ADHD meds and antidepressants are one thing, but the opioid epidemic is a scandal responsible for the hollowing out of entire communities. It’s outrageous. In any sane society the Sackler family would be in prison if not worse.
I’m vaccinated and boosted but I don’t know how I’d feel about people asking me to trust the Big Pharma if the life of my sibling or parent was pharmaceutically destroyed.
Sacklers are not to blame for the disaster, their products are not killing people. Those lives were destroyed by a society which seems to believe that drug abusers deserve to die.
Opioid addiction is only dangerous because lawmakers would rather have people dying off of dirty street heroin than having access to clean drugs.
I get the impression America is uniquely vulnerable among the wealthiest nations. Private healthcare providers, a defanged health regulator, and rampant corporate bribery/advertising.
Purdue salespeople lobbied doctors directly to prescribe their opioids to patients, while Purdue suppressed knowledge their incredibly addictive nature, and later offloaded blame to the addicts they largely created.
The Sacklers engaged in unethical behavior to get people hooked on something that made them money. Easy opioid prescriptions created thousands of (mostly) functional addicts who were getting their fix in a high-quality control form via their doctor on a monthly basis. That's bad but that's not an opioid "crisis". You don't get a crisis because of a few evil billionaires. More things have to go wrong. What really turned the opioid problem into a crisis is when the feds cracked down. The doctors had to cut the junkies off or lose their licenses. The junkies predictably switched to the street for their supply with predictably tragic results.
The Sacklers may have done unethical, arguably evil, things to make a buck but there's plenty of blame that should be cast in the direction of other parties here.
> You’re aware America is under siege, fighting an opioid crisis that has exploded into a public-health emergency. You’ve heard of OxyContin, the pain medication to which countless patients have become addicted. But do you know that the company that makes Oxy and reaps the billions of dollars in profits it generates is owned by one family?
I'm arrogant because I know way more about this than you probably ever will. My brother is a psychiatrist and has published papers on systematic issues with psychiatric drug trials. You are another internet commentator that thinks they have grasped the current zeitgeist, when actually you don't understand that what you call "society" is just manufactured B.S. shoved down our throats to make billions and billions of dollars for Big Pharma and their cronies. Do you even know who Peter Gotzsche, Robert Whitaker, or David Healy are? Do you actually follow this stuff?
And I'm really glad that you are such an expert on Big Pharma corruption /s. I'm sure next you will lecture me on how the opiod scandal is about our society and not about the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.
I think that maybe then you too should be mad at the Sacklers.
They intentionally and knowingly deceived the market that opioids were safe. Had they not done that maybe the opioid epidemic would not have happened and you could still have access to the medicine that you are grateful for.
I hear what you're saying, but it feels like you should be placing your blame on the sacklers too - if they hadn't pushed opioids on people who didn't need them, fueling the crisis, then there would not have been this backlash you describe.
Like, we shouldn't be mad at opioids, we should be mad at drug pushing profiteers.
Keep your eye on the Sackler/Purdue Pharma case [1].
Purdue steered over $13B directly to the Sackler family by aggressively marketing opiates, misinforming doctors and the public about their dangers, and giving medical software companies kickbacks to push more addictive long-release versions of their opiates to doctors.
One company, Allscripts, was able to pay $145M to resolve criminal and civil kickback allegations [2].
They directly killed over 400,000 people between 1999 and 2017 and indirectly killed many more/caused unimaginable human suffering.
The family is proposing to pay $3B over 7 years and an additional $1.5B by selling off another company they own.
This is the real opiate crisis jackpot and the high-scale, high-powered, industrialized version of the crimes that are happening on the dark web.
I'm sure there are more large companies and high powered individuals involved and agree that the 200 arrests/$6M is an infinitely tiny drop in the bucket, but it's way easier to prove and stick than the larger operations.
Do you understand what happened in the opioid crisis, and why people are mad at the Sacklers? They weren’t hapless naive actors that didn’t fully understand “the implications” of the drugs they were selling. The effects of opioid addiction were WELL known when oxycontin was introduced, and Purdue Pharmaceuticals deliberately misrepresented critical information about the drugs they sold and had salespeople lie in a wholesale fashion on a massive scale.
It’s reasonable to have suspicion about companies and regulators in this area, but the opioid crisis is such a different situation in context.
Society refusing to draw a link between the homelessness/addition crisis in the States and the pharmaceutical companies becoming drug dealers/pushers of opioids that flooded the country is honestly shocking.
Hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans became opioid addicts because they were prescribed unnecessary pills by their own doctors, and became hooked (the risks of opioids have been known for what, thousands of years?). We have barely given the pharma industry a slap on the wrist for the harm they've caused and the direct link between the two crises is never drawn in the public sphere.
While an additional fine might be fair, again, just "taking it all" isn't. The Sacklers, while they might have played a small part, are being unfairly scapegoated for the whole of the opioid epidemic. This ignores the responsibility borne by states, physicians, and most importantly, those who choose to take the pills. This was also done with FDA approval.
More importantly, this is a part of the larger narrative that everything has been caused by overprescribed opioids. However, there's no correlation between increased prescriptions and increased illicit usage [0]. Rather, it seems there's been a large growth over time of illicit opioid use [1]. The only place this sort of thing has been effectively combated is in Portugal due to its decriminalization and attempts to make things safer. Politicians caused this with their stupid "war on drugs". They are now pointing and saying, "Look, the big bad Sacklers did it!" so their own failures are ignored. Stop scapegoating one family for a political and societal issue.
