A federal bankruptcy court judge on Friday said he would approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.
The deal overseen by US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm.
The new agreement replaces one the US supreme court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. The judge said he would explain his decision in a hearing on Tuesday.
Lol there’s people who sold these on the street that got YEARS in prison, kids taken away, assets seized and exorbitant fines on top of that- lives ruined forever.
At least the consumers of people who sold them on the street knew they were addictive by then.
These fuckers straight up lied and said it was 100% non addictive which they knew was fucking bullshit and nothing happens to them.
We live with a two tier justice system. The rich get their own justice system that treats them like misbehaved childeren. The plebs get the justice system that is meant to create slave labor and an underclass.
I’m honesty shocked this got ‘won’ to this extent.
I would have figured that they had enough money, lawyers, and accountants, to quash most of this.
Yeah, of course they’re not actually personally going to rot in prison, that’s for little people.
Relative to a lot of other shit, this is a rare, near actual W for consumer protection in the US, by the standards of similar precedents.
… shame so many victims are already dead, lives ruined.
I’m kind of just surprised the legal system still functions at all, at this point, for people with a net worth over ~$100m.
We need to stop defaulting to “of course rich people won’t personally go to prison.” It only helps enable that in the courts. We need to be furiously protesting these courts and their decisions. Enforce EQUALITY in the court systems.
Talk all you want, won’t matter unless we get a lot more Luigis, or something like that.
Me, personally, I’m sick to death of ‘consensus building’ and ‘starting a discussion’.
We’re at least a, if not two decades beyond that point.
Sitting around talking on the internet or in real life already got monetized and turned into a profit engine by the same system that makes the wealthy into untouchable demigods.
And they’ll also all go to jail for life for mass manslaughter, right?
Or is this tragedy one of those “a single death is a tragedy, a million death are a statistic” kind of this?
Because the sacklers quite literally have pulled a statistic. The sacker family literally is in the areas of Hitler and Stalin with their fucking body count, but at least Hitler did it for a vision, as fucked as it was. These fuckers did it all just for the money
Thesr victims were not shot, that would have been merciful. They first had to suffer long and hard so that they could spend lots and lots more money before they’d die.
They. All. Knew.
Fuck this family. I hate the concept of hell,.nobody deserves to burn for eternity but these fuckers? Yeah, I hope they all burn in hell for eternity, they’re literally at the top of the the worst people ever list.
But instead they pay some pennies on the dollar as a cost of doing their business…I’m sure that’ll teach them
Purdue will be converted into a non-profit called Knoa Pharma, focusing on developing and distributing opioid overdose reversal and addiction treatment medications.
Though I feel nothing short of their complete separation from ALL their wealth AND prison time is the minimum of what they deserve, this is at least a commitment to meaningful change.
How is this handled by a bankruptcy court and not a criminal court? Thousands of people were prescribed addictive drugs specifically as non-addictive.
A captured justice system that has been corrupted by twisted, mutant late stage capitalism, mostly.
How do we know it’s late stage?
Because it’s economic philosophy concept, not necessarily a literal term. The German form of the term is about 100 years old refers to the form of capitalism that took root post-WWI; the English translation didn’t really take off until about 50 years ago and typically refers to capitalist forms that rose after WWII.
Because it can’t get any worse.
Spoiler Alert
It would.
It’s a lot of money but they will all be fine. They should be in prison.
Fuck that, they should be force fed oxy and every doctor in the country prohibited from helping with their inevitable addiction.
I sincerely hope no one else gets addicted to opioids. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. These aren’t people, they’re fucking demons.
Unfortunately, they are people. Evil, narcissistic, sociopathic, detestable people. Dehumanizing them is easy because of how inhumane they are, but it jumpstarts one of the more verified slippery slopes that ends up “justifying” atrocities.
That being said, I’m all for them being stripped of every possession and asset they’ve ever had, sending every participant family member and associate put in a different high security prison for life, and possibly sentencing them under 13th amendment slavery rules with all revenue going to addiction treatment.
Because they’re people. And they deserve all of the things our judicial system has to offer. As people. Evil, shitty, greedy, people.
Because they’re people. And they deserve all of the things our judicial system has to offer.
So solitary confinement for years to drive them mad?
That’s what our injustice system currently does to people who got addicted to those drugs and fucked their lives up as a result, so that seems fitting as long as we are gunna do torture anyway.
