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 lime misbehaved childeren. The plebs get the justice system that is meant to create slave labor and an underclass.
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.
When I lived in an area with high opiate addiction rates, I regularly saw bumper stickers which read “shoot your local drug dealer.” They made me absolutely livid. The dealer is only doing anything because the Sacklers got them addicted
In the current timeline I can’t believe Richard Sackler isn’t head of the FDA.
I am equally as surprised El Chapo isn’t head of the DEA.
All drugs should be legal and regulated
All drugs? I think probably some of the most popular/safest from each class should be.
But there are some drugs that have no business on the market in my opinion.
Should Carfentanil be legal? Should Bromo-DragonFLY be legal? What about Alpha-Pyrrolidinovalerophenone? How about Clonzolam (not to be confused with clonazepam)?
I see where you are going with your comment… But the short answer to your question is yes. This is because making addiction illegal doesn’t solve the underlying issues. It just drives addicts through the criminal system instead of the medical one. A person going through addiction should have safe and controlled places to use along with a firm pipeline of helpful services to help kick those habits and get back on their feet.
That said, the drugs you are referring to are horrible. But I highly doubt a person deliberately sought them out when their journey through addiction began. Likely they got those mixed in with their original habit and down the rabbit hole they went. Keeping substances and their use illegal will just keep the underground drug trades thriving for the users that still need their fix.
To use this court case as an example, the issue wasn’t that the drugs were addictive. The issue was that the company lied through their teeth about it. The company already knew from the medical studies that the drugs were horribly addictive, but decided to lie to doctors and tell them that the drugs were perfectly safe. They had massive advertising campaigns aimed at doctors, to get them to prescribe increasingly high dosages, and to write prescriptions for much longer periods of time. The company actively worked against any kind of safety nets or support to help people come off of the addictive drugs, in order to keep a lid on the addictive properties as long as possible. Because the company wanted to sell more drugs, and the executives realized that getting people hooked would sell more in the long term.
That doesn’t mean the drugs should be illegal. It means they should be available in controlled environments, with support staff who are knowledgeable about the full suite of potential side effects, overdose symptoms, and withdrawal effects. Staff who can monitor the addicts and ensure they don’t overdose, while also being able to provide resources, support, or even alternative medications (to control the withdrawal effects) for those who are looking to quit.
It’ll happen after the Trump pardon
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.
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.
Nope. They have caused an amount of destruction they could never ever pay for. They’ve done that with me alone, let alone the hundreds of million others.
Fuck. That.
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)
So glad my dead mother will definitely see justice. /s
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 oaint 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 tonget away with are as close to 100% as makes no difference.
I agree on journalistic integrity. But isn’t it important to uphold that standard, even if others don’t?
They may deserve it, but it’s by knowing those details that we determine if they do or not.
Because otherwise your position basically becomes ‘If company did thing x and as a result is bad, it’s okay to blame them for thing y and thing z, which they probably had nothing to do with, but we’ve already determined they are bad and therefore they deserve any blame we throw at them justified or not’.
The problem with that is it sets up witch hunts. You are bad, therefore we can blame you for anything we want, and that blame justifies your being treated as bad.
That is why the Constitution mandates due process. And we should uphold that same standard, in our minds and in our positions and in our debates.
That would be a very fair assessment if the entire system weren’t rigged for the benefit of corporations and the very wealthy. Mitt Romney said thay “corporations are people too” so I’d like to see them get death sentences as well.
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On a good day they are at 3/10, bad day 8/10 on the 0 to 10 pain scale.
Those pain scales are subjective junk that motivated the opioid epidemic from when special interests pushed that “5th vital sign” bullshit.
This story covers how
- Pain is not just a medical issue but a cultural and psychological phenomenon.
- Attention amplifies pain; ignoring it can reduce its impact.
- Effective treatment may require balancing resilience with emotional expression.
Historically, physicians have regarded pain as “an inevitable part of life”, “not usually an emergency like low blood pressure or an erratic heartbeat”, and definitely not a vital sign.
Then in 1995, the American Pain Society started a campaign referring to pain as the '5th vital sign', which caught on with medical bureaucracies and the pharmaceutical industry.
CAMPBELL: Well, strictly speaking, pain wouldn’t be a vital sign because a vital sign would be a manifestation of the physiological functioning in the body that’s vital to life. So it’s vital in the sense of being associated with being alive.
SPIEGEL: But Dr. Campbell still thought elevating the status of pain would do more good than harm. And since, in 1995, he was president of a medical organization called the American Pain Society, he used his presidential address to launch a campaign, and the idea caught fire. Over the next few years, lots of groups made pain a priority. The Veterans Health Administration put out a toolkit for doctors that emphasized pain as the fifth vital sign. The Federation of State Medical Boards encouraged doctors to systematically measure patient pain. And importantly, JCAHO, the main organization that offers accreditation to hospitals, published a document that emphasized the importance of assessing and treating patient pain. Dr. Campbell had helped to launch a revolution. It’s just like a genius marketing move.
