue is basically broke. It's also an LLC. Thus, in order to go after the Sackler family's money, you basically have to claw back money that Purdue paid out to the family over the years. It's not impossible to do, but it requires a whole more litigation, the outcome of which is not at all certain.
Now, 3rd party releases are a genuinely weird thing: a court ruling that a party that's not directly involved in the case is immune from future lawsuits. Partially the reason it went all the way to the supreme court is that there was a circuit split - they were allowed in some circuits, but not others. However, (and this is according to a friend who represented the victims in the settlement), it's really unfortunate that THIS is the case where they get struck down. If the Sacklers walk away from the settlement, it makes the victims getting their payout much less certain, and certainly delays that payout by many years.
> Thus, in order to go after the Sackler family's money, you basically have to claw back money that Purdue paid out to the family over the years.
Or you can find them personally, directly, criminally liable and their profits the result from a criminal conspiracy.
Personal crimes aren’t protected by the “veil” of LLC, so any assets of the family could be liable, after criminal conviction, for any civil claims from victims.
IANAL, but I don't think this would help the victims (and incidentally, that could have still happened even with the settlement). If there were a criminal lawsuit of the Sacklers, and if that lawsuit was successful, the seized money would just go to the justice department.
The only way the victims actually see any money is through civil litigation.
Well, I don't think civil forfeiture specifically would work, but like I mentioned above, yes, if the justice department wanted to criminally charge the Sacklers, they could possibly win and get a judgement against some of the money. But then that money doesn't really go to the victims - it's just a way to punish the Sacklers.
The bankruptcy settlement had a bunch of money going to families of the victims, and also to the states for anti-addiction programs, and also some money towards documenting the Purdue wrongdoings, so that the public would have better visibility just HOW this was allowed to happen in the first place
My understanding is that Piercing the Corporate Veil has gotten easier over the years. The more egregious the robber baron class has gotten the less sympathetic the courts have been.
If you rob a bank and can pay the bank off with interest from the money you stole, was justice served?
If you sell drugs and use the interest from your profits to pay a fine, it doesn’t sound like punishment.
Part of the problem with this is that much of an old money wealth is from less than reputable sources (slavery, piracy, war, crime, smuggling, opium and alcohol).
The next likely step to this will be how it affects the future hypothetical (but almost certain) trial of Boeing execs. Depending on what you want that to look like, then this was either positive or negative.
It is fascinating that this is happening almost concurrently with the "trust doctors, trust the science" narrative around the COVID vaccines. It shouldn't be acceptable to force people to trust the medical industry. They are not trustworthy and it takes a long time for harm to be acknowledged by the official system.
If your boss tells you you'll lose your job if you don't have sex with him, and you quit to avoid that, would you disagree with the statement that you were forced to quit?
the choice to have sex with someone or be fired is not a legitimate choice and framing it as one is also illegitimate. do you have a better suggestion for a term you would prefer?
It is choice. That's the whole point of the discussion you might not like the choice you would have to take but it still is. If you want to convey that you get extorted do so but use the right words.
>to make something happen or make someone do something difficult, unpleasant, or unusual, especially by threatening or not offering the possibility of choice[0] (notice or here)
>If someone forces you to do something, they make you do it even though you do not want to, for example, by threatening you.[1]
>to make someone do something that they do not want to do
>I was forced to take a taxi because the last bus had left.[2]
Yeah, still nobody can "force you to trust" anything. They might force you to comply with something but they can't force you to trust. That's just nonsense.
I didn't commend on that. I commented on you replying "no" to the question "If your boss tells you you'll lose your job if you don't have sex with him, and you quit to avoid that, would you disagree with the statement that you were forced to quit?" after which you edited all your previous comments. The first of which originally just read "force?" (a single word) which leads me to believe, along with your original response to the point I initially commented on, that you didn't have that point in mind. Also, "tust" in "force people to trust the medical industry" clearly means something along the lines of "to commit or place in one's care or keeping."[0] But that point is irrelevant because you made up that point after my initial response.
I edited my first comment to clarify and nothing else and YOU commented on that.
We can throw dictionaries on each other however we want for me it still stands as long as you have agency over yourself nobody can force you to do anything. If they take away your agency we can talk about your arguments. But looking at your last comment you are not arguing in good faith so the discussion is over me.
>I edited my first comment to clarify and nothing else
You edited "No, words have meanings" to "No, words have specific meanings that should accurately reflect the nuances of the situation at hand." You also edited "So?" (single word) to 'So? "Force to trust" like op wrote made absolutely no sense.'
>for me it still stands as long as you have agency over yourself nobody can force you to do anything.
It can and often does mean that though. Here's a list of 170,000 books using the phrase "forced to trust"
Both edits are for clarity and don't change the meaning of the comments... and both edits are not in our comment chain. You seem to have another agenda here and I really won't entertain it anymore. We have different views of what force means. One is rather clear and the other one is nitpicking to get an agenda across. Nobody forced anyone to get vaccinated and nobody forced anyone to blindly trust medical professionals. There are billions of people who didn't get vaccinated. You might want it to be but it's not the reality we live in.
Reality is what doesn't change if you stop believing in it.
The first edit I mentioned is in this comment chain and the second one was in response to my post in a different chain.
>Nobody forced anyone to get vaccinated
Really? This is trivially false. For example vaccination was extensively mandated in several countries by law, for example some provinces in China.[0] In the US certain states require proof of vaccination for certain activities. For example in New York vaccination is required to go to school.[1] Perhaps you meant "not all people were forced to get vaccinated?" That is not being debated here. In any case I never even made an argument about this point until now. And in any case I don't feel too strongly about whether "force" is the right word to describe vaccine mandates. My only points were that if your boss tells you you'll lose your job if you don't have sex with him he has forced you to quit (assuming you cannot get him fired, for example if you have no proof he said that and will continue harassing you) and secondly that "forced to trust" is not complete nonsense.
>You seem to have another agenda here
You're the one that tried to say that a boss extorting sex isn't considered forcing you to quit your job in order to maintain your position. My point was actually fairly clear and not even about vaccination.
>One is rather clear and the other one is nitpicking to get an agenda across.
I would agree except you're not even nitpicking you're just claiming that whatever you decide "force" means is the one that OP must hold by as opposed to "throwing dictionaries" at the problem.
If your boss sexually harasses or extorts you, you take legal action immediately, you don't quit.
China? Really? ¯\_(?)_/¯
I won't delve into the possibility that you might have experienced inconvenience had you not been vaccinated. It appears that you're primarily concerned with your own interests and failed to grasp the broader implications during the COVID-19 pandemic, a perspective you seem to maintain even now. The choice was yours*.
*Except if you were residing under totalitarian regimes. Where they might actually forced you to get vaccinated.
There's a commonly understood definition of "force" among the general population, which you and op are attempting to distort by cherry-picking definitions from various dictionaries, often focusing on the less common usages found at the bottom of these entries. (If you go back and think about your china argument you might just understand this.)
As I previously stated, engaging in further discussion with you is unlikely to yield any meaningful results. bye.
>If your boss sexually harasses or extorts you, you take legal action immediately, you don't quit.
It's a hypothetical.
>China? Really? ¯\_(?)_/¯
You mentioned billions of people. So your argument was clearly not limited to the US. Or you just didn't make the point well.
>which you and op are attempting to distort by cherry-picking definitions from various dictionaries, often focusing on the less common usages found at the bottom of these entries.
One of the dictionaries is an ESL dictionary. It gives words as they are used and it gives the usage I quoted as the first definition.[0] The reason that the usage in the other dictionaries have the usages I quoted at the bottom is becasue they all give the noun form of "force" first.
Words have specific meanings that should accurately reflect the nuances of the situation at hand. You can write your comment without emotional exasperation or maybe not...
If someone didn't get vaccinated then the government would start basically attacking basic human rights. In particular rights of freedom work, assemble, free travel, freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to practice a religion, etc (and to maintain their own health I might add) which turn up in some pretty hefty documents like the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Once those things are bargaining chips that you get to have for following a government policy, the policy is forced. This might make you uncomfortable. Indeed, it probably should.
Freedom means you don't have to trust hastily developed medical products. They can't have done any long term studies on the COVID vaccines yet because not enough time has passed for one to happen yet.
