and yet Richard Sackler still has an active medical license in New York State...
27
So proud to live in a state with Maura Healey is Attorney General. It is time for Harvard and Tufts to give back the money they have received from the Sackler family and to take the family's name off the museum at Harvard and whatever buildings/schools they have endowed at Tufts. The family is nothing more than drug dealers, making billions off the misery of others. They should be stripped of their wealth and the company should be dismantled. Until, we as a society, make people such as this, really pay for their craven attitudes, they will continue to act in this way. And, the only thing these people understand and the only pain they feel, is in their pocketbooks. They are amoral sociopaths who believe their wealth entitles them to behave in any way they want, who use their wealth to buy their way out of all sorts of difficulties, and who use their high priced attorneys to bully the Justice Department. Well, Maura Healey will not be bullied. I hope other states follow suit and go after all of big pharma!
61
The saying goes "There is no great fortune without a great crime." Believe it.
33
If it can be proven that the Sackler family knowingly misled MD's about the risks of OxyContin I hope criminal charges will be filed. If it turns out that the Sackler family are just callous, greedy capitalists, then that's not against the law, no matter how grotesque it is. I would really like a Grand Jury to check this out. The cigarette companies executives who lied before Congress were not punished and I fear this set a bad precedent. I want liars who hurt people to be held accountable. If they know their products cause harm and lie about it, send these animals to prison. How many people have to die before something changes. Also CMS made pain a 5th vital sign. Health care facilities and agencies can be penalized financially if pain is consistently rated a 7 or above. This creates an incentive for MD's tp prescribe more opioids. I have personally known of people deliberately rating their pain high to get these meds. This also needs to change.
26
Jail, thousands of criminal manslaughter charges at a minimum for them.
28
So l want to see how many institutions remove the Sackler name from their facade.
20
Interesting, but much of this was previously published in the New Yorker in October of 2017.
See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
5
My brother was a heroine addict. My father, an ox and a fireman, disowned him for being weak. Then dad got cancer and prescribed oxy per treatment. I'll never forget that day he came to me to apologize for being so wrong, a withered shell of an ox, brought to his knees and incapable of describing the absolute horrors of his oxycontin addiction. Just tears and a plea for understanding.
24
Let them pay for the many hundreds of thousands who need rehabilitation along with other costs associated with their fraud.
25
I like this: The Sackler family used to be one of the richest in the United States. They now live in a family trailer park, are required to work forty hours per week at minimum wage, and forfeit any money gained from ownership of Purdue Pharma.
20
High time for a class action law suit!
19
It has been well documented that 1 in 5 individuals will become addicted to opioids following a 10 day prescription with instructions to take "..every 4 hours for pain".
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply-of-opioids-1-in-5-become-long-term-users/
As a health care professional that sees this every day, I find the physicians and Phama negligent in their prescriptive practices and instructions to the patient.
It is a lack of instruction in medical schools, residencies, physician assistant and nurse practitioner programs that also contribute .
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/health/addiction-medical-schools-treatment.html
11
The similarities between the Sackler and Trump families are jarring. Inherited values (an wealth) are insidious.
10
Our BIGGEST drug dealers are too rich to be prosecuted. Sackler family is a prime example.
Welcome to the Land of the Ruling 1%...
30
This crisis began when BigPharma attempted to profit off of the overuse of opioids. BigPharma is also for-profit and while their ethics appear to be non-existent, this is why we have government administration to help protect us. They overlooked this issue for years, practically allowing companies like Purdue to provide misinformation to doctors and patients. Now that we have a huge problem and thousands of lives are being lost, we need to concentrate on saving people now more than ever.
10
Pharmaceutical companies need to not be able to use "sales reps." Period. Medicine is not the same as used cars, or insurance, or cell phone companies. Let the science speak for itself.
If we can't get rid of this retail marketing, then have it take more than one doctor to write a prescription for the new drugs whose effects are not well-known. Maybe one of them has time to consult the scientific literature.
Even better, get a medical librarian on board. Put them in pharmacies. Question the doctors who write the prescriptions in the first place (don't wait until someone over-prescribes them). Doctors are not omniscient. They are, of course, very busy. Hence their susceptibility to sales pitches.
And, while we're at it, Please God, please take the commercials for drugs off the TV. We got cigarette ads off there, let's get rid of the drug ads, too! There are current ads running for certain drugs that claim to cure many different conditions -- the same drug, mind you -- in totally different commercials. Corrupt practice, totally misleading, creating false hopes, and morally reprehensible.
23
Two weeks ago, my 16 year old son broke his collar bone snowboarding. He was taken to the medical clinic on the mountain and was not in much pain and in good spirits. The doctor there prescribed him 20 pills of OxyContin for his pain. Neither him nor the two nurses there gave him or me any warning about the addictive nature of the drug. The only warning they gave was that it was a controlled drug so you shouldn't lose it. They never offered he start with ibuprofen or any over the counter drug. I went back to the cabin with him and read all of the warnings and looked up the drug before he took it. I am so thankful that I was there when this happened and that I know enough to read and research before taking a medication. Of course, we agreed he would not take any and he instead took ibuprofen for a week and now is not on anything. I think it is negligent of anyone working in the medical field to prescribe this medication without warning and without saying it should be only taken in extreme pain! Let alone a 16 year old who is into extreme sports and will likely suffer many injuries in their life. I am disappointed in the staff and grateful I have the warewithall to research. I am afraid many people blindly say "ok" and take the prescription. It is not just addicts that have the problem, but the people creating the addictions haphazardly.
46
@Jordan Champagne
I concur. After having dental surgery I was given Oxycontin (twice) with no kinds of warnings whatsoever. I didn't want them in my house so I threw them out. I took a couple of ibuprofen once and got through all it fine.
12
president Trump's gets the wizard of Oz award (never mind that man behind the curtain ) his call for a wall is an example of superb misdirection as millions suffer from the cruelest actions coming from quaint Connecticut
7
This can't possibly be true. Building a wall on the southern border is going to solve the opiate crisis. The president said so!
22
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
15
Crossed the line? The Sacklers must be arrested, tried and hopefully jailed for life given the enormous misery that oxycontin has wrought on countries around the world.
18
Purdue aggressively encouraged opioid use, knowing full well the dangers of addiction.
Monsanto (and Dow) sold PCB's for more than 30 years after their internal research warned that the product could cause cancer.
Tobacco companies...big sugar...suppress evidence for as long as possible...sales+profit uber alles
GM chose to ignore air bag safety problems. Deliberately. They calculated that a class action suit would cost less than the cost of fixing the problem (they were right).
Yet pundits of all description decry the growing dissatisfaction with capitalism. The above examples illustrate the well known existential problem of the corporation. Despite some blather about "community" or "caring" about this or that, (witness BP's precious concern for the environment), single-minded slash-and-burn greed is baked into corporate culture.
It's likely that many of those who serve their corporations are--on the outside--perfectly nice people who would never think of jeopardizing their neighbors' safety or poisoning them. Once they step foot on corporate territory, everything changes. They are there to do their job--to advance the interest of the corporation, to enhance profits. Full stop.
Elizabeth Warren introduced the Corporate Accountability Act to address these issues.
25
"The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable."
Why do we let layman, which are what these pharma sales people are, even into Doctors offices? While the effects of the opioid crisis are visible, there is a general crisis with respect to conflicts of interest in the medical community that need to be addressed. As a patient it is impossible to know if the drug you are given is the most effective for the cost, let alone necessary at all.
4
I remember vividly the marketing of Oxycontin to doctors around the 1990's. The salesperson was a trim lady new to the job of "detailing" drugs to docs. She had recently received a MBA from a university in Milwaukee and had no pharmacy or biological science training, unlike most sales people in the industry. She obviously had a narrative which included that it's slow release prevented the "rush" that was necessary for addiction potential. The 4 of us were incredulous of the naivete of this person that was reinforced by scripted answers. This was bald faced marketing unleavened by any understanding.
21
It's always interesting to review the comments below. No one, including the author of this article is suggesting that Oxy does not work as an effective pain medication. Morphine and Vicotin work as well, but the manufacturers of those drugs don't make false claims about the addictive nature of those drugs. The question is whether the Sacklers knowingly instructed their marketing and sales people to provide false information to doctors regarding the addictive nature of the drug in an effort to sell more. If they did, that's a crime. Based on the research uncovered in this article, it certainly looks like they did. I have seen article after article documenting the opiate crisis in this country and the patients who were prescribed Oxy for post-surgical pain, became addicted, and ended up on the street buying heroin. There is an excellent Ted talk about this exact scenario, and the difficulty of breaking that addiction.
9
I had my aortic valve replaced four years ago. When I was released from the hospital, I was given an entire bottle of OxyContin to take home - 50 pills! When I explained to the pharmacist that I wasn't in pain, he explained that it was to eliminate the need to go to my local drug store and purchase more (of course, the hospital made $$$, but that's just eliminating the competition on a sale). Not too long after I returned home I disposed the OxyContin. It's a vicious cycle that so many have encountered and no one is willing to accept blame. The Sacklers are pure slap evil. Anything less than a lengthy prison sentence is a crime.
15
@Mark Kelly -- 50 pills?! That is unconscionable. When I had wrist surgery I was given no more than ten. I took one (1). It helped me get over the first day after surgery. Afterwards I needed no more pain killers.
3
If the company/Sacklers did what is alleged here, they should be hung by their thumbs and the company dissolved.
But we need to be careful here. Opioids have a legitimate use in medicine and can be a godsend for people in severe pain. I dare say millions of people have used them to great advantage when indicated and have not become addicted.
Opioids cannot and should not be used for more than very short term. Doctors should not over prescribe by renewing prescriptions and pharmacies should not refill prescriptions (unless rigorous standards for the exception are met) under penalty of law.
Certainly opioids have been heavily abused and there is plenty of blame to go around for that. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. When used carefully and judiciously opioids are akin to a godsend for those in agony!
7
@SAH
Cannabis is also excellent for pain...and, not addictive.
5
So much for the historical palaver about corporate interests capable of being relied upon to do the right thing, because, after all, they have an interest in keeping their customers happy and, presumably, healthy.
Right...
10
Yet another example of why corporate directors and senior executives should be criminally liable and imprisoned for the heinous acts of their corporations.
12
As one who took daily the same low dose of Oxycontin for years that allowed me to have less pain and lead a normal life, including exercise to strengthen myself enough to get off of it at some point, I can give evidence of the medicine usefulness. I blame the government and the press for the ignorant and aggressive hysteria that robbed millions of the medicine's physical and/or mental pain relief that forced the sufferers into willing (or unwilling by searching for other relief) suicide.
11
I hope they get the justice they deserve. This is a dark stain on our country caused by immoral greed. These grugs have great benefit for those suffering extreme, prolonged pain, but were marketed as if they were aspirin, and doctors and the public were misled. Those who are responsible is be held to account.
2
Private enterprise at it's finest, sell a product that addicts you to the product ... isn't capitalism grand?
8
The Sacklers appear to be the 21st century equivalent of slave traders. I wonder if the nonprofits and other organizations that take their dirty money will reconsider. I'm guessing no.
6
There is no such thing as non addictive morphine. Never has been. The Sacklers are Billionaire Morphine dealers. The War on Drugs has been a joke. Ruining poor people's lives for using drugs like Marijuana while The Sacklers get away with selling a product that kills 100,000. If the crime is big enough the rule is, it is not a crime. Just like the poisoning of Flint, Michigan by the Governor. We all know the Rich live by different rules than the common folk.
16
This is so sad and upsetting. Where is integrity and caring about real humans? As a Pediatrician, I attended one drug rep seminar in my career and really wonder why those are allowed. We can do our own research on what is best for our patients. No meal or free anything will change how I care for sick children. We have grand rounds and CME and Up to Date to help us give excellent evidence based care. I have cared for newborns addicted to opiates and their newly uncovered sensation of severe pain is terrible to watch but it is equally sad to understand how their mothers' got to this place in life. I also watched as 30 pill prescriptions for opiates were sent home with adult patients when perhaps 3 days or one week could have been used with the caveat to call if there is a need for more. I am proud now to be working in a state that is proactive and progressive and is working to solve these urgent problems.