If you had read the article you would know that's exactly what it says. The definition has broadened. The pharmaceutical industry has a perverse incentive to medicate everyone. They are the invisible hand destroying America. They profit off of autism, ADHD, obesity, anxiety, and depression. The opioid epidemic is the tip of the iceberg.
Arguably yes. It's not possible here to properly cover the many issues involved from longstanding narcotics law, international treaties on narcotics, etc. to the duty of care the Sackler family should have exercised for those who consumed its opiate products, and so on. That the Sackler family did this through its company Purdue Pharmaceuticals is immaterial, as they not only knowingly allowed widespread proliferation of these narcotics but also actively encouraged the pushing of said narcotics. Moreover, the Sacklers made many millions of dollars from the hapless and desperate consumers who consumed its addictive opioids—many of whom have died; the estimate of numbers is in excess of 100,000. (If anything, a confiscation of their wealth ought to be justified under proceeds of crime legislation.)
What's truly relevant here is that both the Sackler family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals not only had both access to expert knowledge about opioids, their addictive properties and the longstanding protocols for their control, administration and use thereof but also they were actually in possession of such expert knowledge.
(Note: this is a non sequitur, as it would NOT have been possible to be a manufacturer of narcotic drugs within the USA and NOT know these facts by second nature and yet they deliberately pushed these drugs onto the market in an extremely irresponsible way (in fact, people within Purdue casually and callously joked about the fact).
The fact that this was allowed to happen and that Purdue was allowed to continue doing so for so long is a separate matter, and for that, the FDA holds considerable responsibility.
Remember, the addictive properties of opioid drugs is extremely well known to the medical fraternity, the pharmaceutical industry and to many, many others and it's been so for a very long time. It's absolutely no secret—in fact, it's been very well documented since the Civil War (when hypodermic needles first became available and opioids were given I.V. to injured soldiers for pain relief many of whom became severely addicted). This knowledge resulted in International treaties in the early part of the 20th Century and it meant that many countries introduced severe penalties for peddling narcotics—from many decades to life in jail, and in some countries the death penalty.
For a company such as Purdue Pharmaceuticals to be little more than a street pusher of narcotics through its negligent misuse of its position of responsibility by not having most stringent protocols in place is about as irresponsible as it gets. As mentioned, upwards of 100,000 people have died as the consequence of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals irresponsible, negligent and reckless actions—actions that were committed out of sheer greed of absolutely the worst kind.
In my opinion, just confiscating their financial assets alone isn't enough, they too ought to be in jail along with the other pushers of narcotics.
That the Sackler family can actually negotiate its way around what's happened is also a travesty of justice.
You touch on the core issue, but I would like to highlight it. At the core, the opioid issue is not really about opioids at all, it too is just a symptom of a far greater issue, corruption, rot, degeneration of the system. And of course that manifests itself in ways like this "opioid epidemic" that is really no different than what Pablo Escobar or El Chapo were doing; they just didn't have the connections and were not part of the identity group that makes up the ruling class, something they may have learned even no amount of money can buy you into … ignoring all their less than sophisticated antics for a moment.
The Sacklers are just purely evil people that were part of the system of evil people who are the ruling class. That's fundamentally why they got away with what objectively is mass murder and even essentially treason, because the ruling class they are a part of is no longer a group that has the USA or its people in its interests. The American people and America are clearly well beyond their circle of interests and priorities. We now have not just the "opioid epidemic" to prove that, but the total and complete hollowing out of the American economy and also the complete burying of America under masses of debt. Not just the American, but the whole Trans-Atlantic ruling class are objectively made up of abusive, predatory, parasitic, evil people. Their actions and words speak for themselves, no amount of postulation required.
The only other alternative is that they are utterly incompetent to such a degree that they are mentally ill with something like schizophrenia or some other psychosis.
But one must assume that since they were actively and zealously behind all that they now lay at the feet of regular people of their own counties and societies (colonialism, slavery, etc.) that they too now are actively behind this new plunder and enslavement to debt and erosion of currency and value. Why would they not be, they have only ever gotten away with it, barring a few revolutions here and there before they learned to control them.
I like this approach to explain some of antivax as well. Essentially big pharma has just finished up a massive campaign that was the opioid pandemic. Essentially there’s going to be a large correlation between people with jobs that get them injured and targeted for opioid use, and those people being right. Opioid addiction that comes from that targeting isn’t just a single victim thing, someone addicted to something as hard as opioids is going to affect entire families and likely extended families. It’s going to essentially feel like a massive economic and spiritual attack to the family, by pharmaceutical companies (after all the news that came out of that social pandemic). So it makes sense that the seeds for not trusting the medical system are there and in insanely rich fertilizer to grow by even groups previously seen as insane like antivax groups (seriously both sides of the isle used to mock those groups). The worst part is that the people taking a drink of that koolaid, are able to literally take their life experience and draw a completely sane line from A to B that Big Pharma shouldn’t be trusted.
I’m vaccinated and boosted but I don’t know how I’d feel about people asking me to trust the Big Pharma if the life of my sibling or parent was pharmaceutically destroyed.
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