CAMPBELL: It was really amazing because it transformed medicine.
SPIEGEL: But not in a purely positive way. Some people now argue that this small bureaucratic shift in medical practice and the way that it taught doctors and patients to see pain as a critical problem to be solved led ultimately to the opioid epidemic. After all, when doctors are expected to ask about pain, it’s hard not to give medications if a patient reports a high score. And several drug companies that made pain pills were quietly funding these initiatives. In fact, Dr. Campbell set up a pain awareness group that got a decade of financial backing from Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. In congressional hearings on the opioid crisis, Dr. Campbell called the support, quote, “generous,” though the pain group’s chief executive later added that funders do not influence its work.
What is beyond debate, however, is that conceiving of pain as the fifth vital sign and asking patients about their pain number meant that pain got a lot more attention than it ever had before. And here’s the thing about attention that most of us don’t fully appreciate. Attention is not a neutral force. It invariably changes the thing that it purports to observe. Often, it makes that thing bigger. Attention can change all kinds of things, even the physical response of the body - which brings us back to Devyn and her pain.
Society is still paying the deleterious consequences.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more heartless and unempathetic reply in my whole life.
Your post, and the linked article, boiled down, basically all say that doctors should ignore pain and patients who are in pain should just suck it up and not think about it.
I’m very glad that medical science doesn’t treat patients in such a cold and uncaring manner. By this logic, there’s no reason to bother with anesthetic during or after surgery, because ‘pain is part of life’. There’s no reason to do joint replacements, because ‘pain is part of life’ and if the person can’t walk more than 10’ without pain too fucking bad for them.
Perhaps someday there will be an objective way to measure pain- some scanner that can read the signals going up the spinal cord or can read activations of nerve endings. But until then, this is what we’ve got.
I encourage you to take a serious look in the mirror and think about what kind of person you want to be. Because right now you’re someone that looks at a fellow human who is suffering and says ‘too bad, we shouldn’t lift a finger to help them’.
Seems you want to repeat history.
The fact is there is no objective measurement of pain & the dangerous addictiveness of those drugs have already caused an epidemic of deaths. Some doctors take their oath to first do no harm very seriously. As unpleasant as pain is, it doesn’t cause death.
Modern society’s excessive preoccupation with pain relief has caused a crisis, and no lawsuit or monetary relief can undo all those needless deaths. Perhaps you should take a look in the mirror & learn some goddamn sense.
‘too bad, we shouldn’t lift a finger to help them’
At least they’ll live.
At least they’ll live.
But what is the point of living if there’s no quality of life?
This is the difference between treating a patient as a person and ignoring the person but treating the disease as a broken machine.
Almost any medical treatment has potential or real side effects, possibly including death. Sometimes those side effects happen, and the risk is weighed against the benefit.
Pain relief is no different. You’re acting like an opioid pill is a death sentence. The fact is under proper medical care and supervision they can be quite safe.The UNsafe things, the people who get addicted and die, are people who were NOT treated properly to begin with- given high dose extended release opioids (creating dependence), then cut off cold turkey. Proper protocol for that is a wean-off protocol where the dose is reduced slowly over time so the body adjusts without huge withdrawal. If the person turns to street drugs and ODs you’re right money can’t bring them back. But the problem is the prescriber that did an unsafe protocol, and the company that paid them to do it.
Blaming the pill for effects caused by medical mistreatment is stupid.
But what is the point of living if there’s no quality of life?
What is the point if you don’t?
The doctor has a valid moral claim not to promote deadly addictions.
The fact is under proper medical care and supervision they can be quite safe.
They can, and the doctor is the most qualified person to make that assessment.
I’m criticizing your undervaluation of the dangers & poor acknowledgement of the cultural causes of the opioid epidemic such as misguided thinking about pain promoted by the pain scales, influence & regulatory capture by pain associations & pharmaceutical industries of medical policymakers to pressure physicians, campaigns popularizing myths. Competent doctors then & to this day found it all ridiculous & mostly disregard the pain scales: they rely on patient history & background, knowledge of their medical conditions, patient conversation.
Some pain is untreatable, and there is something to the idea that focus amplifies pain, moderation & acceptance lessen it.
But the problem is the prescriber that did an unsafe protocol, and the company that paid them to do it.
That’s not how it works or the physician was incompetent.
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.
A rare actual W for consumer protection in the US.
… shame so many victims are already dead, lives ruined.
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 untochable demigods.