10
There is a medical industrial complex as dangerous as the military industrial complex. With billions of dollars at stake, it is clear that money and profits has become more important than the healthy outcomes of patients in this country. In this case, we have a drug that has significantly contributed to the more than 200,000 people who have died in this country from prescription opioids. We now hear that the same forces that wrought havoc on large swaths of the US population is now hard at work to export this misery to the rest of the world. This is not a conspiracy, but a consequence of the profit driven business of medical care. Humans have transitioned from patients to be cared for into revenue units to be charged for maximum profits. The fines paid by this company do not resemble punishment as much as they resemble the bribes paid to government officials by the Narcos in Mexico. We the people need to tell the corporations and regulators and politicians that we have had enough.
12
Although Purdue Pharma bears some culpability in this--suppressing evidence is a big deal--the opioid epidemic is a group effort, including many contributions from professionals who had nothing material to gain.
A big part of the problem is/was physicians who overprescribed in a laudable but very dangerous attempt to adequately treat pain. For years, we were told to treat pain aggressively, that there is no risk of addiction so long as real physical pain is being treated. It turns out that the latter claim originated in a letter to the editor of a medical journal; it was just one physician's opinion, not based on any scientific study. That opinion was terribly wrong.
There's a lot more being done to safeguard against addiction, albeit sometimes to the detriment of those who really need relief from pain. Opioids are quite effective, and quite dangerous. We don't have much in the way of alternative treatments in many cases of pain. And a certain percentage of patients who receive opioids for legitimate reasons will, almost inevitably, become addicted. The sooner that addiction is caught, the higher the chances of successful treatment and recovery.
We need to think through this issue much more thoroughly, in a wholly evidenced-based manner.
7
@Hammond, why aren’t there any research efforts for better pain meds? I am a veteran, and a chronic pain patient who would love to have something as helpful (or more?) to my pain as opiates without the annoying side effects. There is NO “high” from these meds, as they barely decrease pain enough to allow me to have a very moderate quality of life. I did well on Vioxx for many years, but that got pulled from the market due to “possible” cardiovascular effects. I literally cried when I took the last dose many years ago. Now, if the government gets their way, opiates will become illegal, and my choice is unbearable pain or suicide.
9
@hammond
"We don't have much in the way of alternative treatments in many cases of pain."
Well, one alternative is called Cannabis - a top enemy for big pharma. It's natural, effective and not addictive -- while at the same time sharpening and improving one's understanding.
3
I've been prescribed Oxycontin more than once due to injuries. I didn't find it particularly effective as a pain killer, nor did I become addicted or experience the side effects described by some others. I'm not arrogant enough to hold up my experience as some kind of standard; we're all different. But I do have observations and questions.
We're talking about two different situations here: the people who are legally prescribed Oxycontin for pain management and become addicted, and those who change the form of the tablets and use them to get a high. In either case, the manufacturer who misled physicians and the public bears a heavy responsibility and should be held accountable for all wrongdoing. But I do wonder if some of the people who took it for pain management took it more frequently than prescribed and thus became addicted, or didn't speak up to their prescribing physician about what was happening to them; and people who deliberately used it to get high knew early on that they were doing something dangerous. In other words, I think there's a difference between blaming the victim, which I hope never to do, and thinking people need to be responsible for themselves.
I hope the wrath of the multitude won't be rained down on me for expressing that opinion, because I do feel very sad for anyone with an addiction problem, and for their families. Life is difficult enough without that cross to bear.
4
Same experience. Prescribed multiple times, not particularly effective, and I certainly didn’t like the way it made me feel nor did I crave it or want more of it. So, you are not alone.
2
That’s a very fair analysis Linda. Many thanks. What seems odd to me is that it seems we now take for granted the fact that drug companies make billions. That in short is surely the root of the problem. What happens to our brightest minds after they’ve been to college and beyond? 200,000 deaths??!! Were there banner headlines? Calls for inquiries? Why is this being left to private litigation?
4
The peddling of these drugs by Purdue and the Sacklers sits atop a mountain of professional drug pushing. After all the publicity about the devastation caused by these drugs in my coal-country PA hometown, I was baffled last summer when an orthodontist prescribed two different opioids for my 17-year-old "just in case" she was suffering after her wisdom teeth were removed. He seemed totally careless when I asked if they were necessary. My kid settled for Tylenol and it worked just fine.
15
A situation that justified "lock `em up".
9
When will government stop coddling criminals like the Sacklers? When will the authorities stop with the settlements and slap some cuffs on those folks who believe they're above the law?
11
When politicians can't be bought. In other words probably never, certainly not any time soon
4
These people are no better than the street dealers selling meth and heroin.
15
In terms of collective harm caused by individuals, I believe they've caused significantly more
6
Actually, they’re worse.
6
Big Pharma doesn't care about healthcare only sales. They rush to hospitals and clinics with free lunches, dinners, trips, samples and more to have physicians push their drugs. A must read.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220314.Overdosed_America
4
I agree that the Sacklers appear, based on this rather 1 sided piece, to have crossed the line of ethical marketing of a product. But what is never brought out in these types of hatchet jobs are that 1) doctors are not stupid - they get the same exaggerated spiels from every pharma rep about every new drug that comes out; 2) Here in Virginia, doctors, patients and pharmacies are all computer linked and cross checked to ensure compliance with proper dosing guidelines. A couple of times a year, you'll see where a doctor crossed the line, wrote too many prescriptions and is going to jail, and lost their medical license. Clearly this method works - without prescriptions, product isn't sold, and if it isn't sold, Purdue isn't going to make as many; 3) if we as a society really want to help opioid addicts, let's put some $$ into better public mental health care and expand substitute drugs that can help those who are also in chronic pain - their pain isn't going to disappear because some people abused a drug and access to it is unfairly restricted to those who really need it. 4) Seriously crack down on fentanyl. It doesn't come over the border from Mexico, it comes (mostly) from China and it is the main reason (when added to heroin or made into counterfeit percocet pills etc) we have so many opioid related overdose deaths.
80
@Eric T Centralized registries did not come into being until well after many people became addicted to prescription pain pills. In Florida, the registry was not implemented until late 2011. If anything, this piece places too little of the blame on the Sacklers and their corporate counterparts. Yes, fentanyl has flooded the market and is the current cause of many deaths. To deny the profound role of Oxycontin on today's addiction crisis, however, is to deny history. Had Oxycontin not been accepted by health care providers as a "harmless" alternative to other other prescription opioids, it is doubtful that fentanyl use would be anywhere near the levels it is in this country today. This acceptance was the direct result of the intentional and meticulously planned marketing of the drug by Purdue Pharma.
48
@Eric T
Before you congratulate Virginia too much, this is to remind there was a doc in Virginia in the 90's who had his license suspended, had it reinstated and then had it revoked only to have it reinstated, both times for overprescription of opioids and the death of at least one patient.
It was only with the death of another patient that the doctor's license was finally revoked for good and he was prosecuted . The family members of that person wondered what it took for a doc in Virginia not to be allowed to practice medicine.
17
@Eric T All of the Oxycontin available to addicts is not from prescriptions, unless you are speaking of the middle class adults. Oxy is a small part of the addiction in Amerika. Don't many of those addicted turn to other drugs when denied their drug of choice Oxy?
6
Charge them with first degree murder. Premeditated murder.
There are thousands of people who have died as a result of their greedy actions.
11
I think you need to be more specific in your reporting. It is the family of Raymond Sackler that owned Purdue when they invented Oxycontin and they are the ones who promoted it. The Smithsonian musseum is named for Arthur Sackler who died in 1987 -- long before Oxycontin -- and his estate sold their shares of Purdue back to Raymond's family. So it's Raymond and Beverly Sackler's name -- not Arthur or Elizabeth, that is in question. Many people Sackler did not have anything to do with Oxycontin. Let's tar the correct people.
6
@Rebecca - If I were one of the innocent Sacklers right now, I'd seriously be considering changing my name.
2
The legal drug pusher verson of 'The Enemy Within'.
Remember the soul song 'I'm your pusher man', how appropriate it applies to a US company. No, 90% of the drugs aren't coming over the Mexican border, they're made right in the good ole USA.
4
How long did it take to get the tobacco companies to admit that addiction to cigarettes was intentional and orchestrated and not a consequence of moral, physical or character weakness of the user? And how long before they admitted that did we KNOW the truth? We don't need these people to admit anything. We need to stop the criminal behavior in its tracks, put them in prison and shut down the company if it cannot handle the manufacturing and distribution of highly addictive and dangerous substances in a responsible and regulated manner.
1
If the Sacklers were regular drug dealers, civil asset forfeiture laws would take their money. Lots of it. Prosecutors should go after their money--it could be used for the addiction treatment.
16
This is an example of free market capitalism at its finest - they seem to have rid themselves of any lingering traces of noblesse obliges. What's a couple thousand lives compared to a billion bucks, eh?
5
Doctors are equally guilty. So is the FDA for approving a drug with just one benefit: You don't have to take as many pills, so it's convenient.
4
59 Overdose deaths ‘is not too bad’? Anyone with an ounce of humanity would think that 1 death is enough to cause doctors and the company to look at what went wrong. But our system worships wealth so much that people with money are always right and should be allowed to get away with anything to get richer.
1
When you look at the demographics, the Sackler family has a good point: deplorables, down and out. It's the same as the gun argument and suicides -- it's not the guns, it's the individuals
My high school was plagued by OxyContin. The group of 'cool guys' all started doing it, sourced from someone's dad who was a doctor. Eventually the point guard of our basketball team had to go to inpatient rehab his senior year. My best friend from middle school started doing Oxy. She became so addicted that when her supply ran out she turned snorting, then injecting, heroin. She has been in and out of rehab for the past 10 years. Another acquaintance overdosed but survived - twice. I can easily riddle off so many stories of how this drug snagged good people into addiction and then destroyed them. People make bad decisions, but in my limited experience once you tried this a few times, it's all down hill from there. That the Sacklers would look at that addiction trend and push dosage and sales - is truly vile.
17
It’s one thing to come down on a privately held drug company pushing their products. Like many industries, this one requires adult supervision. The FDA should be held criminally responsible for not protecting us, not doing their jobs. They failed miserably. Shame on greedy soulless billionaires, they will meet their maker in one form or another. Yet to me, the FDA is the true culprit, awash in corporate lobbying cash. Unbelievable.
5
these folks need to be held accountable! Thousands of deaths lie at their feet. All for a few extra bucks. How very, very sad.
4
I was prescribed Oxycontin in early 2001 for a lumbar disc issue. I was required to see a prescription specialist before I could receive the script. When I sat down, the Nurse(?) took out a little pill and placed it on the desk in front of her. She then reached into her desk and retrieved a little hammer. She then took the hammer a smashed the pill. She looked at me and then said: Don't do that.
I had been miserable with the pain and had a real hard time moving at all. So, what do you think I did? I took a little hammer and smashed one, and then ingested the contents.
What followed was the worst year of my life. I couldn't get enough of the stuff. When I got my 30 day prescription filled I was lucky if it lasted me 10 days. The withdrawal symptoms made the pain I was suffering before hand look like, well, nothing. It was absolutely horrible.
Marijuana didn't help. Nothing helped subdue the withdrawal symptoms. Marijuana didn't help the back pain, much. Maybe if that "Health care professional" hadn't done that, it would have been different. It took every ounce of determination I had to get off that vicious cycle. The pain I endured from my spine was more bearable then the "fix".
And then, I found Kratom. I used it, daily, for more than 2 years. Not one hint of withdrawal. No prescription drug haze. No throwing up because I took too much.
But the FDA wants to ban it. Because it's "Dangerous". No, it's because big pharma isn't making any money on it.
18
Where have federal and state agencies (FDA, etc) been all of this time?
4
In 2002, I worked in community mental health and even then you could see it starting. I remember a patient dying on a public bus after overdosing on fentanyl patches. Pharma companies ignored the problem until the body count grew. Government stepped in too late. We created our own epidemic.
8
Pretty large numbers, but remember, 480,000 people die from tobacco related illnesses every year in the US and it is in the name of Freedom to do whatever you want.
3
" it is in the name of Freedom to do whatever you want."
Except that tobacco companies for 40 years knew that cigarette smoke contained cancer-causing particles, but deliberately hid the information from the public.
So how can users make informed decisions ( in the name of freedom) if pertinent information specific to the health dangers of both addictive vehicles were deliberately withheld?