If someone doesn't trust the vaccine providers they shouldn't be forced to take it. You could have figured that out by analysing the specific meanings that the words have. That position on the topic of vaccines is neither rare nor subtle.
And the sentence still looks fine to me, I don't know why you think that phrase isn't kosher.
As trust is fundamentally a voluntary act. Trust involves choosing to rely on or have confidence in someone or something. By its very nature, trust cannot be forced.
1. Trust is a personal choice: It's a decision made by an individual based on their own judgment, experiences, and perceptions.
2. Trust requires vulnerability: When we trust, we willingly make ourselves vulnerable, believing the other party will not take advantage of that vulnerability.
3. Trust is built over time: It's typically developed through consistent positive interactions and experiences, not through coercion.
4.Forced compliance is not trust: If someone is compelled to act as if they trust something, it's not genuine trust but rather obedience under duress.
5. Trust can be withdrawn: Because trust is given voluntarily, it can also be taken away by the person who gave it. No one else can remove your ability to trust or distrust.
Ah, well circling back to the "words have meaning" point, that isn't a comprehensive understanding of what trust means - you're overly loading it on one aspect of the word. For example, Cambridge dictionary includes the meaning "to hope and expect that something is true" [0].
Trust doesn't require a personal choice built up over time. Some types of trust do, but that isn't a factor here as you can detected from the context. Trust is actually quite a flexible concept - you can catch some other interesting applications in security with ideas like "trusted systems" which people also may not trust in the personal sense even though they will agree that the system is trusted. That leads to awkward situations where a system can be a trusted system even if it is known to be compromised. You also get interesting things like "Trust" in the legal sense that showcase a similar flexibility.
Just to preempt a possible next comment, if you identify that one reading of a word doesn't make sense in context, the reasonable thing to do is to try the alternate readings to see which ones fit.
I will just annotate that with the observation that at the equivalent point (~4 years) into oxycodone's history I doubt it was well known to be addictive. Wiki suggests it was a "Miracle Drug of the 1930s" and they didn't get nervous about it until the 1970s [0].
And I doubt OxyContin came with the liability waivers that I seem to recall the COVID vaccines having.
That is a fairly safe base case - but would you have seen the opioid epidemic coming that resulted in this Supreme Court lawsuit? These things are being proscribed by reasonable doctors as painkillers and appear to have done more rather serious damage.
I will cheekily note that you wouldn't have been following the science if you did, these things were safe, effective, FDA approved and administered by the experts.
Thank you. For my purpose as a reader it is editorial incompetence that the article neither provided that link, nor the name of the case to make it easy to lookup.
It's really painful when you've got coverage of state court cases where you have neither the case name nor the court it was filed in nor the docket nor any document nor anything that would let you figure any of this out.
This is my gripe with regular news. Science paper? No link. New law bill? No link. Someone made an hour-long speech? 30 second cut, no link to the full speech. Is it almost as if they'd rather we didn't see their sources?
A more cynical take is that it isn't editorial incompetence, it's an editorial decision. Once you notice it, it's hard not to notice how often you aren't given the sources or ways to further confirm stories, especially those that might be controversial.
I find the Supreme court decisions to be fascinating reads and overall much more interesting and complicated than most news services make them out to be.
Lol, they're also quite ideological. Don't fall for the trap that these people are enlightened philosophers. They have a lot of flaws in their own right.
Ask good lawyers about their thoughts on SCOTUS Justices, it's not always peachy.
Even if they are ideological, they are not usually political hacks (cough Thomas cough).
Honestly though, for as much flak as this current court gets, there is at least a certain consistency where they at least mostly stick to arguments about the letter of the law. In previous courts you would see some truly wild written arguments about how, like, a specific word in the Commerce Clause or whatever could mean whatever you wanted it to.
Haha. Sure. Like when they make up Qualified Immunity which is a completely made up special status/protection given by the Courts, not by law or common law but abusing the concept of Judicial immunity and expanding it to all governmental officials.
My bad. I can no longer edit/delete my comment to fix it.
I haven't responded that way in the past but was responded to that way a couple of days ago and guess it took hold. I can see why you have to clamp down on it, it easily spreads.
Most of the current legitimacy damage stems from a perception that the Court has members that are arbitrating law over bribery while simultaneously engaging in behavior that looks suspiciously coercive. I think that's a major issue, but it's a bit orthogonal to the question of whether they use sound judgment to arrive at rulings like, say, US v. Rahimi 22-915.
(The other source, to my eyes, of questions of legitimacy is that the appointment of three judges in a narrow amount of time under one party's dominance of Congress and the Presidency has fundamentally shifted the "flavor" of the way the Court interprets law. Rather than bringing their legitimacy into question, that's rather the point of the process by which the US appoints Justices and the length of their term; the Court's "personality" is stable over long stretches of time, but it can shift and it does go through eras. People complaining about the new era don't seem to realize that for many Americans, the previous era was strange times that called to question in their minds the legitimacy of the Court).
And honestly, while we like to lump them into "conservative" and "liberal" camps for simplicity, it's easy to get the correlation wrong. Like anyone else, their moral and legal philosophies might make them lean one way or another politically, not the other way around. Even for the most extremely political justices, to hear them expound on the legal principles of federalism or human rights is very fascinating.
It's easy to forget that, while they are political appointees, they have to have fairly long careers as acting judges to even qualify for the appointments.
Save for at least one current sitting Justice: Amy Coney Barrett. They only had ~3 years of experience being a judge, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (2017–2020), before being nominated to the Supreme Court. Yes, they have experience in other law related roles, however your comment explicitly stated, "...fairly long careers as acting judges...," so that is what I'm speaking to.
> It's easy to forget that, while they are political appointees, they have to have fairly long careers as acting judges to even qualify for the appointments.
This is objectively false. There are no requirements like this and there have been many appointees throughout history without many, if any, qualifications for the role.
Liberal vs. conservative has always been the wrong take. The stronger dividing line is textualism vs pragmatism.
In fact Scalia famously said this coming from a textualist perspective which I think most people can agree with even if they hate him: “ If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach.”
This seems absolutely correct, but when is the last time ypu ever saw a commentator observe this? Critique has been reduced to “i dont like the effect so the interpretation of the law is wrong.” Put the other way, a fair observer must eventually say “i really hate the conclusion but they got it right.”
>The stronger dividing line is textualism vs pragmatism.
They should be doing what is right for the American people. There are clearly laws on the books today which infringe on individual freedoms (abortion), harm society as a whole (citizens united), etc.
The 'justice system' is supposed to be the government branch protecting the little guy from powerful elites. I've not often seen that. I see the opposite. If the legal system won't deliver justice, well, people are going to take things into their own hands whether that's 'justice' or not. If you bury your child, and you see the people ultimately responsible get away with it, I'm not sure I could really blame them.
Strong but respectful disagree from me. Justice is supposed to be blind. And if right and wrong were so clear cut there would no need for democracy at all.
The court is not a democratic institution and exists to uphold the textual rule of law as determined by lawmakers. If a pragmatic ruling by the court can circumvent a politically logjammed congress, so be it. But the courts deciding what is right or wrong for the American people is a very slippery slope that leads to disaster. And a court that just rules against the (existing) elite every time is a junta.
Both sides have their merit, but some people want to have it both ways - do you want pragmatic judges or more democracy? They can often be mutually exclusive.
> The stronger dividing line is textualism vs pragmatism.
Except when it came to "textualism vs pragmatism", I've seen that the "textualist" judges have, in many cases, no problem being "pragmatists" when it suits their desired outcome on an issue.
For example, when Scalia dissented in some famous gay rights cases (I'm thinking of Lawrence v Texas specifically) his basic disgust at the thought of same sex relations was laid bare. Ironically, in Lawrence v Texas his dissent was basically correct - striking down laws against sodomy was a step towards gay marriage - but the gist of his argument was that gay marriage was such a god awful, horrible, unthinkable thing that any decision that allowed it must be prima facie wrong. He was basically warning "This decision will force us to allow gay marriage" as if, instead of that being a good thing, it was akin to allowing the apocalypse.