(For the record, I’d much rather we didn’t do crimes against humanity, but here we are)
First, did anybody notice that the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to the opioid epidemic included heroin? Seems like shitty reporting to me.
There’s two sides of this. What Purdue did is truly awful and they deserve to be punished.
The other half of it, is that oxycontin works. I know somebody who has chronic pain due to a car accident, they have tons of metal in their body and the surgery never healed quite right. The result is they are never, ever, pain-free. On a good day they are at 3/10, bad day 8/10 on the 0 to 10 pain scale.
Oxycontin was one of the few drugs that brought them anywhere close to being pain-free. On oxycontin their pain was actually managed to the point that it didn’t impact their everyday life. For my friend, oxycontin was truly a wonderful life restoring drug.In fighting the opioid epidemic, my friend was a bystander casualty. In the fight to stop opioid abuse, prescribing oxycontin even for people who genuinely benefit from it became a regulatory and insurance minefield. It’s like in the effort to stop abuse, the entire world forgot that some people actually need the stuff. Prescribing it became a problem for my friends pain doctor, as the amount of pushback from government and insurance for every prescription became totally untenable.
My friend now takes multiple short acting pain pills a day, and gets significantly less relief and lower quality of life despite being on a very similar daily morphine equivalent dosage.So for whoever reads this, please don’t forget that while there are awful people at drug companies and insurance companies and the like, and pushing prescriptions of unneeded addictive medications should result in a lot of jail time, there are patients involved in this fight. Patients who can benefit from this drug, and whose needs are being totally forgotten.
did anybody notice that the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to the opioid epidemic included heroin?
This is because of two main things, AFAIK.
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The number of heroin and other opiate addicts that got that way because of prescription opioids. This is a period of time where a significant majority of opiate/opioid addicts started on legally prescribed pills, were kept on them too long and weren’t properly tapered off. Many then sought street versions of the drugs to avoid withdrawals and fell further into addiction.
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Adulteration of other drugs. It has long been common to adulterate drugs by adding cheaper but stronger drugs and filler to the mix so that most users know something is happening but remain unaware they paid more for a mix of dubious efficacy. Incomplete mixing, higher tolerance to the advertised drug than the additive one, or are in some way compounding in the mixed drugs cause many more overdose deaths than those of known and consistent effects.
And when both aspects combine, it can prove to be a particularly deadly combo.
Okay so you’re really telling me that the inner city addict who steals his brother’s watch and pawns it for drug money, back in 1992, that was all because he used to be functioning member of society but then got a prescription? Come on man. Heroin has been around a lot longer than any sort of Perdue malfeasance, as have the criminals supplying it to junkies.
I will perhaps give you that it’s possible a large number of new heroin users started with prescription pills, for some period during the height of the crisis. But it is beyond ridiculous to ascribe every opioid death to Purdue.
And as for combining drugs, yes that is the risk you take when you buy illicit substances off the street. That is a thing that has been going on long before Purdue, continues today, and will continue into the future even after they rebrand or reorganize or whatever they call it. None of that has anything to do with Purdue.
My point is, the US of course has a drug problem and lots of people die from it. But if you are going to talk about the harm a company creates, you should focus on the deaths actually related to that harm, not out of a broad general category.
For example, if you say ‘People need to slow down in work zones! 500 highway workers died on the job last year!’ But if the reality is only 100 of those died from being hit by vehicles, the other 400 died from equipment malfunction, chemical exposure, and bad workplace safety practices, your statistic is irrelevant and disingenuous, just like this article.
And how do you propose the people crunching the numbers separate these cases? Most addicts will lie about how they became addicted, choosing whatever story they feel paints them in a positive light. Most families of deceased addicts will stick to the same story, either because they believe it or because they too want to paint their dearly departed as a victim rather than irresponsible. Practically speaking, there is no way to get an accurate split between who was addicted to prescription drugs first and who wasn’t.
If you don’t have good statistics, then you don’t include them right next to talking about the prescription drug epidemic sending the impression (If not precisely stating) that your number is directly caused by prescription drugs.
Journalistic integrity is important.
I agree, but exactly zero large media organizations agree as well. Journalistic integrity is bad for business. That said, when a huge corporation is profiting by turning people into addicts and killing them, I have no sympathy. Let the FDA and DEA worry about which opioid deaths are whose fault while the courts lay each and every one at Purdue’s feet. The odds that they deserve it due to some other as-yet undiscovered shenanigans that they’re likely to get away with are as close to 100% as makes no difference.
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