6
@BorisRoberts - Except that OxyContin was only approved for marketing in 1995, so it's been around for a relatively short period of time compared with tobacco.
Also, it's one thing to have a nicotine addiction and quite another to have a $100 a day dope habit, no?
9
That helps explain why my wife and I (both past 80) have been prescribed oxycontin so often, and in such large quantities whenever we had something involving surgical or other hospital stays.
We said we preferred other ways to control the pain, but they kept on prescribing it. We ended up using only a small percentage of the prescriptions.
I guess we were lucky.
10
Brian, my husband and I -- same vintage -- have had the same experience.
4
FACT: The drugs at issue sold by Purdue have been very effective at reducing or eliminating the pain and suffering the drugs are intended to address.
FACT: There is nothing wrong with a company or its officers and/or directors seeking to maximize sales of the drugs it produces if those drugs are legal, which the drugs at issue here are.
Thus, the critical issue is whether Purdue and its officers and directors knowingly misled doctors and/or potential drug purchasers about the addictive or other negative features of Purdue's drugs. While the emails and quotes discussed in this article suggest the Sacklers might have been insensitive to the effects of their company's drugs and could help prove an allegation they knowingly misled doctors and patients, nothing quoted constitutes "smoking gun" evidence of guilt. Further, as the quotes are appearing out of context and without explanation or rebuttal, the willingness of readers to find unquestionable guilt here is unwarranted.
3
Less is more. Promoting prescription drugs to consumers and to distributors (physicians & pharmacies) as mass market consumer goods is unwise and, to some of us, is unethical but, so far, not illegal. Use of drugs should be limited and parsimonious. Used only when necessary and tightly monitored to reduce likelihood of misuse and abuse. Drugs should be tightly monitored from manufactuer via distributor to end user = audit trail for every pill, potion, and “medicine.”
1
@Gail FACT: There is definitely something wrong when a drug company produces a substance that results in grave public danger, even if it is legal to do so. I'm reminded of the classic Elixir Sulfanilimide case of 1937, when the S.E. Massengill Company produced a deadly 'elixir' that was not one (leading to the passage of the 1938 Federal, Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act). Back then, the Massengill's produced a substance that was taken to market with little testing for the sheer profit motive. And it is the profit motive at stake here, which -- no matter how legal to pursue -- also has an ethical side.
Think of the Ford Pinto case, too. Ford had a right to produce a car cheaply. But safety? People were being blown up and burned to death due to the company's negligence, and Ford paid a heavy price for their willingness to ignore, and even factor in how they could weather, the death toll.
The Sacklers' apparent breezy dismissal of the effects of a powerful drug that they were producing is absolutely troubling, and given Oxy's incredible addiction potential, I do not see how you can dismiss their culpability in pushing for more prescriptions, and perhaps burying the known effects. What would you expect patients to do after the prescriptions ran out, pray tell? And you can see the effects of this deadly crisis -- right across the nation.
4
The harsh reality of corruption. 218,000 deaths and counting. How can these people get away with something so terrible like this?
6
Interesting that in 2000 this family and executives were found guilty of felons and were to be charged by Justice. Then, Guilliani was hired and he arranged a deal that they would not get charged, a few million dollar fine and they were allowed to continue including exclusive government contracts. It stinks, its the system, and its all about who has the most $$$ to pay off our dear public servants. This same lawyer ,Guilliani, is now trun Trumps lawyer.
12
I'm no lawyer, but I've watched enough Law and Order to be unreasonably confident these rich scumballs are guilty of reckless endangerment at the very least.
Unfortunately, it's 21st century America, so their lawyers will drag it out, eventually issue some mealy-mouthed buzzword-laden corporatespeak statement about how they "regret [vague passive verb] this tragedy," promise not to do it again (again), and never see the inside of a courtroom.
Too bad that the most fitting punishment for the perpetrators would be considered cruel under our legal system. Feed large doses of oxy to those convicted and then stop cold turkey. Rinse and repeat.
10
So...when is someone going to be charged with a crime? Go to trial? Go to prison? 200,000 deaths and counting. This is why people hate big pharmaceutical companies! All they want is money and they don't care who suffers or dies. The hate does double for all of the spineless politicians who accept donations aka bribes from the pharmaceutical companies to look the other way and do nothing to stop the murders.
12
Just a little late on this NYTs. The New Yorker magazine covered this about a year ago exposing Sackler/Purdue which was horrifying to read, not to mention the philanthropic aspect of all this.
4
Put Richard Sackler in prison for a good LONG time. He and all other Sackler members who committed these crimes deserve punishment.
11
How could the government's war on drugs miss this high profile drug syndicate? Oh, right, lobbyists and campaign contributions.
9
I'm reading multiple comments that state how the user flushed these pills down the toilet. Please stop doing that; you are poisoning the creeks, lakes, rivers, oceans. Remains of drugs are turning up in fish and other marine life. Our waterways are polluted enough. You can return them to the pharmacy that dispensed them; you can grind them up in coffee beans and put them in your garbage can. But stop flushing them!
26
The Sackler family deserves to lose every cent they have in lawsuits against them for this.
8
Pharmaceutical companies are the biggest drug dealers on the planet. Do the Sacklers get a pass because they threw their drug empire money at a few medical schools?
11
Just your basic drug dealers, but less honest.
4
200,000 deaths in the US since 1996.
Surely there must be laws that would allow the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma to be charged with murder. A financial penalty, no matter its size, will never be enough. The family and the corporation need to be stripped of all assets, all rights, all freedom, all dignity.
Thanks, Massachusetts, for starting to go after these greedy and callous monsters. Good luck.
6
“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”
How pathetic. As a recovering alcoholic and opioid addict, I spent time in detox and rehab with people addicted to OxyContin. I never used the drug, but the people I met said that to get around the time-release nature of the drug, all a person had to do was chew the tablets. That unleashed a rush of opioids to the system, resulting in a very addictive high.
I wish the Sacklers could see the suffering I saw in people trying to get off this horrific drug. It takes months, if not longer, of excruciating withdrawal, sleeplessness, nausea, and worse, a sense of hopelessness, that the patients would never get back to the way they were. I met one guy who cashed out of his 401k, to the tune on $90,000, so he could buy the drug.
I understand and admit that as addicts, we are responsible for our recovery. A person on a solid path to recovery doesn’t blame others, even the drug manufacturers. But to refer to us as “reckless criminals” is abhorrent.
The FDA should banish this drug. That may mean patients who REALLY need painkillers have to take a pill every four hours, rather than Oxycontin’s empty promise of extended release. That’s true if the meds are used as prescribed. Addicts don’t follow rules. I should know. I am one.
14
As someone who has the stance of legalizing all drugs, this right here is a cautionary tale. But it's not users that I fear, it's the prospect of private companies with deep pockets and lobbyists waging war on behalf of them that I'm afraid of.
5
Continually finding no members of the Sackler family at fault, yet levying large fines, is a court-sanctioned guarantee to encourage them to continue, in fact, double-down on their single-minded efforts to sell more product. Afterall, how else can they pay the fines? It's time to hold people like the Sacklers, and others like them, personally accountable.
7
Here’s the problem with OxyContin, which did NOT ignite the opioid epidemic.
That was ignited by street-drugs.
But government efforts to blame drug manufacturers has created a whole new class of addicts - I’m one.
As the victim of debilitating nerve impingement, I was given a moderate dose of oxicodone, 15 mg pills, take WHEN needed.
I did - then, with the new rules, I was required to take half my oxycodone as Roxycontin - 30 mg 3x daily.
What happens if you have to take a drug and maintain a minimum level in your bloodstream 24-7?
It stops working.
So, now I am in pain, and the limited number of as-needed pain meds don’t do the job anymore.
I’m not stupid enough to touch street drugs. I am bedridden most of the day, though.
If the federal rules hadn’t changed, I could reduce the total amount of pain killer (and chronic pain with intermittent bouts of acute pain is a way to destroy a life - no one should live in pain)!
But the government ruled, when Chinese Fentanyl became the street drug of choice - and a very dangerous one because potency cannot be made reliable - illegal dealers don’t have the equipment - that EVERY legitimate opioid user must use “background” drugs, it caused what will probably become a wave of suicide by legitimate users who cannot take the pain anymore.
It has nothing to do with street drug deaths - and everything to do with politics - not party politics but bureaucratic response to “do something”.
1
Fines don’t eliminate responsibility for deaths although they may salve the payers.
Based on the comments quoted in the article, these people essentially are murderers.
On vacation a few years ago, I twisted my back and couldn’t stand up. I went to the local urgent care facility and after a short examination, a prescription was written that provided me with 60 hydrocodone pills. I asked if hydrocodone was the same as Vicodin and told yes. I asked - are they dangerous? Addicting? I was told not to worry. They would relieve the pain. Enjoy them is what the doctor said.
I never took one and disposed of them through my local police department.
I couldn’t believe it was that easy to obtain a dangerous prescription drug. Nor could I accept the doctor’s comments.
I’m sure there are some patients where their conditions require these drugs, but the ready availability to people who don’t really need them is what results in addiction, followed by crime and the search for non-prescription substitutes that are killing people.
This family has enriched themselves through inappropriate business practices and the number of deaths that have resulted is overwhelming. They need to be held responsible.
6
It is time for the American public to stop rewarding the filthy rich
(as opposed to all those clean rich) by allowing their congressmen to legislate tax loophole after loophole, until, the taxpayer is basically paying the Sacklers, and the Trumps, NOT to pay taxes. If you are successful in an upper-middle- class way, you are introduced to tax loopholes as soon as you are able to actually buy a house and have credit, and no one says “no thanks”. Like addiction behavior, you are very soon too compromised to really complain about the system. It is been many years since anyone intelligent made the mistake of respecting the “contributions” of those whose immoral behavior undermines the social contract of democracy, not to mention common decency.
3
@magicisnotreal, Yes, I do understand the difference. The unknown quantities of Fentanyl is what is killing people. There is something dishonest going on with combining the statistics. People are also dying from prescription opioids, but in nowhere near the numbers of the street drugs. If you take 35 Oxys a day, they will kill you. If you take the prescribed number, they don't.
1
Too late now.
American law, or, should I say, the nimble manipulation of American law, has rendered the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma bulletproof and untouchable.
3
"In 2016, Forbes magazine estimated the family’s wealth at about $13 billion."
I wish I knew the magic number of dollars people feel they need before they willing to sell their soul and ignore the evil they perpetrate.
4
Americans need to chose life over opioids.
This may stir up a lot of people, but opioid crisis never became a crisis until White Americans began to fall prey from this drug abuse, at a disproportionately higher rate. This is not a new phenomenon.
Good to hear the Sackler's are doing well. Maybe we need to build a wall around Purdue Pharma to stop the drugs from pouring into our streets?
5
As gut-wrenching as this entire story is, it is kind of amusing to once again see the arrogance of the C-suite, as displayed in their emails, used against them in court.
Folks, don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't want to see printed in a newspaper the following day, or shown to you in a deposition years after the fact. Your work emails aren't private. Your personal emails probably aren't either, for that matter.
2
Remember: behind the beautiful art pieces, museums, the prizes for theoretical physicists and mathematicians that bear the Sackler name, lies this tale of gore, blood, ruined lives.
9
"Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids, and Purdue Pharma has been the target of numerous lawsuits."
Because of this directed effort to mislead everyone, they're technically mass murderers.
Why aren't any Sacklers in prison yet?
7
Shocking but let’s remember that there are not great serious pain relievers out there as alternatives. These people are evil no doubt but many people have benefited and not gotten addicted. I never see those stats though they are important.
4
At first, I thought the idea of changing the name of the Sackler museum was ill-advised. Now, however, I wholly support doing so.
3
Drugs are cheap. Insurance companies will not pay for unlimited alternative pain management: chiropractor, acupuncture, shiatsu, etc. Most cannot afford long term alternative pain management. Chronic untreated pain equals no quality of life. Those with chronic pain who can choose to be conscious suffer and loose hope. How many commit suicide. Let’s have a conversation about how this country does not treat chronic pain.