Scalia also authored the 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, a major second amendment case that held, for the first time, that individuals had a private right to own guns (not just "a well-regulated militia"). Read up on that case, as tons of "conservative" judicial scholars argued that it was "pulled from thin air" just as much as Roe v Wade was. From the Wikipedia page:
> Richard Posner, judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, compares Heller to Roe v. Wade, stating that it created a federal constitutional right that did not previously exist, and he asserts that the originalist method – to which Justice Antonin Scalia claimed to adhere – would have yielded the opposite result of the majority opinion.
>> The text of the amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or other sport, or for the defense of person or property. It is doubtful that the amendment could even be thought to require that members of state militias be allowed to keep weapons in their homes, since that would reduce the militias' effectiveness. Suppose part of a state's militia was engaged in combat and needed additional weaponry. Would the militia's commander have to collect the weapons from the homes of militiamen who had not been mobilized, as opposed to obtaining them from a storage facility? Since the purpose of the Second Amendment, judging from its language and background, was to assure the effectiveness of state militias, an interpretation that undermined their effectiveness by preventing states from making efficient arrangements for the storage and distribution of military weapons would not make sense.
Pretty much. He also authored an opinion today against the EPA's good neighbor rule. Directly continuing the work of his mother, who was head of the EPA during the early Reagan years until she was forced to resign as even within that administration she was flagrantly unwilling to do her job of enforcing regs to prevent pollution while also illegally utilizing the power of the office for personal politics.
Always strikes me as weird that the clear through line from her time in power to his own jurisprudence on environmental issues doesn't come up more.
I totally agree. I have also been captivated by the oral arguments. To the extent that I find myself pre-researching some of the cases' background beforehand. Makes for compelling entertainment when you have a sense on why the justices approach questioning the way that they do. Beats any podcast I know.
They're also eminently readable, which (to me) shows the massive skill of whoever writes these. The fact that I, a layman, can easily understand them speaks to the quality of the writing.
Or to how unexceptionally average most of the judges actually are.
If you're willing to entertain these are skilled brilliant jurists with some kind of mystical levels of elucidation, maybe they're actually just people who failed upward into a job with a fancy robe
The difficulty of understanding a text isn't proportional to how skilled the person is at their job (I think it's inversely proportional, if anything), but to how familiar a field is.
It doesn't take a good developer to describe a system in a way that nobody can understand it. It does take a great one to describe a system in a way that a layman can understand it.
If you've been around the valley long enough to hear pitches, you've surely met some remarkable bullshitters who can convincingly describe with clarity and crispness something that is actually nonsense and simply is not real.
There's a group of attorneys that host a podcast on SCOTUS that present a pretty convincing case for this interpretation, at least to me. Here's the most recent episode
I studied international politics in college and as a result I read not only a ton of news, but often the primary sources they were based on, and I was shocked by the amount of omissions and oversimplifications. I've never understood people who don't "trust" the news given that it is provably accurate and factual nearly all of the time. But I've long despised the arrogance from mainstream media wherein they confidently decide what to print and what not to print with no explanation or accountability on those decisions.
IANAL but most contested Supreme Court decisions I've read (going all the way back to AP gov class) sounded like they could have reasonably been decided either way depending on who had control over the court. The law is ambiguous and complex enough that there's just so many logical ways to approach a decision and little in the way of prioritizing or disambiguating them. Whatever their bias, judges have lots of ways of reasoning themselves to their predetermined outcome. This is true up and down the courts but most judges are at least somewhat worried about their reputation and their record with appeals courts, which at least mitigates their biases but the SCOTUS is free to do whatever it wants.
As much as each side likes to bloviate about originalism and activist judges, SCOTUS often decides at the whims of ideology because the law gives them lots of room.
This decision was 4 conservative + 1 liberal vs 2 conservative + 2 liberal. The majority decision and the dissenting opinion were both written by conservative Trump era appointees.
Bankruptcy is a unique creature. It's created directly in the Constitution as a federal system. Bankruptcy is inherently "equitable," which means that judicial decisions are guided by case-by-case considerations of fairness rather than strict legal rules. Bankruptcy courts have wide latitude and discretion to basically do what makes sense in each context.
Here, the majority overturned something the bankrutpcy code approved, because, in its view, the remedy of a non-consensual third-party release conflicted with the structure of the Bankruptcy Code. The dissent disagreed, pointing out there were no express prohibitions on the relief the bankruptcy court had granted, and explaining that, in their view, the bankruptcy court should have been given discretion to authorize such a release if ultimately it would make the creditors better off. Basically the majority was focused on the structure of the Code, while the dissent was focused on the practical fact that the creditors would probably get more money from the Sacklers this way than if they had pursued direct lawsuits against them.
Thanks, that word helps clarify my major problem with handling this as a bankruptcy case. I don't see the destroyed lives as an issue of creditors, I see them as victims. Calling off the corporations coming after an individual for unpaid debt is a whole different issue than barring individuals from going after a corporation for actual injuries.
It seems to come down to whether the sentence "[A chapter 11 bankruptcy plan may] include any other appropriate provision not inconsistent with the applicable provisions of this title" means "A plan can contain anything anyone can imagine as reasonable as long as it isn't expressly forbidden" or "A plan can contain other types of provisions that follow the same general theme as the concrete list given just before this sentence".
The Sacklers argued that the law says they can take away other peoples rights to sue them, since the law says these bankruptcy plans can include "anything", and the majority opinion of SCOTUS was that that's not the right way to read the law.
It also seems to turn whether the Sacklers seek a third-party “release,” which is precedented, or “discharge,” which is not. (The Court also assumes Purdue’s indemnification of the Sacklers will not hold, which would allow the Sacklers to drain Purdue as they fight the various claims against them.)
Interestingly, the argument for is textual. The argument against is pragmatic. Both sides claim history, which again, turns on the difference between a discharge and release, a distinction I cannot get my head around.
> the law says we can take away other people's rights to sue us as part of a bankruptcy settlement
As the dissent notes, third-party releases are part of the law. The turn is on whether the Sacklers are having third-party liabilities discharged versus released.
The solution may be in re-drafting the Plan so it’s more clearly a release. That might mean the Sacklers can be sued for fraud, but not other things.
> If this decision was just about third-party releases, it wouldn't be before the court. And you know that.
What is the difference between a discharge and release as it relates to the “appropriate powers” clause this case is about? You seem to have clarity the Court’s members couldn’t find.
You, then: As the dissent notes, third-party releases are part of the law.
Gets called out for over-simplifying the case.
You, now: What is the difference between a discharge and release as it relates to the §1123(b)(6) “any other appropriate provision” power this case is about?
Indeed. Maybe next time, stop pretending there isn't more to it.
The argument for is a mixture of textualism and moral repugnance at the idea of letting the Sacklers keeping billions in profits they made from killing a quarter of a million people. I suspect the second part was strengthened to swing Jackson's vote and aside from her, it's a fairly standard split.
The law surrounding Chapter 11 reorganisation plans only covers the relationships and responsibilities between debtors and creditors. It doesn't say anything about third parties.
But it does include a term saying a plan "may" also "include any other appropriate provision not inconsistent with the applicable provisions of this title" - subject to the approval of a judge.
Applying the broadest possible interpretation of this catch-all wording would produce absurd results - a bankruptcy plan would be more powerful than the constitution itself. So courts have to figure out just how broad an interpretation to apply.
> law surrounding Chapter 11 reorganisation plans only covers the relationships and responsibilities between debtors and creditors. It doesn't say anything about third parties
Yes it does. It covers third-party releases—there is ample precedent for that. The Court held this isn’t a release, but a discharge. (Idk.)
Chapter 11 bankruptcy law includes a "catchall" provision that “may” also “include any other appropriate provision not inconsistent with the applicable provisions of this title.”
Historically bankruptcy courts have wide discretion to make any "appropriate" provisions, and this document is an argument about what the limits of appropriate include.
What really stuck out to me was how soft the opinions were. Especially the dissent. Rather than dry legal reasoning, it was argued much like a politician would. Maybe this happens fairly often, but usually when I read the actual decision from SCOTUS is is very specific and sober, even if I disagree with the conclusion.
For those claiming the Supreme Court is a political institution, I'd like to note that this was indeed a 5-4 decision.