I am a NYCDOE school teacher. 20 years ago 6 adult sized 6th graders slammed a door into me for fun. The UFT contract was whatever GHI would pay for. I received a total for the year of 20 chiropractic visits. I was paying out of pocket $1000 a month for alternative pain management until I couldn’t. I had no tenure and then I had no job. No one offered me Oxy but I did get Tylenol with codeine for years ( My brain lights up from sugar not codeine) It took the edge off of the pain but I used up all of my energy to walk through the chronic pain. I lost hope that I would ever get me back. I did have a timeline of how long I thought I could survive and considered suicide as an option. At a time of no hope, a neighborhood chiropractor discounted his fee so that I could be treated three times a week for three years. It worked, the residual pain is in the background.
I survived, the old me is back, albeit older and wiser. We need MEDICARE FOR ALL that must include continuous alternative pain management.
9
Another billionaire family lying to get richer at the expense of poorer people. Is that the American dream now?
I've only used opioids once and that was after I had wrist surgery. And I only took the opioids at night because I don't like pills.
After about a week, I was virtually pain-free during the day without any painkillers so I tried to taper off of the night-time pills. Suddenly nights became extremely painful. My brother, a doctor, said some studies have shown that your brain in withdrawal from opioids actually increases your sensitivity to pain making you go back on the opioids, rinse and repeat.
Another reason to hate pills. I flushed them down the toilet, which was no hardship for me because I'd only been using them for a week. A couple of days later, I was fine, but I can imagine long-term users might have a very difficult time.
9
@LibertyNY flushing is the wrong approach, just for awareness. They impact the water stream and everything that resides within, which is why communities have established take-back programs (also to reduce misappropriation). Something to keep in mind for all drugs.
6
We shouldn't forget the roles that Orrin Hatch and Jason Chaffetz played in running defense for the Sacklers. Hatch thwarted the efforts of Hal Rogers and Mary Bono as they tried to pass laws to prevent the mass prescription of opioids and instead study other methods of pain control. Hatch received 360K in campaign contributions from Purdue. Chaffetz, whose political campaigns were largely funded by pharmaceutical companies (>200K), led an effort against the CDC as they tried to encourage doctors to consider other methods of pain control before prescribing opioids.
20
@Jim Excellent point. Anyone who wants more info on this - check out American Overdose : the Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts, by Chris McGreal. Great book - it reveals the role of big pharma lobbying and campaign contributions in this epidemic.
2
It is a rare situation that has a single cause, or a single culprit to blame. But here's my take- physicians should have known better than to pump their patients full of powerful opioids with few concerns for their long-term well- being. The history of western medicine is the history of opium and morphine. They just should have known better.....
9
This story reveals is a fundamental problem with drug laws, and enforcement. I would like the see the SAME LAWS on the books enforced right up to the top of Perdue. You know, the property seizure laws, minimum mandatory prison sentences - the same enforcement for ALL ILLEGAL DRUG DEALERS.
If drug dealers can shield themselves behind a corporate entity, LEGALLY pushing drugs, how will we ever stop this?
And what's to stop some other wealthy people from setting up a corporation to shield themselves from legal consequences?
13
The legal pushers were the feds OxyContin is, by nature, addictive because it’s always in one’s system.
Legally dispensed RoxyCodone can be controlled.
Made by same people, too.
But the street drug problem can only be controlled by improving the lives of those driven to it by poverty, homelessness, depression, hunger - things too many people don’t want to see money spent on.
3
My 82-year-old dad was given oxycodone when he entered hospice following a sudden onset, interstitial lung disease that doctors expected would do him in within six months. The drug was automatically prescribed. He didn't have pain, per se, but that was hospice protocol. He liked it. A lot. One day he insisted on a double dose while I was visiting, which rendered him a zombie for the duration of my visit. It angered me off because I had a hunch he didn't "need" it. The timing coincided with all of us in the family realizing that perhaps rumors of his (impending) death had been greatly exaggerated. When I delivered a "tough love" rant about him zoning out while I was visiting, I think it was a wake-up call that 1) he wasn't dying and 2) he was on the cusp of becoming addicted. He quit the drug, fired his hospice, and miraculously, is now living a productive (if dependent on oxygen) life. Go, Dad!
20
Why aren't we suing liquor stores for alcoholics? Let's sue fast food industry for fat people? When do we take responsibility for our actions?
I'm not excusing the Big Pharma or their owners... but seriously? who doesn't know that pain killers are addictive?
So tired of addicts blaming the doctors & big pharma. Most sb on their knees thanking their lucky stars that there's something to relieve pain. Instead, they abuse the pills then blame their bad behavior on everyone else.
6
Because trusted, licensed physicals don’t prescribe liquor or fast food. I can’t believe that you would conflate the two.
25
We take responsibility for our actions when these companies begin being honest with us about what they're putting into their products and what the real effect is on our health and lives as a result. If they won't, I vote to sue them into the poor house.
1
That's the point , though - physicians know that opiates are addictive, and so do the manufacturers. The entire point of making certain drugs "Rx only" is to protect the public. Purdue, and a whole lotta doctors, betrayed the trust of their customers.
2
Please tell us more about Purdue's lobbying efforts and expense, the Sackler's political donation record and to whom, and how many Purdue execs also have worked/ will work at the FDA.
9
We went into Panama to get Noriega. Where do these drug pushers live? And, BTW - companies are people too. Jail time, serious jail time, and fines of a significant amount of money for those individuals, is the only answer.
13
Why is it that Trump doesn't go after big pharma as a major player in the current opioid crisis? Instead, in his world, it has all been caused by hordes of brown people at our southern border. Hmmmmm....
9
I bet they never gave to the Democratic party.
Once Jason Chaffetz apparently decided he no longer cared about American citizens, he apparently also decided he could make the big bucks more easily by becoming a Republican. So he did, switching in 1990 from the Democratic Party to the Republican. Easy peasey.
4
"The Sacklers whose name adorns museums and medical schools around the world" may want to think about taking their name off of those buildings and putting the names of the people who lost their lives to their greed on them instead.
12
I wonder if they'll strip their name off their laboratory in the American Museum of Natural History. Somehow I doubt it.
1
Gosh, that sure comes as a shock. Not.
2
We're in the midst of an opium war right here in the USA, courtesy of the Sackler family. Perhaps the Sacklers fancy themselves an Imperial family.
4
@Carrie. “opioid” not opium.
Reality Check countless millions have died from secound hand smoking an still has zero regualtion because not concedered food. Nictine been altered to make it ten times more addictive still zero regulation by government. Our culture is worse now then 50 years ago. Almost form of population control drugs .
1
I don't care how much a drug company/rep pushes a pharmaceutical/device, I won't prescribe it or use it if I do not believe (based on my research), that the pharmaceutical or device is in the best interest of my patient. I spend many hours out of my week, studying research (I read about 40 journals per week) to ferret out any and all things that may potentially affect my patients. I have an academic surgical practice in addition to holding a second doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology along with my doctorate of medicine. It is MY job and MY responsibility to question anything and all things that involve the health of my patients. While pain relief is of importance in the treatment of my surgical patients, their safety is of paramount importance. I don't trust pharmaceutical companies any more than I trust politicians. The pharmaceutical companies do not have the safety or even the health of my patients in mind when they are pushing their pharmaceuticals/devices any more than our so-called political leaders have the best interest of this country in mind. The buck stops with me and has always stopped with me from the time I raised my hand and took the Oath of Hippocrates to "first do no harm".
16
This family has done nothing less than help set in motion an American catastrophe of epic proportions. Through greed and reckless disregard of intended use they have participated knowingly in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens. The complicity of certain doctors and distributors has escalated this into a national crisis. The Justice Department needs to aggressively prosecute these crimes by starting at the top and working their way down without interference from the pharmaceutical industry or the medical community.
2
I was given a prescription for 20 opioid pills after I had wrist surgery. I took one and got sick to my stomach and threw the rest of the pills away. A friend of mine came to visit and brought me some marijuana. I smoked a joint with him and the pain I was experiencing went away and never returned. My brother is taking opioids for hip pain. He told me how great he feels after he takes the pills. I told him to stop taking them. I said to him "You live in Colorado. Marijuana is legal. Try it and see if it helps to relieve your pain. I don't want to get a phone call from someone telling me you died from taking opioids. The stuff you are taking is poison. Please stop!!"
186
But where is the evidence? There is little evidence other than anecdote to support your claim, and what there is is pretty flimsy. Cannabis for pain relief is more about belief than evidence.
8
@susan No doubt doctors are the biggest drug pushers in the USA and the various pharmacas are the suppliers. The wall will not stop this.
11
@PeteH
There is little evidence to support pain relief because for years it was illegal to conduct clinical trials on cannabis.
21
if you get addicted whose fault is it? The addicts. Take personal responsibility people
3
Who writes the prescriptions? These medically-prescribed Opiates aren't supposed to be like booze or tobacco, available on every street-corner. People trust their doctors to give them the right treatment!
2
@Brad I used to share your sentiments, until I read Dopesick. I highly recommend it - even the most hard-hearted person could not help but be moved to sympathy for opioid addicts.
1
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime"
13
legalize cannabis, it will go a long way toward solving the opioid crisis , turns out one can love a healthy happy and productive life while being a regular cannabis user , it’s not perfect or risk free but it’s a lot better than opioids
3
The ill-advised crackdown on prescription opioids has led to more overdoses, many due to people turning to street drugs. Clearly prescription painkillers should be easily available to people who need them, based on their doctors' judgment. When used as directed there is little chance of overdose. Although reporting sometimes conflates addiction and overdose, addiction is at best a minor health problem since opioid addicts can be fully functional.
5
After knee surgery, I faithfully took the pain killer prescribed by my doctor to, “...keep ahead of the pain”. Within a week I was thinking about the time schedule to take another pill, a lot! I then took half doses and lengthened the time between pills, and after I was well on my way back to work, I found myself sweating and anxious because I wanted a pill-just in case. Mine was a minor case of addiction, but it scared the hell out of me because it was so easy and doctor approved. Big pharma is not your friend, and the surgeon who prescribed to me has, thankfully, retired.
10
@Jsbliv. You could have just refused to take them.
It was a major surgery, I had never taken these kinds of drugs before, I was in a great deal of pain, and I trusted my doctor. I had no idea how fast they would take hold, plus having no experience with family or friends to advise me one way or another, I trusted my physician. It was a lesson I will never forget and I educated myself quickly after that.
5
And why aren't they in jail, and the kid on the corner selling is? The mega-rich are certainly above the law. A disgrace!
8
I recently read the book Dopesick. It kept me awake at night. I loathe these people who swan around being rich and important going to dinners and parties, lapping up adulation for the money they donate, while people are suffering and dying and families are grieving because of their greed. Disgusting beyond belief.
318
@laughoutoud Dopesick was the the best book I read in 2018. A must read to understand what is going on - and what is the leading cause of death for people under 55 in the USA.
9
@laughoutoud Also check out Anand Giridharadas fantastic book on the same topic, Winners Take All. It includes a long section on the Sacklers.
10
I just heard a tidbit on MSNBC: an American is now more likely to die from an opioid overdose than a car accident. And when I think about the fact that our own government is not allowed to negotiate prices for prescriptions, I go into a rage. Who are the Senators and Representatives that allow this policy to continue. I wish the news outlets would hold them to account too and name names.
16
Where do we build the wall, Worcester?
4
Every institution that has accepted the blood money of the Sacklers needs to scrub their name from each building, exhibition hall, etc. where it is now emblazoned for posterity. They have been successfully donating their name into/onto everything (Harvard, Smithsonian, etc.) Stop it now!
239
When conservatives and Republicans harp on about how there is too much regulation, remember this ceaseless tragedy unfolding in our country that sits at the feet of a hopelessly greedy family who already had more money than they could ever spend but wanted more, more, more. The Republican party supports these greed monsters without question, while the middle class pays with the lives of their children and for drugs that big-pharma makes sure they can't even afford.
4
During the 1960's Arthur became rich marketing Libirium and Valium. They have no souls. Sad that so many museums that I love have their name and hands all over them. I wish they would be stripped of all of their wealth like the Madoff's but sadly that will never happen. My heart goes out to the commentators here who have dealt with this drug and have lost loved ones.
5
The New Yorker’s feature article ( Oct, 2017) on this very issue, family, lawsuits, etc seems to be repeated here . And no reference or credit to that initial work.
2
Thank you for keeping this story alive. Just when it looks like we have a reality check on the opioid crisis, some more disturbing facts come to light.
3
Perhaps, hypothetically of course, every members of this family and all those unburdened ,guiltless stockholders could be put on a limited drug trial , as a penance , as it were. Every man woman and child over 10 could be given this drug multiple times a day for, say, oh I dont know two weeks, then taken off cold turkey. We could film it, for scientific reasons, of course, as we see the rich and powerful become the addicts they so deplore(and, apparently, helped to create.) Now, even in these times, ,hopefully, we have not succumbed to their level, our basest instincts . One thing to remember about the wealthy, they literally do not care if you or I live or die, as long as it is profitable. That might be the most disgusting aspect of this entire, preventable tragedy.
3
Dear NYT:
Good work. Thank you for following up on this ongoing investigation into the culpability of members of the powerful Sackler family, whose wealth will always be stained by the blood of thousands of American victims of the opioid crisis linked to their fraudulent claims re the safety of OxyContin.
Now perhaps the state and federal prosecutors in NY and DC will also pay attention?
3
I had surgery for two different health problems over the years, and when I was discharged, my doctors prescribed OxyContin to help with pain. Both times, I took the drug for one or two days and it was so strong and made me feel so awful and out of it, I stopped. Instead, I let my body heal on its own and worked through the pain.
I'm not suggesting that others should avoid taking pain killers after surgery but I find it mind-boggling and sad that people chose this powerful and dangerous drug to make themselves escape, and, therefore, feel BETTER?
1
Why don't we just ban these drugs? I don't understand why doctors can still prescribe them.
1
Firstly, prohibition doesn't work. Secondly, these are very important drugs for use in palliative care, and other limited applications. They should never have been used for post-surgical and chronic non-cancer pain, which is where the problem lies
1
@atb - There are thousands of people who live with chronic pain who take OxyContin daily in proper dosages and they live good, ordinary, productive lives. Banning this drug would cause great harm to those who use it properly. You just don't hear about ordinary, everyday use of OxyContin. It makes for a boring story.
6
If we do not see multiple Sacklers, all their executives, the leaders and the bulk of their sales force impoverished and behind bars for significant periods of time, we will know for certain the courts generally and, likely, Roberts court are as corrupt and beholden to vile interests as we suspected.
These people, all of them, knowingly, willingly, aggressively participated in the corporate murders of hundreds of thousands of Americans and likely millions more around the globe.
I don't care that their collars are white; these are pure, murder for money, professional killers.
This was no mistake.
This was no oversight.
This was no lack of data or information.
This was fully aware, completely intentional, corporate murder.
If corporations really are people, this one needs to be put to death.
3
@oogada
It might also be a good time to start considering whether share holders bear criminal responsibility in some cases, because this would surely be one.
Blatant as it is, I mean.
Everyone involved knew lots of people were dying. Everyone involved knew exactly why. Everyone involved decided to lie about it and press on.
If nothing else, you'd think the rest of the pharmaceutical industry would want to see the Sackler/Purdue axis crucified. Because if they continue to run free, hyper-regulation is soon to follow.
1
@oogada. Purdue Pharmaceuticals is a privately held company.
1
Connections to distributors needs to be investigated. They are the ones that poured millions of tablets into poor rural counties in West Virginia and Kentucky knowing people would become hooked.
3
At what part of the Mexican border did the Sackler family smuggle their drugs across?
Perhaps a wall should be built around them.
18
After working for more than a decade with another family founded, owned, and led pharma company, I am not at all surprised a "next gen" family member would abuse the already-too loose sales and marketing constraints.
I used to sit in conferences as a sales rep where the family member would "preach" about how they revered their daddy's commitment to the patients -- then direct the sales force to sell whatever drug they wanted the highest profit from with a lie. Of course, the highest dose was always pushed -- even if it had caused deaths overseas (see Halcion).
59 deaths against a million prescriptions is nothing to this industry--not even an appreciable statistic. I'm surprised they were even reported.
OxyContin has withdrawal symptoms such as panic attacks, which set in after some use. So, it is unfair to blame people who become addicted to it. If Purdue and Sackler ignored its addictive nature, then they should be held liable.
4
Look where greed and profit before all else gets us.
- opioid crisis
- climate crisis
- global conflict
- x,y, and z
It all about $$$$ and power.
Capitalism has been co-opted by a very select few for the sole purpose of attaining and retaining power.
This is how civilizations fail.
6
It appears that the Sackler family are the largest mass murders in history.
4
@magicisnotreal. Yes, there is a WORLD of difference between Street Fentanyl, Heroin, and prescription Opioids. With the prescription drugs,nobody is putting unknown ingredients in unknown quantities into them. And why would that Sackler bunch be involved in manufacturing and trafficking in Fentanyl (Fentanyl is what is killing people, 80-100 times stronger than heroin), It could only cut into their profits with the Oxys and Hydros. There gas got to be a reason for them combining the statistics. Telling the truth is usually not the reason for these things.
1
@BorisRoberts
You seem to not really understand the subject.
It is not the impurities of street drugs that are killing people it is actually the purity of them that is.
3
Seems that if you are incorporated and have shareholders then almost anything goes in the name of "revenue." Theft by another name.
7
Blaming the victim works like a dream in cultures that consider shame and guilt an essential part of the human experience. Often the victims are taught and conditioned to blame themselves as well. Victim blaming has worked well in American society with demonizing and blaming the poor, rape victims, victims of drug abuse perpetrated by big pharma, and media that covers uncomfortable truths that shatter our beliefs in a benevolent patriarchy. Blaming the victim is a crafty and effective way to defend the Devil.
3
This goes beyond disgusting what they did, it goes beyond criminal...
A full investigation of not only the company, and the family, but the medical system as a whole in America is required -
So starting from the foundation of the marketplace, we ask the question, can modern America actually reform itself, the roots of contemporary capitalism are rotten to the core.
Rome burns, and people are scratching their head about why...?
And thank you, to those of you who dedicate much of your time to trying to fix the damage from this sort of medieval cruelty rampant in the modern corporate culture of absolute power, absolute profits.
2
Jail the Sacklers. Their greed has cost thousands of lives and created misery for thousands more.
3
This company should be made to pay the survivors of its greed.
5
These are contemporary American drug lords.
My friend died addicted to opiates. I know most people here probably know someone who has, too.
2
This is another stark reason to embrace Medicare-for-All. There is no CARE in our current run amok for-profit inhumane system.
One of the things that are repeated over and over from people who became addicted to these prescription drugs is when the script was denied they were left alone to suffer hellish withdrawal — or seek illegal alternatives. Sorry, you are on your own? What is wrong with us as a country?
How much is this epidemic costing US taxpayers? The cure is so simple: Medicare-for-All. Marketing drugs should also be muzzled.
It must be surreal to be part of a family whose wealth rests upon the bodies of enough dead to fill an entire city. It is chilling.
5
Criminal charges need to be filed against members of the Perdue family. It’s an American Drug Cartel.
2
And who "successfully" represented Purdue in their slap on the wrist settlement? The great Rudolph Giuliani of course - sleaze personified!!
4
If this is proven to be true, the Sacklers should be forcibly bankrupted, right into the poorhouse.
1
I find it sadly ironic that this story and the story of El Chapo’s trial are running in the NYT at the same time. While the administration and law enforcement continue to rail against the “terrorists” bringing illegal drugs into the country, what exactly are they doing to stem the proliferation of drugs being manufactured and distributed by the pharmaceutical industry within the country? And now the world. Thank you, Commonwealth of Massachusetts for having the courage to take on these scoundrels. May the Sackler family live to see the four walls of cells designed just for them — and have no access to the infirmary for pain-relieving medication.
6
For more info on how the FDA was complicit in all this, read American Overdose by Chris McGreal
2
The present US administration (and previous ones) do not seriously hold the big corporations responsible for their actions.
Purdue Pharma is responsible for the mnfg of Oxicontin but it is the Doctors who are prescribing the pills that feed the addictions that ultimately leads to overdoses and deaths.
Approximately 50,000 opioid deaths in the US last year is horrendous! It is intolerable that this is not on the front page of our newspapers and on TV news daily.
While I was reading this article, I had a cable news channel on in the background. The gov't is partially shut down because the President isn't being allocated $5 billion to build a wall to keep out imaginary drug dealers.
There is irony in this.
2
How much money is enough for the Sackler family? Terrible what greed can do.
1
Where's the War On Drugs when you really need it?
Nothing but collective cognitive dissonance when society makes a distinction between this creep and El Chapo. The latter must be kicking himself for not buying a wing at the Met.
2
What a horrible legacy for a family name. It was so purposeful and it defines greed and evil. They knew.
1
Read Matt Taibi’s book The Divide. Same o led story: big Pharma gets let off with a payout and small time drug dealers in the street pay with jail time.
Health plans are complicit. They refuse to pay for behavioral therapy, PT and other non-drug approaches to the management of chronic pain. Far cheaper to pay for the pills. Once the patient is addicted, the plans refuse to pay for treatment.
3
Why the pharmaceutical sector can not be trusted to enter the cannabis sector.
Lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry is arguably the single largest obstacle in preventing a relatively low cost ( potentially over the counter consumable product ) with favorable biological as well as organic properties from becoming widely available to US consumers
3
In "Dopesick", the excellent book on the American opioid crisis, the author describes an encounter among a physician, the teenager he was treating (minor surgery, as I recall), and the teen's parent. When the doctor prescribed an opioid (contravening his own hospital's guidelines), the parent ripped up the scrip in the physician's face and demanded a less addictive pain reliever. And then went upstairs to insist that the physician be disciplined.
The family had already seen one of their children die from opioid addiction. They refused to lose another.
3
"As part of the 2007 settlement agreement, the board of Purdue Pharma, which included members of the Sackler family, signed a corporate integrity agreement with the federal government promising that the company would not violate the law in the future."
So...prior to this settlement, the board was unaware or unaccountable re obligation to not violate the law?
200,000 Americans die because of these clowns, and Trump is on about drugs being smuggled across the border?
8
“littered with biases and inaccurate characterizations.” This means the highly paid lawyers couldn't come up with a list to juxtapose or counter the complaint. Seems very telling to me.
Even if the family is not connected in the complaint, it is a privately held company they own and control, thus the buck stops with them as their employees behavior is their responsibility.
You'd think they'd take an interest when the Billions started rolling in just to see what had happened no?
2
As a physician practicing in the 90's, I saw Purdue drug reps claiming that pain should be a "vital sign" and physicians paid off to give dishonest lectures about "untreated chronic pain" being a disgrace. Four (or more) oxycodone daily has decreasing value except to lead to dependency. They even had hospitals taking a "pain scale" vital sign to evaluate on every visit, something never proven to have any value.
But the Sacklers, when not becoming rich villains, gave a little money away like the Kochs and all those other wonderful people ruining the world.
8
And how about the doctors prescribing it to their patients needlessly. The law show go after the doctors and patients as well!
4
I am deeply and sincerely empathetic regarding all the suffering that opioids have brought upon people with an inherent biological flaw that makes them vulnerable to addiction. It is not their fault. That said, I am in my 60s, have no predisposition whatsoever to abusing opioids or any other substance, and have in recent years required the prayed-for and medically sound relief that opioids can offer, including devastating post-surgical pain for a bowel obstruction, the initial days after a shattered wrist from a fall in the street, a sudden and excruciating infected tooth (think "hot drill being jammed through your head for 14 hours"), and another malady best left unnamed. None of these examples could be touched by over-the-counter medicines or "pain management." At my age, I've already been prescribed three or four pain medicines over the years and was just as happy to throw out the last one or two pills each time. So it galls me to have to be grouped under the umbrella of unfortunate addicted people and have legitimate opioid pain relief withheld from me. I think the medical community's stance on withholding opioids across the board is wrong.
6
@Robin If the company had offered their pain relief responsibly, you would not be denied. Their recklessness is to blame for the backlash against prescribing pain medication.
2
I took oxy for twelve years on doctor's orders not blackmarket. I never took any street narcotics. When I asked my doc early on about addiction he assured me that if I took it as prescribed there was little chance of me becoming addicted. Guess what? I was up to 140mg/day at the end. I took six months to ween myself down to 15mg/day and finally went cold turkey after that. It was the worse five days of my life but I did it. Thankfully the pain I took the drug for was no longer there but I had no way of knowing because I was too addicted.