But one with Justices in the majority who were appointed by Biden, Trump, Bush 43, and Bush 41, and in the minority who were appointed by Bush 43, Obama, and Trump.
It was Jackson, Gorsuch, Barrett, Alito, and Thomas in the majority and Sotomayor, Kagan, Roberts, and Kavanaugh in the minority.
And I don't think it's a singular judgement. If anything, the "ideological split" types of decisions are rarer, so it's more accurate to say that a few decisions on hot political topics doesn't mean that the SCOTUS is increasingly political.
I guess this is not a topic that is politically divisive, so the judges were free to vote as they saw fit. Which doesn't say anything about how they will vote on other topics, like abortion, environmental protection etc.
I'm trying to convey how legal conservatives think, as someone who is one. I am, on many policy issues, quite liberal. I think rich people should pay more taxes, people should drive EVs, etc. But ultimately I care more about the rules--especially the rules about who makes decisions and where power is allocated--than I do about what people or outcomes. I'd rather see 3C of global warming than administrative agencies operating contrary to the tripartite system of government the Founders designed. I care more about the Constitutional rules for allocating power to states than I do about what citizens of those states might do with that power. Etc.
Issues like abortion and environmental laws just happen to map onto particular legal issues as an accident of history. If state-by-state legislation leads to widely legalized abortion, for example, I don't think most legal conservatives would support a Roe-like judicial decision ginning up a "right to fetal life" (which actually exists in Germany). If Congress passed environmental laws itself, instead of outsourcing it to an executive agency, I don't think most legal conservatives would be looking for ways to second-guess Congress's judgment.
You actually see this in Europe. The legal system in European countries tends to be pretty boring, because they have more social cohesion and can legislate things according to the rules, rather than hacking up the system. The equivalent of Roe, for example, doesn't exist in continental Europe. In an irony, Emmanuel Macron criticized Dobbs when it came down. But France never had anything like Roe. And after Dobbs, France passed a constitutional amendment addressing abortion, which is exactly how legal conservatives would say you should handle the issue!
I think the most redeeming quality of Americans--an inheritance from the British--is that they'll jump off a bridge if they're told to do so by a court and the required procedures have been followed. Rule following, more than anything else, what separates advanced democracies from the third world country I come from. And in the long run it's what will save the most lives and lead to the most prosperity and social harmony.
Nice edits. I’m going to assume your original remarks reflect your true beliefs on the matter.
Too bad you took out the part about “no one will be talking about Dobbs in 10 years” because I was going to suggest you put that bet on one of those futures betting sites. That would be an interesting debate.
Both examples are expressing the same belief about Dobbs! Yes, I believe the social harmony from allowing these questions to be decided democratically outweighs individual "rights."
What about Ireland? Abortion was illegal in Ireland until 2018, and then it was put to the public for vote in a referendum. In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights refused to overturn Ireland's abortion ban (though it did find a due process violation with respect to the lack of procedures for qualifying for a pre-existing exception for life-threatening conditions). That's how the law works in civilized democracies. People make decisions on social issues, not judges.
A single vote means little and being partisan doesn't mean 0% voting with the other side. By this logic Congress is not a partisan institution given that people from both sides frequently vote together, but anyone who remotely follows national politics knows that it's a deeply partisan time.
We had a decision on the SEC vacating some of its enforcement powers, 6-3 with only the 3 liberal justices dissenting.
We had this decision, which was 5-4, although it wasn't a clear ideological split.
We had a 5-4 decision vacating an EPA regulation, with the 3 liberal justices and one of the more moderate conservative justices dissenting.
We had a 6-3 decision on the EMTALA-abortion decision, with the 3 most conservative justices dissenting. (Technically it's per curiam, and the "majority" opinion is unsigned. But every justice signed onto a concurrence or a dissent, so we know exactly how every justice voted in this case).
Yesterday, we had a decision on social media which was 6-3, with the 3 most conservative justices dissenting.
Yesterday, we also had a decision on bribery which was 6-3, with the 3 liberal justices dissenting.
Out of the most recent 6 decisions, we have 4 decisions that clearly evidence a 3-3-3 ideological split between 3 liberal justices, 3 more moderate conservative justices, and 3 very conservative justices that would be able to pretty fully predict how they would vote on the cases, and there's another case that it's partially predictive on (a 5-4 that peels off either Roberts, Kavanaugh, or Barrett doesn't contradict this lineup). Furthermore, the one case that the ideological breakdown doesn't work on is the case that is the least politically charged (it's literally resolving a circuit split, as opposed to please-intervene-in-this-politically-charged-case).
So yeah, this doesn't disprove the thesis that SCOTUS has become increasingly politicized over the past few years.
They didn't "overturn" this "corruption law." This was a prosecution under 18 USC 666, which is titled "theft or bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds." In this case, the question was framed to the Supreme Court whether 18 USC 666 applies to so-called "gratuity" payments. That framing was because the prosecution in the case below could not prove that the defendant had anticipated a payment in the future when he undertook the official act. (The defendant himself maintained that the payment was for subsequent consulting.) Federal law makes a distinction between those two things.
You can still bring an 18 USC 666 case for bribery, you just need to prove that the payment had some ability to influence the official act.
In this particular case a mayor rigged the competition for a garbage truck contract so that one particular company would win it. That company then overcharged the city and gave a kickback in the form of $13,000 to the mayor. The Supreme Court said this was fine and let the mayor off of the hook.
If you can't prosecute with this level of evidence the law is effectively dead.
That's not what the Supreme Court decided, and its extremely misleading to suggest that.
At trial, the government alleged the mayor had "rigged the competition." But the government argued, and the jury was instructed, and the Seventh Circuit agreed, that the government did not need to prove that. Because, under the Seventh Circuit's view of the law, it did not matter whether the subsequent payment actually influenced his official act. So on appeal, the Seventh Circuit upheld the jury verdict on the assumption the government did not need to prove that the competition was actually rigged.
So the case that came up to the Supreme Court didn't have the issue of whether he rigged the competition. The jury was told it didn't matter, and we don't know what the jury would have decided had they been told something else. The question before the Supreme Court was only whether 18 USC 666 requires proof that the payment did or could influence the official act. It did not consider the factual scenario under which he rigged the competition because we don't know if the jury would have found he did that.
Now the case goes back to the trial court to see if the government wants to retry the case, where they actually have to prove corrupt influence.
> The question before the Supreme Court was only whether 18 USC 666 requires proof that the payment did or could influence the official act.
And the Supreme Court's finding is that it did not because the payment happened after the action. Certainly corrupt officials in the future will never figure out a way to exploit this loophole.
This isn't the first corruption case before the court where the standard of proof seems to be "they need to write 'This is a bribe' on the notes line of the check for it to count".
> And the Supreme Court's finding is that it did not because the payment happened after the action.
It doesn’t have to do with the timing of the payment. It has to do with whether the defendant had a corrupt motive at the time he took the official act.
The government could have prosecuted this case under the same statute by saying: “he knew he was going to get paid later so he steered the contracts to this company.” They had the evidence to pursue that theory of the case. The jury could have inferred under the circumstances that the after the fact payment effected the official act. If they had done that this Supreme Court decision would’ve had no effect on the outcome.
The government instead made the choice to prosecute this case by having the jury instructed that it did not matter what the defendant was thinking at the time of the official act. That was the government’s choice.
This case just means that when the government brings a case under 18 U.S.C. 666–which is titled “theft or bribery”—they actually have to prove bribery, which requires corrupt motive at the time of the official act.
If the government wants to target the appearance of impropriety that can result from payments for official acts that weren’t corrupt at the time, there’s different laws for that (18 U.S.C. 201(c)).
Politicization and ideological polarization are two different things. Take Dobbs for example. That was an ideologically polarized decision, not a political one. Roe is the product of a judicial philosophy that conservatives think is fundamentally wrong, even if they don't oppose abortion. For half a century, conservatives were unified in saying they would overturn Roe, even though--as we have seen subsequently--there was a lot of intra-party conflict about what abortion law should actually be. Dobbs hurt the party that appointed the justices that voted for it. Trump would probably be cruising to the election in 2024 if Biden didn't have that card to play.
Most of the cases you identify split along ideological rather than political lines.
> We had a decision on the SEC vacating some of its enforcement powers, 6-3 with only the 3 liberal justices dissenting.
What the case actually held was that the executive branch imposing fines without a court order violated the Seventh Amendment. It's a separation of powers case, and reflects the same ideological debate about separation of powers that we have had for 100 years. Do you believe that the Constitutional three-branch structure should be respected, or is it obsolete in light of modern society?
> We had a 5-4 decision vacating an EPA regulation, with the 3 liberal justices and one of the more moderate conservative justices dissenting.
This is an executive agency decisionmaking case. Again, same debate we've been having for 100 years.
> We had a 6-3 decision on the EMTALA-abortion decision, with the 3 most conservative justices dissenting.
This was probably the most idiosyncratic and ideological case, but it's not political at all. It's Thomas and Alito willing to die on an ideological hill, not caring that virtually nobody in their party wants to follow them t here.
> Yesterday, we also had a decision on bribery which was 6-3, with the 3 liberal justices dissenting.
It was actually a decision on whether someone could be prosecuted under a bribery statute for a payment he received after taking the official act. Where other parts of federal criminal law make an express distinction between bribery (which corrupt official acts) and gratuities (which create the appearance of corruption but can't directly influence official acts).
This one is probably the most overtly political. Liberals voting to expand the scope of criminal law and conservatives voting to narrow it is weird. But it's worth pointing out that the Court's conservative wing has a strong libertarian streak these days, especially Gorsuch.
That is not a representative sample of Supreme Court decisions. This is one of the last few opinion days of the year, the opinions being released are the most contentious ones the court is dealing with.
Of the first 6 decisions of the year, 4 were unanimous, 1 was per curiam, and one was a 6-3 split with the dissenters being Gorsuch, Sotomayor and Jackson.
Those 6 decisions would also not be a representative sample.
I won't argue against the Supreme Court being a political institution. However, I do think the court is more nuanced than popular opinion realizes. The article below shows a nice graphic of how often justices rule together on non-unanimous decisions.
> For those claiming the Supreme Court is a political institution, I'd like to note that this was indeed a 5-4 decision.
Is there a name for this type of fallacy, in which a single data point is used to argue that a global trend does not exist? (Another prominent example is "it snowed somewhere, therefore climate change is not real.")
Being a judge in the US is a political job. There's not even a universal requirement that one has to be a lawyer.
However, "political" how liberals are using it currently is a euphemism for "current disputes between the Democrat and Republican party management." If you don't accept that framing, or assume that these people are wind-up toys set into motion by the Presidents that appointed them, things can be very political without this split that the punditocracy project onto the court.
Whether bankruptcy courts can dictate a settlement for something this wide-reaching, and simply indemnify someone against future lawsuits is a very political question. What if the courts had settled with the Sacklers for $10, and indemnified them against future suits? Why are the bankruptcy courts allowed to improvise restrictions against what other courts and other victims are allowed to do?
It's redolent of one of the most disturbing elements of Epstein's first conviction, during which they immunized unidentified, unindicted co-conspirators. In order to avail yourself of this immunity, you had to be guilty of child trafficking with Epstein. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been a co-conspirator. Can a court name a sacrifice to suffer for others?
I'm not concerned in this case that some of the victims' lawyers were clamoring for it. Those lawyers could very well be paid for by people with another agenda. Why should the Sacklers be left with anything? The main guilty parties in their family are dead - now we're arguing with the people who are inheriting the proceeds of the crime. Why argue? Just seize it all; the damage far outstrips their worth, and their worth isn't even from their own labor, it's inherited.
Meanwhile, the descendants of slaves are mocked over 400 years of stolen wealth. And we can't even take the proceeds of the most horrific crimes from people who don't even work for a living, and will likely be left wealthy if every dime of that inheritance is taken away.
Interestingly the same kinds of tactics used to push opiates on the general public are still being used to push amphetamine analogs - but the death rate from amphetamine addiction/overdose is much much lower (>1000X lower) than that from opiate addiction/overdose so it doesn't really hit the headlines, and arguably is not as much of a concern.
From a libertarian point of view, mood- and mind-altering substance use should be the citizen's choice, but for this to not result in an epidemic of addiction, it would require a well-educated public who understands that whatever short-term apparent benefit a drug (including alcohol and nicotine and caffeine) delivers, there's always a tax that must be paid afterwards, and use must be kept below the addictive threshold, meaning if you start needing more of the drug to get the same effect, the only rational thing to do is to stop using the drug until your tolerance goes back to zero.
This of couse goes against consumer society norms, where the concept of 'less is more' is almost a heresy.
I guess I'm not sure what the point of the comparison is. If the death rate from opioid addiction were 1000x lower, I would happily bite the bullet and say Purdue did nothing wrong. Chronic pain is real and terrible - it would be great to have a solution where the downside risk is no worse than an Adderall dependency.
In my experience, people who use amphetamines (and cocaine) regularly start making very bad decisions, and heavy use leads to amphetamine psychosis. A very public example of this was the behavior of the SBF / FTX / Alameda operation, where by several accounts regular amphetamine use was the norm. That doesn't mean it should be illegal, but I'd avoid associating with anyone I knew had an amphetamine or cocaine dependency.
The problem with mind altering substances is they can short circuit your rational thinking. So you can start with the most well-considered decision process ever and still end up addicted. In fact, this doesn't even require a substance. Gambling is plenty addictive to many.
There's a kind of fallacy to thinking that sufficient education can counter biological human desires and impulses in all cases.
That's the authoritarian view - people don't know what's good for them, so their behavior needs to be controlled by the state as informed by a small group of elites who themselves are somehow free from the influence of those biological human desires and impulses... which is why drug testing as a condition of employment was never implemented for political candidates, heads of bureaucratic government agencies, or corporate CEOs.
>a small group of elites who themselves are somehow free from the influence of those biological human desires and impulses...
They don't need to be. A person addicted to drugs is perfectly capable of creating laws prohibiting drug use.
The "impulse" equivalent for a lawmaker would be that once they feel withdrawal, they will spontaneously pass a law allowing drug use again.
Since (luckily) passing a law is far too complex to happen spontaneously, this scenario cannot occur.
ETA:
>which is why drug testing as a condition of employment was never implemented for political candidates, heads of bureaucratic government agencies, or corporate CEOs.
If drug use is "only" prevented for the 99% of people who do not fill these roles, that is still a massive improvement.
Another thing to note is that the scheduling of the substances you speak of (and other non-scheduled like ozempic for example) merely puts them behind a prescription paywall--the wealthy have easy access to beneficial medicine and few to no consequenses from their use, whether that be criminal (possession or behavioral problems under the influence) or the cost of resulting health and addiction issues. Resulting in the non-wealthy suffering exponentially more.
It's very important that these societal and monetary debts are not only paid out, but go to the right people.
Difference is the death rate from prescription ADHD meds is zero, and they’re not addictive like opiates.
I’m open to discussing the underlying problems that push people to take ADHD meds. Like the insane work life required to just maintain the same standard of lives as our parents generation, or modern devices eating our attention spans.
But limiting access to ADHD drugs is just going to affect the most vulnerable and the positive outcome is just for the benefit of Calvinist pushing their world view on the rest of us. Hey, while we’re at it let’s make caffeine a scheduled drug. It’s actually addicting, it’s long we half-life makes it more likely to effect sleep, and its vastly over consumed by everyone starting in middle school.
>Hey, while we’re at it let’s make caffeine a scheduled drug. It’s actually addicting, it’s long we half-life makes it more likely to effect sleep, and its vastly over consumed by everyone starting in middle school.
Are you talking about the Sacklers as individuals, a family unit, or in their capacity as decision-makers for Purdue? There seem to be a relatively complex set of incentives and options in each of these capacities.
And they'll get it - they stashed a lot of their gains overseas, and they'll keep those gains while continuing to live a lavish life amongst the elites of the world.
I lost a very close friend to opoid addiction, and Purdue was based one town over from where I grew up. I hope the entire Sackler family gets fined and taxed to the point of genuine destitute poverty, and then some. Genuine scum.