8
"The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable".
Shouldn't drugs be prescribed at the discretion of doctors and not sales representatives of drug companies? Would be important to know which doctors acted on the advice of Purdue Pharma. They, too, should be held accountable.
3
The Sackler's have a temple to themselves at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this does not make them saints. In fact all the money and art they have contributed is based on this horrible drug. I hope some legislation can stop their killing of weak, innocent Americans. This is just as bad or worse than tobacco and that has nearly been ushered to the back of the planet, or sadly to the developing countries. It is time for the Sackler's to be prosecuted or sued for all the misery their overly powerful drug has caused.
207
@JHM - ...there are significant economic gains in various forms of tax deductions, and free security for priceless artwork, for unique donations to museums. Peer behind the veil of the art world in general, and you'll find massive money laundering, elite criminals in suits, etc.
24
@JHM
You take it as prescribed 3 or 4 times a day for 30 days then tell me how "weak" people are.
13
@JHM
This is not a horrible drug; it is a boon to modern medicine. Overdoses are caused by people who do not take it as directed. Weak perhaps, but not innocent. Do you really want to be in severe pain and be told that your only option is ibuprofen?
5
That’s criminal behavior.
2
This has been going on since the 1950s, so why isn't this family in prison?
4
According to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Purdue Pharma is unrepentant and undeterred: they are now allegedly aggressively pushing their products abroad under the aegis of the MundiPharma arm of the company, which is using the same tactics it used to boost prescriptions in the US.
Maybe the NY Times could follow up and give its readers an update. In the meantime, tell your friends and loved ones abroad to carefully scrutinize their painkiller prescriptions.
3
Another Republican family murders innocent Americans with lies of their products.
Deplorable Sackler family should’ve in prison.
6
Blood money
7
The Sacklers this past September were granted a patent for an addiction treatment drug. A crisis is an opportunity. Link below -
https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/07/richard-sackler-member-of-family-behind-oxycontin-was-granted-patent-for-addiction-treatment/
1
These people, the Sackler family, are the real criminals and drug dealers in this country, not immigrants.
They and their dishonesty, all in the name of making big bucks, have killed thousands, 100's of 1000's.
They should be in jail.
12
Richard Sackler is simply put a street pusher. But since he’s white and has money to buy off politicians and the FDA, he can do it legally. He should’ve been put away a long time ago for murder.
6
I feel sick.
2
Life in jail would be appropriate for the pushers of this hellish drug.
3
Equal justice? Right next to El Chapo, in Super Max for the rest of their lives!
1
Lock them up
5
Being white and rich protects them from the incarceration fate of low-class folk who do the same thing. I wonder what level of the inferno Dante would assign them to? Couldn't be deep enough or hot enough for what they deserve.
It must be nice to be so wealthy that you can be responsible for hundreds of deaths, and never worry about being prosecuted.
1
Trump Regime has prosecuted almost no white collar criminals. Open season; use the computer/business to commit crimes; you get a free pass from Trump. Thanks GOP. Ray Sipe
Drug pushers in suits ! Big money "donors" usually have their way with the politicians they buy with this legalized bribery ! Very often their high priced lawyers get them off the hook for jail & they pay a fine that amounts to a parking ticket like business expense that probably gets a tax deduction !Our country is as corrupt as the banana republics & BADLY needs to be accountable to ordinary Americans !
4
Ahhh...
Unchecked and unregulated capitalism at it's best. How could that possibly harm society?
2
We need criminal actions against this
family no money can bring the loved one.
They are criminals and murderers worst than John
Gotti and El capo and deserve severe
Punishment.
As long as these so called white collar
criminals can get off the hook by paying
Just fine we will continue to have these
Economic meltdown and pharmaceutical
murders.
Doctors should also be stripped of their
Licenses and charged criminally and
I am saying this as a MD who has Board
Certified in Addiction Medicine.
If you don’t know what you are prescribing you should not have privileges to write it.
MAH
1
The New Yorker did a piece on this over a year ago:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
The problem with opiates is not the opiates - its the fact they are prohibited. In portugal and Switz'd where drugs are not prohibited they have a handful of O/Ds each year. Look it up!
Further, doctors can't prescribe for addiction, leaving many to the black market.
In this case (legal opiates) the main problem is lack of understanding of their addictive nature, the O/D danger (high), and the danger of mixing w/ other drugs. D.A., JD, NYC
Those are some loyal employees -- 3 execs plead guilty and paid fines but the Sacklers go untouched? Hopefully that will change with these findings.
2
If it can be shown that the Sackler's negligence--or direct conduct to increase sales and blame addicted people--led to deaths, can they be criminally prosecuted?
Fines will not stop this kind of corporate behavior. People need to go to prison.
1
Sounds like we the people (government) have been complicit since 2006 of the abuses by this company to incorrectly promoting their drug as safe and not abusive.
Heads need to roll but we know they won't, they never do for the elites of industry who will do anything for another billion $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Thank you to the NYT for highlighting this issue!
If you haven't already, I HIGHLY recommend reading the deep dive that the New Yorker did in October of 2017, "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain."
A few excerpts from that piece:
"The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism 'is believed to reduce the abuse liability.' David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was 'not involved in the approval.' The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue."
"The marketing of OxyContin relied on an empirical circularity: the company convinced doctors of the drug’s safety with literature that had been produced by doctors who were paid, or funded, by the company."
And if that wasn't horrifying enough, they were aware that their claims of continuous relief were overstated. The result? "...many people who were not drug abusers—and who took OxyContin exactly as their doctors instructed—began experiencing withdrawal symptoms between doses."
Forget drug dealers, the current opioid epidemic lies squarely at the feet of the Sackler family.
3
Perdue Pharma and the Sackler's in no way advocated oxycontin be abused and shouldn't be held responsible for abusers crushing tablets bought on the streets or for the criminals who sold them illegally.
2
As an endocrinologist in private practice in the 1990’s, I was baffled by getting frequent office calls from an attractive female Purdue pharm rep extolling the virtues of the “very safe” Oxycontin. My practice rarely dealt with treating pain and I rarely wrote prescriptions for analgesics. I had never heard of Purdue. I had never been detailed for a narcotic. The pharm rep had no medical training other than what she had been taught to say by Purdue. The pharmaceutical industry has knowledge of every prescription I wrote, and the Purdue rep chastised me for “undertreating pain patients” when I failed to write her “quota” of Oxycontin prescriptions she expected me to write. I finally banned her from my office. Eventually I declined all office detailing from all pharm reps. I believe all doctors should keep pharm reps out of their office as ultimately there will always be a conflict of interest.
15
@CPS
Bravo to you. I have never believed the pharmaceutical industry should be given the data about every physician’s prescribing details.
The one concern about vanishing reps totally is that the physician no longer has free patient samples of some drugs. Those samples really help many patients deal with the costs of their care.
4
What a surprising development.
1
It’s very simple...seize the wealth of the Sacklers. They’re a deplorable family of thieves.
4
@John Archer
Don't forget serial murderers.
1
Very interesting indeed. I went to www.fec.gov and looked up Richard Sacklers campaign contributions. Not surprisingly, he gave very large donations, exclusively to republicans. And the large donations were coming fast and furious during the years he was promoting addictive opioids to vulnerable Americans for a profit. And he was also making large donations to the company’s PAC, so for him to say he wasn’t involved with the company is ludicrous.
2
Everyone concerned with the opioid epidemic should read "Dopesick". The author, Beth Macey, goes into depth about the corporation owned by the Sackler family (Perdue Pharma), that pushed Oxy Contin claiming no one could become addicted to it.
...but those of us who suffer from severe chronic pain still need solutions that will make our lives bearable. Too often the drugs offered as solutions are only effective for a small portion of the individuals who suffer from a specific pain-causing diagnosis. Further, many of these alternate drugs cause headaches or exacerbate bone loss or cataracts. As a penalty, Purdue should be required to invest in the development of safer pain management drugs as well as continuing education for medical professionals on the use/abuse of various opioid substances.
2
Very disturbing story about the Sacklers.
However, all physicians take pharmacology classes. I do not know how they could fail to recognize these were risky drugs!
7
@Jean
Maybe you did not notice but your post is a classic blame shift.
" I know I did... but this other guy..."
@Jean I think you are being naive? Knowledge of wrongdoing or risk does not prevent crime.
1
@magicisnotreal
It is NOT a blame shift to say that physicians should have known better and cannot just 100% blame pharmaceutical companies.
Rather, I am emphasizing the shared responsibility!!!
I come from a healthcare family—multiple physicians and medical school profs. I have also worked for medical schools and healthcare organizations.
Everyone knows pharmaceutical company salesmen and lectures always have one bottom line goal: sales! Even if the CME info is good.
2
My question: How many hundreds (thousands?) of those 200,000 opiod opioid deaths is Purdue Pharma responsible for? Whatever the number, it's certainly going to put them among the worst mass-murderers in our country's history. Yet the only legal consequence is a fine. They lose a tiny bit of their billions of $$$. The Sackler family and Purdue executives will continue to enjoy the profits of pushing this deadly drug---while thousands of young men do jail time for marijuana possession. It's a strange (and often unjust) world we live in.
11
Aside from the obvious guilt of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma in helping create the opioid epidemic, why were doctors so complicit? Why didn't doctors, most of whom want the best for their patients, do something to stop the over-prescribing? Where was the AMA? Also, why did it take so long for the FDA and the rest of the government to recognize the problem and do something?
7
@Eric
The short answer is "GREED".
1
This is not new news. Same pattern followed by other corporations with profit above the well being of people or the environment. So do you really think government regulates too much like our current administration?
Yet another reason we need strong campaign finance & election reform.
12
The article does not mention that the Sacklers / Purdue Pharma is now doing the same thing around the world that it did in the US, as MundiPharma. The LA Times did an excellent investigative piece about this on Dec 18, 2016. See especially the commercial in Spanish they created showing chains coming off people and the world turning into technicolor once people take OxyContin. I fear the global consequences of their campaign to get unwitting, largely poor people around the world addicted to this heroin like drug.
406
@Christine I had no idea, thank you for this. It's like what Big Tobacco and Big Soda is doing with the third world too - moving on to these markets once they know they can no longer pull the wool over the eyes of Americans.
29
Standard operating procedure for companies whose drugs run into trouble with U.S. legal/regulatory systems.
More innocent victims abroad, and more (much more) blood on the Sacklers' hands.
21
@Christine ....my one year old 13 pound puppy was prescribed OxyContin (at half the human dose for a 150 pound person) to suppress kennel cough. Not to cure her (the antibiotics did that) but to make me, her owner feel like the Vet had accomplished something. These horrible people are now pushing this drug into our pets. Imagine a drug addicted pet. Imagine getting your puppy off this drug after her supply ran out. Yes - we should watch out for where they go next.
23
All of those responsible at Purdue and within the Sackler family need to be brought in front of a nationally televised public trial, akin to that of the Nuremberg trials.
These evil people have intentionally and irreparably damaged countless communities and families. Much of this damage will never be repaired nor reparations paid to the families, first responders, and communities that bear the brunt of the cost.
7
This is a cautionary tale about the close relationships of pharmaceutical companies and the doctors and hospitals that treat patients. A drug is introduced with limited clinical trials because it is based on an opioid, which has a lengthy pharmacological history, and therefore was allowed to be introduced to an unsuspecting public. Consider for the moment if we told the patient that the drug is actually heroin and with it comes all the horrendous impacts, including addiction, loss of employment, loss of family, and death. What if doctors were truthful and told their patients that not only is the drug highly addictive, but that they would have to enter into a treatment program to get off the drug. Does anyone think that this drug would have been released?
The documents cited in the court filing clearly show that Purdue and the Sacklers knew exactly what the risks were but were so focused on generating profits that they didn't care about the impact on the patient, the families or society.
Purdue and the Sacklers are no different than any of the Mexican or Colombian cartels that have wrought destruction to many of our communities. They should be prosecuted as such.
17
@Mike
Like the FDA approves it and end story...?
Sounds like this is also a DEA issue and a piece of abuse of everthing from A to Z.
Is the same doctor writing scripts over and over for the same patient? Does the drug store in Muscle Shoals, Alabama file 4000 scirpts a month.