I think this is where the settlement went wrong. The Sacklers were going to remain billionaires after the $6B payout. In all real respects they were going to feel no pain. They already have way more money than any of them could hope to spend in their remaining years, and that really rubbed people the wrong way. With the immunity removed they will at least spend some of their retirement in court room after court room instead of sipping drinks on the deck of one of their many megayachts.
It sucks for the victims who are realistically not going to get any help before they die, but it does send a message that you can't kill thousands (probably millions) and get off scot free.
> WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday blew up the massive bankruptcy reorganization of opioid maker Purdue Pharma, finding that the settlement inappropriately included legal protections for the Sackler family, meaning that billions of dollars secured for victims is now threatened.
Does anyone find it strange that this is described as a loss for the victims?
"is now threatened" is not characterizing this as a loss for the victims. It's characterizing this as opening up the possibility of a loss for the victims, relative to what had been settled. That characterization seems accurate and relevant.
(This ruling also brings a certainty of delay for compensation, since negotiations for a settlement have to start anew, and with lower chances of success.)
Well, it is. The victims had a settlement agreement worth billions of dollars, which the Sackler family was going to willingly provide in exchange for legal protections.
Now that legal protections are off the table, it is very unlikely that any new settlement will be as generous, and in fact quite unlikely that any settlement will be achieved at all.
Not really, it will be played out in a number of separate cases and each case is in a weaker position separately simply due to scale and resources. The Sacklers have an estimated $1bn liquid available to fight these things.
The $6bn ruling was significant and not an amazing outcome for either side (so, a compromise).
Additionally most of the Sacklers are well into old age, so they'll probably die before losing $6bn.
It's a loss of ~1/2 of their net worth. That's significant.
They are now likely to pay much less by settling smaller individual cases, which will take significantly longer and cost claimants significantly more to pursue.
When they die (which will be soon, most of them are 75+) it'll become even more difficult to get anything.
The deal that was overruled was certainly not justice, but reality will likely be worse. There's no outcome that will render them not billionaires within their lifetimes.
predictably, the end of a long campaign of bad pr, and government pressure (which is now fairly deflated)
the settlement was also in the interest of the government, which may now end up with tens of thousands of separate suits to manage and $6bn less to help manage the crisis
don't get me wrong, the sacklers could end up worse off... but it's a big if and will take much much longer
> It's a loss of ~1/2 of their net worth. That's significant.
It's a gain of billions of dollars that everyone agrees they should not have had in the first place. That's significant.
It's pretty telling that literally nobody says that the Sackler family should actually have this money, just varying degrees of it being hard to claw back from them.
There's no strong legal structure to allow it, the US justice system strongly favors the rich and corporations. Loose consensus isn't enough if there's no legal mechanism to do so.
The deal was pragmatic in the absence of a clear path for actual consequences.
It would be easier to rally an angry mob at this point.
It sounds like you agree with me, since this is exactly a variation of it being hard to claw back, which is annoyingly analogous to letting rich people get away with whatever they want including theft and murder because trying is hard.
Even if that's the result (which is questionable), the Sacklers are almost all overseas and their assets are "hidden" in complex schemes. So, collection is as big a hurdle as coming to a reasonable judgement.
Victory is not guaranteed, and even if the victims do win, going to court takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. The victims agreed to the settlement because they preferred that option to going to court.
OK - but the individual payouts are going to be small and do little to compensate for the harm caused.
The primary goal for the suit is to punish the wrongdoing and disincentivize similar future behavior by others. Higher costs and uncertainty does that.
And to people whose lives were wrecked by addiction. Tens of thousands of dollars would be a welcome windfall to people on HN, but to these families it could even be life changing amounts of money. Sucks that their payout is now delayed indefinitely.
> Does anyone find it strange that this is described as a loss for the victims?
As the dissent notes, this decision means the victims won’t get money now. When is an open question, as well as whether it will be similar, more or less after litigation costs.
What is certain is the Sacklers will be hurt more. (Unless a couple bizarre legal maneuvres pay off, e.g. the Sacklers extinguishing liability by way of a 2004 indemnification agreement.) So in a sense, this is deterrence and retribution winning over restitution [1].
We can conclude the Sacklers are worse off right now given they (and the creditors) accepted the deal. They may be materially better off in the future. But the rest of their lives will be about this crap.
The Supreme court case was specifically about the $6 billion dollars the Sacklers committed to the bankruptcy fund. And this ruling says they are not allowed to contribute to it.
> Does anyone find it strange that this is described as a loss for the victims?
I can see it going both ways, yes: this means that 6 billion dollars are not immediately available for compensation.
On the other hand, certain states (Washington was one, if I recall) argued that 6 billion dollars was such a pitifully small amount (relative to the damage done) that they declined to accept compensation in hopes that future lawsuits would yield more.
I view this decision as rejecting the immediate compensation, but opening up possibility for greater compensation in the future (with obvious risks and delays).
> certain states (Washington was one, if I recall) argued that 6 billion dollars was such a pitifully small amount (relative to the damage done) that they declined to accept compensation
As the dissent notes, “all 50 state Attorneys General have signed on to this plan.” The holdouts were “a small group of Canadian creditors and one lone individual.”
I always thought of the Sackler carve-out as a scam. But the dissent gives me pause. This ruling trades restitution for retribution. In all likelihood, many classes of victims—such as small victims, small states and local governments—won’t see a penny, at least for years.
IMO the money is a pittance, sounds like a lot but it's just a fraction of what the federal government spends on any given day. We can afford to carve out the financial resources to help victims. The retribution is totally worth it, because it needs to be understood that behavior like this will get punished. It should be painful, not just the cost of doing business.
I agree, but absent John Stewart taking it up [1] were not paying out the victims, and I’m not a victim, so it’s easy to discount their desire for the $3,500 to $48k.
You may find the money a pittance, but the victims decided otherwise.
It seems the case that the interests of the victims/plaintiffs (e.g. compensation) may be different than the public at large (e.g. punishment).
If so, perhaps the interests of the public should be pursued by a different avenue than the civil case of the victims, which requires superseding the agency of the victims.
The case and settlement has almost nothing to do with solving the problem at a societal level, with either outcome being negligible.
Real progress would involve systemic changes to the treatment and causes of drug addiction, as well as medical treatment philosophy.
To hang the opioid epidemic on perdue is a gross oversimplification, essentially a scapegoating of a multifactorial problem. Perdue sold the same pills in Europe, but the US has an overdose rate 2,000% higher.
I think that was because they could more effectively market their "pain is bad mkay" strategy in the culturally and politically more homogeneous market that is the US.
The European healthcare market is completely different for each country in multiple dimensions. Be it political, the way insurance is structured, laws are setup and governmental agencies handle them. That means while it is entirely possible to sell the pills in Europe they won't be prescribed in the amounts necessary to jump start the "vibrant free market" for them the US has. So they are just an opioid that is prescribed in extreme cases.
I dont think the idea that patient pain is bad was unique to perdue and their drugs. Many European countries have private health insurance, with reimbursement quite similar to the US.
Like I said above, I think it would be extremely shallow thinking to claim that there is a single reason.
If I were to pick a leading difference, I would say that the US has embraced trained consumerism to a greater degree than most European countries. As such, the idea that a simple pill/product will make a problem go away has more traction, both with prescribers, patients, and abusers.
You see this difference manifest in many cultural and social forms, where people in the US are especially prone to "quick fix" marketing and products that offer escape and excitement through consumption.
This is one thing that leads into higher rates of substance abuse in the US than Europe. For example, the US has a higher rate of alcohol use disorder than most European countries, despite most of the countries having more permissive laws around alcohol and more consumption of it on average.
> To hang the opioid epidemic on perdue is a gross oversimplification
The only sane comment here. It's laughably ridiculous to call for retribution against a single family as if they were personally responsible for every overdose the country has seen.
I don't excuse their unethical and potentially criminal behavior, but I do think they way people talk about it is detached from reality. The corporate choices likely had some effect on the margin, but I dont think the appropriate disclosure around addiction potential and would have moved the needle much.
> As the dissent notes, “all 50 state Attorneys General have signed on to this plan.”
Thanks for the correction! I must have read about Washington States objection a while ago, and been unaware of a change in their position (since I first read about it)
Well, not a loss for the legal profession for sure :D
Will the victims come out with more in their pockets than they would have from this settlement? I guess we'll find out...
I blame the doctors too. I was a teen in the early/mid 2000s and even I knew about the addictiveness of oxycodone. It wasn't called hillbilly heroin for nothing.
Matt Levine has covered this several times in the past, worth reading. From memory, the Purdue family had put away their money in legally sheltered arrangements, so even an unfavorable decision (to the Sacklers) would likely not be able to claw back much money. The previous deal traded the risk of trial for a perceived as decent compensation. My read is that the majority in the supreme court disagreed that you can always financial-engineer your way out of trials
They were (apparently) sheltering money specifically to pay for personal legal damages, and they voluntarily offered it back during the bankruptcy proceedings in exchange for giving up their liability.
The court ruling is not about the legality of their financial shenanigans, but the authority of the bankruptcy court on deciding such matters.
Lawyers are fixated on the money for obvious reasons, but the money will never really fix what the Sacklers did (particularly for the many victims who are now dead.) Restitution is largely a farce and we should be focusing on retribution.
I'm really not sure what other retribution you're suggesting. There's always public lynching if that's what you're after, but we've kind of decided that is not a good idea in modern society
Because car manufacturers exist, and this isn't theoretical or a jab at cars themselves. We are 100% certain that people will die while using cars, and by cars. Vehicular manslaughter even has a high bar for real punishment precisely because driving a car has an inherent risk of killing others and that risk is legal to take on.
Knowing that some people using your product will die, and even that selling more of your product increases the deaths is something we're okay with. It's true of guns, red meat, skateboards, alcohol, lawn mowers, and industrial equipment — all sold for profit.
Except Purdue clearly stated that addiction was not an issue with their product. Car manufactures never say that death is no longer possible with their product. They blatantly misrepresented the dangers of their product in ways none of the other examples you listed come close.
They didn't though, they cited a medical journal article where an unaffiliated doctor reported the extremely low addiction rate. Which was true and misleading because short term opioid use addiction rates don't predict long term addiction rates — lying with statistics. And they should charged and convicted for this, in fact they already were. However, since 2001 every bottle of oxy has made no claim that it's less addictive than other opioids.
Basically, the original judge did a good job - the settlement plan was reasonable and widely popular. And the Sackler family being released from liability by putting billions of personal dollars into the payment fund meant more victims would get more money immediately.
With this ruling, the Sacklers are personally legally liable again - which may make you or I more happy, but this means that victims have to pursue a much harder and more expensive set of lawsuits to get money from the Sackler family. It also means the victims of the deal don't get a voice in the proceedings, and it may also make future payouts and bankruptcies harder if there is no reason to cooperate with the state.
> victims have to pursue a much harder and more expensive set of lawsuits to get money from the Sackler family
They also have to litigate away a 2004 indemnification agreement extended by Purdue to the Sacklers in 2004, which could result in litigation and liability draining the pot before pay-outs can begin.
Definitely more complicated than I first appreciated.
There will be people like Sacklers until we start putting them away and throwing away the key. We do need to put rich people in jail at least every now and again, if for no other reason than to demonstrate we're not a banana republic.
Unfortunately, vermin like the Sacklers have access to top lawyers. The two founding brothers are dead, so you won't be able to put them away; they are already put away, permanently.
However, their despicable offspring managed to flee the country with their ill-gotten gains; good luck finding them now.
My biggest beef with this case has been that people should not be allowed to just "buy" themselves out of jail. The US does not have a concept of "blood money" in its legal code (at least, not yet anyways). This agreement amounted to blood money, practically. Blood money != justice.
You're attacking a strawman, try steelmanning the argument to "rich people who commit crimes should go to jail every now and then". I think we can all agree.
Please don't cross into personal attack regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is.
Edit: Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? It looks like your account has been doing this repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> We do need to put rich people in jail at least every now and again, if for no other reason than to demonstrate we're not a banana republic
/s? Jailing people for being rich or poor is classic banana republic crap. (The legal o.g. was proscription [1]. The real o.g. is warlord saw you have stuff and no army. We literally invented government in large part to prevent this.)
It's best to avoid generic tangents in HN threads, especially generic flamewar tangents. They tend to make discussion more repetitive and therefore more tedious and eventually more nasty. This particular one has been repeated hundreds if not thousands of times in the past.
why would it be harder? wouldn't it just be the next family that tries to get away with crap like this will be scolded sooner?
it seeem like if you want people stop doing bad things you can't let them get away with bad things. here, the family was trying to get away with billions. The bankruptcy court said, "yay, ok". The Supreme Court said "no, not ok"
I don't understand the dissent. unless the dissent is friends of the family trying to spin.
It’s harder because it requires piercing the veil of protection of an LLC, a legal construct that is explicitly designed to limit liabilities. There are simply more legal hurdles to this.
Though I do agree with the conclusion that the bankruptcy court should not be able to grant immunity to the Sackler family. It feels deeply, deeply immoral
> harder because it requires piercing the veil of protection of an LLC
Source?
It’s harder because they’re indemnified by Purdue, and their individual liability is far from established. (The opinion and dissent both refer to a monolithic “Sacklers,” but they’re individuals and trusts and whatever.)
I think the argument is against the Sacklers personally and their actions, not based on their ownership stake of the LLC. So this wouldn’t involve piercing the veil.
Only if suitors were going against Sackler assets to pay off Purdue corporate stuff.
If you want money from the Purdue bankruptcy entity: you just file a claim while they still have money.
If you want money from the Sackler family: you need to lawyer up, prove a bunch of personal liability claims (which are very, very hard cases to win), and wait a long time. And hope they still have money.
While it may feel nice to eventually, maybe, be able to throw the Sackler family in jail, it basically just blows up the ability to do mass tort arbitration.
From the dissent, which even includes Sotomayor and Kagan:
"As a result of the Court’s decision, each victim and creditor receives the essential equivalent of a lottery ticket for a possible future recovery for (at most) a few of them. And as the Bankruptcy Court explained, without the non-debtor releases, there is no good reason to believe that any of the victims or state or local governments will ever recover anything."
> If you want money from the Purdue bankruptcy entity: you just file a claim while they still have money
And as the dissent notes, this class includes the Sacklers per their 2004 indemnification agreement. So we first need to nullify that to avoid the draining problem.
An important but frequently overlooked aspect of the law is that by the time the courts are involve it is often too late for there to truly be justice. Things have often happened that cannot be undone. Often parties that are at fault do not have the resources to pay their share of damages.
No matter what the court does in those situations someone is getting screwed.
The idea of the rule of law + the state's monopoly on violence is that you WILL cooperate with the state if the law says you should. It may even be worth some losses to keep that up.
What's the point of "restitution" if it came from the victims anyways? The Sacklers would have kept all of their ill-gotten gains under this settlement. The amount they'd be paying is practically just the interest from their earnings.
I have a hard time with the concept of retribution alone, but I think if it is phrased in terms of modeling societal standards and demonstrating to others that this behavior is unacceptable, it is still valuable to society. I guess you can mark that under "deterrence", but it's less about sending a signal to future would-be criminals, and more about communicating societal standards to the entire society at large.
justice from whom? Just because they got a prescription doesn't mean they lost complete body autonomy. The lack of personal responsibility regarding drugs around here is insane.
I'm not sure about the justice aspect, but I wouldn't underestimate how powerfully addicting some of these drugs can be to the point where it can override your "personal responsibility". Same thing with any substance like alcohol or cigarettes, gambling, over-eating, etc. It's very easy to slip into abuse and an addictive response and susceptibility isn't universal.
Opioids are highly addictive. If you're vulnerable and your doctor eagerly prescribes them because it feeds their wallet, you can easily loose control.
Expecting some personal agency is now victim blaming? Detoxing from opioids is not fatal. It sucks. But it's doable. You don't need to take your entire prescription. Take it while you're in pain.
If you were prescribed heroin and proceeded to take it, you would end up addicted and unable to quit. Full stop. It is exceedingly rare to overcome opiates, you underestimate them greatly.
The whole basis of this suit is that a Purdue subsidiary went out of their way to market these pills as non-addicting. "Personal responsibility" in this case clearly lies on those actors, not the addicts.