Sure the family says its safe and BMW says the top speed is 153 mph.
This article paints a damning picture of Purdue pharmaceuticals and the Sacklers. But it seems to be rather one sided reporting, and I’m guessing is principally sourced by trial lawyers, many of whom may hope to make personal fortunes from lawsuits.
The most serious evidence presented in this article is the 2007 guilty plea to criminal charges by several senior officials at Purdue, that they criminally misrepresented the addictive effects of Oxycontin. From what is stated in this piece, this may well be sufficient to prove the plaintiff’s case.
Or, there may be more to this story than appears in this article. Intractable pain, that can only be effectively managed through long acting narcotics, is a life-altering medical problem for some people, including those with many forms of cancer, or who have experienced major injury, perhaps in the military. There should be treatment options for these people.
Not all drug addicts are victims. Some made bad personal choices, and share responsibility for their addiction.
Don’t get me wrong, Purdue and the Sacklers may well be guilty of the criminal and civil charges they now face. If so, they should pay the price, if appropriate including jail time. But these questions should be tried in courts of law, based on facts, and not emotion. Let the legal system do its job, and let the truth come out.
53
@Alex
One problem with your argument. No one has yet proven opioids are beneficial for any form of chronic pain.
And for those who don't believe me, read the most recent review of the subject in the Dec. 18, 2018 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association
41
Well reasoned, and we should all agree with your advice to wait and see where the evidence takes us. But my big reservation is that in North America, business leaders are so seldom held to account. Maybe the companies pay fines, but no consequences for owners and managers. Why is the chair of Volkswagen not in an American jail. If the evidence is as claimed in this story there would be evidence for fraud or criminal negligence causing death.
33
@Alex What's your point? The article isn't saying Purdue Pharma should be dissolved nor that the Sacklers should be chased out of the country. It's reporting about the Massachusetts case being brought against both...which includes damning evidence like the Richard Sackler emails cited above.
I had a very good friend who became addicted to OC in 2005 after being prescribed the drug by various
"pill mill" doctors. His addiction has consumed much of the last 14 years. While his situation is complex and he is responsible in many ways for his own decisions, the fact remains that if Purdue Pharma hadn't lied about their drug's risk, ignored data, and aggressively marketed it to make sales goals, it would have been much harder for him to gain access to the drug.
Purdue Pharma did not invent drug addiction. But they did invent a drug that hundreds of thousands of people have become addicted to, if not millions, and refused to change course even when they knew they were doing so.
44
Gotta love for-profit healthcare!
8
@Heartlander
got to love non profit goverment
Reviewing the cover of the New York Times today and the comments here, I think it is evident that alcohol has the best public relations professionals available.
3
Don’t forget the cig companies.
Maybe their philanthropic efforts could support a Sackler Wing at the SuperMax!
4
This is old news.
The Sackler family hides behind there philanthropy. When in reality they are almost single handedly responsible for the epidemic that is destroying so many lives.
Their wealth has allowed them to get away with what amounts to at best, manslaughter. At worst, first degree murder. The fines they have paid are mere hand slaps.
They have conspired with the underbelly of the medical community to make it easy to obtain their drugs. Their lies have misled decent and honest physicians into prescribing painkillers that were know to rapidly cause addiction. The promise of 12 or 24 hour pain relief was, in most instances a lie. After eight hours the effects of the drug diminished and patients were forced to take more, and more.
Most of these people were not addicts or thrill seekers. They were decent people who had suffered from debilitating injuries. Instead of relief, they found addiction and death.
The Sacklers and their corporation should be treated the same as any criminal enterprise and charged under the RICO act. All of the money that they have earned should be taken from them and put towards treatment and rehabilitation of those they have injured.
Let the Sacklers feel the pain.
18
And then when addicts can't find any Oxy on the black market they turn to readily available cheap heroin from Mexico.
How about a jail wall to keep the Sackler family out of our lives?
3
Thanks for destroying my family, Sacklers.
8
Susan I absolutely agree. Those involved should be in the Sackler Wing of a federal prison (built with and run with all of their money) and each person with cell mates who sold their drugs. They also should be stripped of ALL their money. What they did was twelve food beyond the pale of BERNIE MADOFF! When one considers the shame heaped upon him and his family, all the news footage and front page photos..... This should be done to every one involved in Purdue. Stephenson
4
Barry Meier and/or others of NYT investigative staff are also invited to research and report political campaign contributions made by Purdue and Sackler family over past forty years.
5
This quote struck me as ghastly. “This is not too bad,” Sackler wrote to the company officials. “It (overdose deaths) could have been far worse." Who says stuff like this??? I have no doubt this is probably what Trump and every Republican is saying about the government shutdown. The ruling elite in the US basically operates the same way: making money on ordinary people's suffering.
243
@Oregon@@@ I had major surgery a few years back. I was prescribed OxyContin to alleviate the pain. It really worked but I stopped it as soon as I felt better. I had a jar with some pills left over. On first Friday Art walk in Denver some younger people asked me if they could buy the leftover pills for me. I declined and hid them away. I must say that it is an effective painkiller if used properly. I hated the state of haze it put me in. Somehow I never got addicted to it and I am happy to not to use it at all . I love the real world as it is.
46
@JG
Nice comment I have had the same experience. However, I actually do not love the real world as it is, and suffer from depression that rarely lifts.
I do understand why people want to change their experience of life. We have to figure out the safe ways to do it, and also, why they are wanting to change their experience of life, without demonizing them or judging them.
That is what makes me feel the sickest in reading this article--that the Sacklers want to blame the addicted.
11
@JG I urge anyone with leftover opioids from a past injury or surgery to dispose of them appropriately. Do not tell others that you have opioids if possible.
6
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
—Balzac
11
@Otto Walters
NO.
Hershey, FW Woolworth, Sears & Roebuck, etc all made their money honestly selling honest products.
3
@magicisnotreal
My father and I both worked for Hershey. The founder, Milton Hershey, was an honest man and the company reflected that quality. His philanthropy, a school for poor and neglected children, continues to provide a safe environment and a good education for its students.
3
You might want to read about the demise of Sears and the riches being provided to its executives.
1
It's the same old story of corporate America. It was the same with Big Tobacco, knowing that carcinogens cause cancer as early as the 1940s. Maybe earlier. It was the same with asbestos producers. It's the same with gun makers now. It's the same with Big Oil and global warming. It's the same with countless industries that pollute the environment and our bodies every day. It's about getting rich. It's blood money. This is our Capitalism. And it won't stop because YOU, my fellow Americans, are unwilling to vote for politicians who seek to pass legislation that protects us. One cannot have it both ways. One cannot cry about these "poor corporations suffering under the weight of regulation" and also cry about all the dead left in their wake; their executives, owners and shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank (and the White House). As the old adage goes: If you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Tuesday, November 3, 2020: Where will you stand?
17
I just went through TSA. I apologized for the shut-down. The agent replied, “the people voted for him.” I was proud to say I didn’t.
Not my president.
@John
choices?
1
Purdue didn’t mislead the public, they mislead doctors. How did they do that? With SALES reps, the primary source ( not the FDA) of information about new medications. Where does the FDA get most of its information about new drugs? You guessed it. Ummm, anyone else, (besides me) see the potential for problems?
8
What doctor does not know that if you prescribe more than 3 days worth of anything containing opioides you are going to have a problem. They need to be reserved for acute short term pain such as a car accident where folks are banged up bad or late stage cancer. Perhaps we should not permit opioids in pill form, only I.V.
Maybe we should be looking at med school training, how do you get a license without knowing this simple fact.
5
@Norman evidently you're not a doctor.
2
Members of the Sackler family ought to be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned if there is a paper trail with emails acknowledging culpability. In addition, if their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, acknowledged through internal emails that OxyContin was highly addictive but never marketed that way, where are the wrongful death lawsuits from the families of those who are deceased as a direct result of this blatant grab for profits at the expense of unwitting victims? No one is above the law.
9
I would like to see the Sackler name removed from every art and cultural institution in this country that they have funded with their blood money. This includes the Sackler Museum at Harvard, and Sackler Museum at the Smithsonian.
With all the talk of Mexicans smuggling drugs over our borders the biggest criminals of all turn out to be a family so morally bankrupt that it pushed it's deadly drugs so well and so unscrupulously that we've become a nation in which no corner has been untouched by opioid addiction.
Clearly the Sackler family likes to see their name engraved in stone in perpetuity and can afford to put it on museums around the globe including China which now provides the river of fentanyl deepening the despair of countless humans wracked by addiction directly caused by the Sackler family.
The tens of thousands of regular American families on the other hand, will only see their family name carved on the headstones of their sons, and daughters, husbands and wives, all lost to the Sacklers' and their shameful greed.
14
Nowhere in your article was Rudy Giuliani, Purdue Pharma’ legal counsel, mentioned but reported multiple times in the past. All three founders are now dead, suffering no financial loss or personal damage to their reputations. Fines were imposed on the corporation and charitable donations distributed to muddy the water. The comparison to Guliani's defense of Trump is unavoidable.
13
Unfortunately, the Sackler’s are only part of the never ending group of unbridled capitalists: we can all name others: the Koch’s, the fossil fuel and tobacco executives just for beginners. This is unbridled capitalism, AKA oligarchy.
As for casting blame for our epidemic of opioid deaths, how about a well informed, scholarly analysis of which group is more deadly: the Sacklers or the “caravan” crossing hour southern border. Whenever Trump blames the opioid deaths on the migrant caravans, I think what about the Sacklers.
Taking a step back, I was starting my post medical school training in the 1990’s when we were taught (really) that opioids were non-addicting for patients truly in pain. (But the question how do you recognize “true” pain from untrue pain was without answer.) Twenty years later, we all have to check a data base for past narc scripts before ordering narcs. Such is the power of industry and the weakness of medical oversight and the weakness of governmental regulation that supposedly smart doctors are fooled by false advertising. Shame on the medical profession and governmental agencies as the DEA. Shame on unregulated capitalism that leads to industry dominance over the people. When government is considered the “problem,” industry is most erroneously taken to be the default “answer.” This is a fatal flaw of logic.
5
Any settlement should include a provision that any institution named after these criminals can be allowed to rename itself.
7
The Sackler criminal clan are morally repulsive. Their willingness to prey on the public is another example of a predatory approach to profit.
All the organizations that received their 'philanthropy' and bear their name, in an effort to reform their abject familial wealth, should reconsider the naming rights.
8
Sounds like Trump's drug dealers are right here in plain sight on the Forbes list, busy carving their names on art buildings. Their victims' Plan B is cheap Mexican heroin.
The Sackler family raking in the cash by providing false information about the danger of these drugs should be the subject of a Congressional investigation and people should go to jail. People straggling to the border with their family is not "the national emergency", but killing Americans by the thousands with intentional medical lies is.
9
“I will believe that corporations are people when Texas tries to execute one.”
Every director of a company like this needs to have their personal assets stripped and to be barred from corporate directorship in the future.
We need better laws governing corporations in this country.
Vote – our lives depend on it.
10
After the trial, same punishment everybody else gets when guilty - take the money away, imprison.
8
It is time to pierce the Corporate veil. The wealthy individuals who gained vast ill gotten wealth from fraud and murder must be arrested and tried for mass murder. All, every single penny, of their family wealth must be seized as the fruit of conspiracy and fraud and killing.
4
It seems pretty clear that Richard Sackler is guilty of mass murderer and should be imprisoned for the rest of his life, or executed, depending on which state gets hold of him. But he should probably be facing 50 state criminal trials plus DC and federal courts.
Justice demands nothing less.
7
@Steve
From his own choices, Richard Sackler has marked himself for eternity.
The sign of Cain is on his forehead.
1
So while Trump is blaming immigrants for the opioids flooding the United States, much of the real blame lies with our own right-wing plutocrats, who support Trump. And like Trump, the Sacklers will try to deflect blame on to everyone else while making money hand over fist. And Republicans like to talk about personal responsibility?
9
Greed and avarice - whomever did this with intention to mislead should be locked up for a long time. Maybe that would send a message to other pharma industry thieves.
6
Well, this certainly helps explain why they stopped manufacturing OxyContin 160mg...