It's really not that complex. The question is NOT whether the plan was a good idea or reasonable. The question was whether the Bankruptcy Code authorized the bankruptcy judge to approve the plan. It doesn't. It's really not more complex than that.
Courts cannot legislate from the bench. Why not? Because the Constitution says so; i.e., Congress gets to say what the statutes say, while the Judiciary gets to say what the Constitutions says. That's the balance of power under the Constitution.
To me...the waaaaaaay bigger and more intriguing thing is: the story underlying this split 5-4 decision.
I mean this spit the "right" justices and the "left" justices. J Jackson came out of nowhere and sided with four "right" justices. Like, what?
Also, I can't for the life of me understand how J Sotomayor and J Kagan could ever come to the conclusion that this sweetheart deal for rich billionaires, who made their money killing $247k humans, was a good idea and totally fine. Again, what? But no the efficacy of the deal doesn't legally matter and is irrelevant.
Nevertheless, we don't know that the victims will be harmed by this decision. However, we DO KNOW that the rich billionaires would have benefited if this decision went the other way.
Remember that.
There's gotta be a Pulitzer worthy story behind this split.
I disagree. The dissent focused way too much on emotional appeals. It shouldn’t matter if the remedy was popular amongst the primary parties if the law doesn’t allow for such a remedy, “it was popular” is not a solid legal footing.
If we want to make sure that the victims of people like the Sacklers can get some justice then let’s actually write some laws for that purpose. Let’s remove the loopholes that let them make a ton of money at the expense of a nation, and them take it all offshore. Let’s add transparency to corporate structuring. Let’s fully pierce the corporate veil for egregious situations such as this.
What we shouldn’t do is allow the powerful yet another tool to escape consequences. Whether or not this particular deal was a net-positive for victims is besides the point. It gives too much power to bankruptcy judges and is a ripe avenue for corruption. Go to a “friendly” judge and have them absolve you of any personal liability, then send them a nice gift basket full of Benjamins, now fully legally (Thanks Supreme Court!).
I could see shielding from future civil liability as an option, but only after a true bankruptcy has occurred. Liquidate everything, and by that I mean everything, and then you can move on with your life. Definitely no shielding money in offshore accounts.
If you're not willing to do that ... well, see you in court. Over and over, because every individual you hurt should have a chance to come at you with a liability claim.
One problem of which I was unaware is that the Sackler family has largely fled the United States.
Pursuing their assets introduces vast complexities of international law.
"In a brief filed on behalf of the relatives of Mortimer Sackler, most of whom are based overseas, lawyers warned of “significant litigation costs and risks” in seeking to enforce any foreign court judgments against the family if the settlement were thrown out."
The US are proud of getting some terrorist in the middle of Pakistan or putting pressure on whistleblowers internationally but when big money is involved getting a criminal scumbag responsible for ~1m deaths is suddenly a huge problem.
> "In a brief filed on behalf of the relatives of Mortimer Sackler, most of whom are based overseas, lawyers warned of “significant litigation costs and risks” in seeking to enforce any foreign court judgments against the family if the settlement were thrown out."
I understand your point, but basically they are saying: "We hid all our assets to evade the law. Give us immunity from criminal money laundering evasion and we will only pay part of what we likely would have owed."
Can you imagine a member of Congress or the President saying this? Forgoing immunity is a scorched earth tactic, but it is also one that will dissuade future abusers. We have those overseas money reporting laws that make it difficult for Americans to get bank accounts overseas. Let's use them!
> "We hid all our assets to evade the law. Give us immunity from criminal money laundering evasion and we will only pay part of what we likely would have owed."
> Can you imagine a member of Congress or the President saying this?
Well, we haven't gotten to that part just yet. Right now, we're still in the stage of deny deny deny even in the face of evidence and convictions. They are still in the deny stage.
> "We hid all our assets to evade the law. Give us immunity from criminal money laundering evasion and we will only pay part of what we likely would have owed."
> We have those overseas money reporting laws that make it difficult for Americans to get bank accounts overseas. Let's use them!
This is conflating two things.
It is not criminal to move money offshore, and nothing suggested any money laundering occurred, because it is not necessary to launder money to move it offshore. And it is also not money laundering to obfuscate money's origin or destination. Money laundering requires a criminal origin and then obfuscation.
Despite how much the US has convinced its entire culture to stigmatize the concept of moving money, the US is operating in its own bubble of hubris to suggest money has to stay within its ecosystem. It doesn't make any sense at all when you say it out loud does it?
To your second point, the US has reporting laws on money held offshore legally, for US citizens. For banks, this is merely an additional compliance burden that disincentivizes them from dealing with small accounts because its not worth it. But at Sackler money, it is worth it. It is not hard to find someone to bank you as an American. And at Sackler levels of money you don't have to remain a US citizen, hence absolving the reporting requirements if they went that direction.
Or when you have a second citizenship, you can just not tell the US about it, and you can just not tell the foreign bank about your US citizenship. Prosecute that on its own, if you find out.
and finally, there are gaps in this reporting framework. FATCA treaty was a broad expansion of a country's power, to the limit of our global society in the continuum of history. And its not completely as omnipresent as the American psyche imagined. Just like the global sanctions attempt on Russia showed, its a nice try but now everyone can see how much is hubris in plain sight.
> And at Sackler levels of money you don't have to remain a US citizen, hence absolving the reporting requirements if they went that direction.
Renouncing your citizenship because you owe the US government money is generally not seen as a valid reason by the US government to renounce your citizenship.
Nor should it be. These people are leeches whose very existence is antithetical to a healthy and just society. They've done immeasurable damage and then hide behind the courts to avoid any repercussions. Disgusting, the lot of them.
> and you can just not tell the foreign bank about your US citizenship
Holding foreign assets that you did not report on an FBAR is a crime. Lying about it to the bank that asks if you are a US citizen wod be obfuscation to support a crime. I'm not sure why you are trying to argue that nothing criminal is being done in these scenarios.
That's basically the argument made in the dissenting opinion. I find the split among the justices here very interesting as it is not along party lines, as such splits usually are.
It generally demands deterrence. Helping the victims out is great, and the proceedings should do that as best they can, but the largest benefit that can be brought to society as a whole is showing that doing these kinds of things will be bad for you.
> Can you imagine a member of Congress or the President saying this?
definitely. The 2012 STOCK Act is routinely violated by members of congress who insider trade on information from congressional committees before laws are enacted. that money the openly argued about the legitimacy of in congress and Pelosi, for one, and Tommy Tuberville, for another argued that it should be allowed. Pelosi later changed her stance, but continues insider trading. you can find datasets for all this at (no relation...just interesting data) https://quiverquant.com
Considering the patience the US has with getting justice against other individuals who have fled our jurisdiction, we could do the same here. We also have an enormous amount of influence in the financial sector in other western nations, so we could at least make their lives less lavish and comfortable.
Throwing up our hands and declaring it an unsolvable issue just encourages others to misbehave and then escape the same way.
The question is whether to allow a smaller settlement immediately, or pursue a less-likely and possibly larger set of judgements in the future. It's not clear that it is possible to get more money out of them.
The EPA values one human life at $10M. A conservative estimate of the number of people killed by the Sackler family's companies (testified in court) was 245,000. So if opiates were environmental pollutants, the Sacklers would be on the hook for $2.45T in damages. Their immediate settlement was $6B.
The number of opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2021 was 645,000, according to CDC. Purdue Pharma brought in $35B in OxyContin revenue from 1995 to 2017. OxyContin was prescribed to 6.2 million people in 2002.
I'll edit the number above to ~100,000 as an estimate of the number of victims, since it looks like I misremembered 645,000 as the number of Purdue-related deaths. Still, that's assuming only 1.6% of those 6.2 million people taking OxyContin in 2002 developed an addiction, which seems low.
Nit: the assets were frozen, not seized. There was recently hand wringing in the EU over using the principle or interest to fund Ukraine, and they settled on interest because seizing assets scares any foreign investors who might someday disagree with a government.
Come to think of it, it's mind blowing when you compare the slap on the wrist of a punishment the Sacklers have received against what Julian Assange had to endure. One is responsible for the deaths of more than half a million people while the other is responsible for zero.
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