2
This is only an issue because the drug addiction "epidemic" is being shown as mostly white. Mr. Sackler was repeating what everyone said about the drug addicts when the ones the media reported on were mostly black. The drug companies, not only Purdue, are out for big profits and the addicts are not victims, but actively sought out drugs.
Most of the addiction stories don't start out with legitimate use, but people deciding they wanted a prescription and faked their "terrible backache". Rush Limbaugh and Jeb Bush's daughter, both doctor-shopping addicts got away with it because they were white and rich. That does not make it any different from any of the black addicts the media used to condemn. People need to take responsibility for their own actions. Even if a doctor offers a prescription, it doesn't mean you have to accept it.
4
Another great American success story! What's next? President Sackler?
7
Isn't this old news? The Daily covered much of this last summer. Sam Quinones detailed it in his book "Dreamland" that was published in 2015!! The Sackler family was being investigated by the Justice dept and they basically dropped the case. So much for concern from our so called president!
7
Sociopaths (Sackler-mob dope peddlers) do well by Consumer Capitalism. Wisely couched in the architecture of formal education and corporate legitimacy, such firewalls protect what would otherwise bring criminal consequences. This sort of abject greed, immorality and broad social harm is just another pitiful example of profit over people which our system encourages.
6
Only in America can people behave like this and then retreat to their billionaire laire paying their lawyers to run interference for them. Why? Because in this sick country it is all about the money - just look who we elected president.
8
Lock 'em up and hit the firm with hefty damages and fines.
4
Everyone needs to read "American Overdose" by Chris McGreal to understand how Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family are really no better than drug dealers, but on a much larger, and unfortunately legal, scale.
4
The painkiller works for those who are in terrible pain. Too bad people abuse it
46
Yes, absolve the people responsible for putting highly addictive medication in the hands of the masses of all responsibility.
17
@NYC Dweller
Heroin was originally though to be a miracle cure for opium addiction. It was also routinely used on the battlefields of WWI as a painkiller. In its early days, it was produced by companies like Bayer and sold over the counter. Its widespread use and lack of understanding led to addiction and abuse.
The opioid abuse that we have today stems from abuse by the company that produces them.
It is not fair not blame the people who were misled into addiction.
19
@NYC Dweller Based on my reading their drugs aren't effective. More importantly there are drugs that are more effective and not addicting. But as usual that gets drowned out by the advertising by this and other drug manufacturers.
6
As a nurse, I was always urged by hospital management to ensure patients’ pain was well controlled—because the much feared Joint Commission accrediting agency monitored how patients reported pain. Purdue never coerced physicians to prescribed pain medication, the Joint Commission certainly did. Purdue may have benefited from the increased emphasis on pain management, but the real impetus came from the Joint Commission. Lawyers would rather cast blame on Purdue because their pockets are deeper and so there is more money for lawyers in suing Purdue than the Joint Commission, but then we are simply rewarding greedy lawyers.
5
@Bill Griffiths JCAHO doesn't live outside the for-profit world. It is funded by the AMA, AHA, and industry lobbying groups among others, and many of its board members come from those organizations.
The opioid epidemic is a systemic problem that doesn't lay solely at the feet of "greedy lawyers" - pharma's profit motive, patient demands for pain control and hospitals desire to improve their satisfaction scores are all the contributing factors. It is a difficult problem that will require a multi-faceted approach. This includes removing incentives for private companies to profit from havoc they help create.
3
I had spinal fusion surgery 6 months ago. Following surgery, I was in the hospital for 4 days. They sent me home with tramadol. I was off those in about 10 days, because I found tylenol was enough. I think patients sometimes demand more drugs than they need because they are so afraid of having pain. But, pain is a part of recovery and it goes away as you heal. It's better to start with less pain medicine and see how you do, than take the strongest stuff right away. Lots of times patients find they do just fine with less powerful drugs.
15
We have all known this for three to four years, at the very least. During the ACA fights, during the 2016 election, during the budget negotiations now and in years past.
Do we need a clearer example of how the public loves the blame game that the 1% assigns to them? Do we need a clearer example of how Congress has not been in the mood to punish big money? And Doctors? At what point did you start to distrust this drug? It wasn’t yesterday, it wasn’t last year.
7
Thank you for your years of outstanding reporting, Barry, and your fine book. Your details in the updated edition of Painkiller on Rudy Giuliani's efforts on behalf of the Purdue Pharma executives a decade ago were truly disturbing.
8
@Ken Serrano
I did not know that. Old Rudy strikes again.
No wonder he and Trump hooked up. Birds of a feather. Both will do anything to make a buck. Screwing people over and defending those who do.
Yep they're a match made in Hades.
2
Does it surprise anyone that a company would lie in order to protect it's profit? The cost of a lawsuit in the hundreds of millions, if that, is still an acceptable risk when you are making Billions in profits.
7
In my 30-plus years as a pharmacist I saw the opioid crisis slowly unfold over time. Narcotic painkillers more and more frequently prescribed for less and less serious pain and a policy of patient satisfaction factoring heavily in physician evaluations has explosively increased the quantity of these drugs dispensed.
Companies like Purdue have encouraged and enabled this by detailing physicians, lobbying for laws to make prescribing their product easier, and funding "grass root" organizations with cute sounding names like "Creaky Joints".
26
@Bill W
Money really is the root of all evil.
1
@Bill W While I agree there are too many patients using/abusing strong opioid pain killers when less addicting remedies are feasible, many patients can't get stronger medications if they do need them due to the present opioid "crisis" and physicians' fears of legal action if addiction (or worse) results. People want to be able to fix almost anything with the right pill! As a chronic pain sufferer (osteoarthritis) I have used physical therapy, yoga, less addicting OTC pain relievers-sometimes in combination-or just lived with the discomfort. Of course this affects my daily activities--I can't do housework like I used to, have a tough time getting up and going to work, cannot exercise and enjoy physical activities as I'd like to and, yes, I walk funny because of the pain. What do I hear from physicians? "Be more active! Lose weight! Your pain isn't considered severe!" If physicians would, en masse, help their patients create viable, personalized solutions to their health issues and empathetically counsel patients in pain management, opioids could once again be relegated to inpatient and post-hospital use only, perhaps resulting in a healthier populace. Is the medical profession unable to accomplish this in pursuit of the almighty dollar? That is a question for every medical facility.
1
@TM You bring up some good points.
There is a place for drugs like Oyxcontin and there are patients for whom they may be the only answer.
My point is that they are not the answer for someone who just wrenched their knee or had some minor surgery.
Physicians will probably never be able to accurately determine a patient's true level of pain and prescribe appropriately. For every patient I've heard complaining that their Dr. overprescribed their pain medication there are a hundred telling me they didn't give them enough.
Still, opioids fly out the door faster than they ever have.
To those that wish to boycott art galleries: Arthur Sackler (the art philanthropist) was the sibling who was NOT involved with Purdue. He sold his share of the business upon his death in 1987, long before Oxy was invented, and did not benefit from Oxy sales in the least, nor did his descendants. It's the other two siblings, Mortimer and Raymond, and Raymond's son Richard, who are the culprits.
30
I can safely say that this medication is little more than legal heroin. I am a severely disabled Veteran whose life has been intertwined with pain since the injuries I rec'd while serving in the military.
When I found out that I was no longer going to be able to take Oxy because my Dr was afraid of lawsuits, I endured mind numbing withdrawals that were equal to anything you have seen heroin/horse addicts experience. My arms flailed about, my legs twitched, I went thru what could only be termed as "hell on earth!"
I mostly resent my doctors prescribing me the meds and then pulling out the ladder from underneath me. That was cowardly on their part. I finally found a doc that was established to handle my situation and he gave me Suboxone.
After 18 months on that, I am finally weaning off it. However, I will never forget NOR forgive those responsible for what I was forced to endure. It isn't bad enough that I live in awful pain but I have to go thru withdrawals too?
397
@Penthalix
I had a doctor work on me for months to get me to accept an oxy script even though I told her I was sober and vicoden was not helpful and actually harming my digestion. Once she won out I was on my second refill taking 1 every four hours as needed and I did not know already addicted when I went in for a refill and was denied and the doctor was no where to be found and no one was designated to stand in for her.
I have lived with constant pain my whole life and the withdrawal was the worst thing I have ever endured.
57
@Penthalix
I would like to hear more about the difference between your suboxone addiction and your opioid addiction. Or is suboxone also an opioid?
3
@Jo
He is not addicted to Suboxone. It is a tool for weaning people off of opioids.
"Suboxone contains a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone. Buprenorphine is an opioid medication, sometimes called a narcotic. Naloxone blocks the effects of opioid medication, including pain relief or feelings of well-being that can lead to opioid abuse. Suboxone is used to treat narcotic (opiate) addiction."
Side effects of suboxone
"Side effects of Suboxone include: mouth numbness, mouth redness, mouth pain, headache, dizziness, numbness or tingling, drowsiness, sleep problems (insomnia), stomach pain, vomiting, constipation, feeling drunk, or trouble concentrating."
Sounds real fun.
20
We imprison drug dealers -- Hard Drug dealers -- for LIFE,
whether or not they pointed a gun at someone.
How abut those who manufactured a Hard Drug Epidemic?
Are they somehow better than or less culpable than other hard drugs Pushers?
I think not.
61
@Willy P
How can anyone believe that legal citizens of our country would exploit other people for financial gain? Who would imagine such a thing?
5
@Carmen R
The Profiteers have taken over OUR Government and are currently running/ruining America.
We need to replace "just us!" with Justice.
While we still have Time.
5
I’m curious to know if other countries have had this opioid epidemic crisis or is this just in the US.
8
@KTB
Just here. Other countries don't have that problem.
@KTB
Apparently this family is going to take this on the road to South America and Africa.
2
@KTB It doesn't exist in Europe. Drs here are generally not inclined to make people addicted to drugs. That's the difference between a purely for profit drug and health industry and those that are regulated.
1
So we argue about criminals and the wall and drugs coming over the southern border. Surprise, they are already here and they look a lot like us.
49
@Sherry
"We" are not arguing, one bunch of folks is promoting propaganda which feeds a false narrative about the world upon which they base all of their belief's and decisions.
1
It’s refreshing to see in these comments ire directed at the Sacklers, rather than their victims. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. It is not possible to amass millions in this country without doing violence—real, physical harm—to innocent people. If you’re wealthy, you might take a moment (or your lifetime) to consider that. And that’s regardless if you’re a hard worker or if your grandparents “came here with nothing” or how many “jobs” you “create.” Your accumulated wealth kills people, your charity is a self congratulatory bandaid, and the fruit of your overpaid labor is our impoverished, racist, Trumpian dystopia.
35
@Alice
I agree wholeheartedly. The Sacklers are nothing more than legalized drug pushers, the worse kind. Domestic terrorist. I fear them more a Colombian cartel leader.
Eat the rich!
2
The recent untimely overdosing death of singer Tom Petty can be traced to Big Pharma & Purdue Pharma according to many addiction specialists. By misleading physicians about the safety of OxyContin in order to earn $35bn in sales revenue from the toxic pain drug between 1995 and 2015, addiction specialists say that Purdue Pharma & owners, the Sackler family, bear the lion’s shareof the responsibility for many deaths & today's opioid crisis.
In 1995, Purdue Pharma revolutionized the prescription painkiller market with the invention of OxyContin, a drug that is a legal, concentrated, chemical version of morphine or heroin. Designed to be safe when it first came to market, its slow-release formula was unique. After government approval it was hailed as a medical breakthrough.
It was marketed to physicians, many of whom were taken on lavish junkets, given misleading information and paid to give talks on the drug .Patients were wrongly told the pills were a reliable long-term solution to chronic pain, & in some cases offered coupons for a month’s free sample.
In a New Yorker mag. exposé , Allen Frances, the former chair of psychiatry at Duke University school of medicine said “Their name(Sackler/Purdue Pharma) has been pushed forward as the epitome of good works & of the fruits of the capitalist system. But, when it comes down to it, they’ve earned this fortune at the expense of millions of people who are addicted. It’s shocking how they have gotten away with it.”
31
@F.Douglas Stephenson, LCSW, BCD
Are these noxious products sold in other countries?
I'm wondering about Canafa in particular since the Canadian government seems to have their head on straight.
1
Behind every great fortune is a great crime.
--attributed to Honorè de Balzac
33
@JohnH
Not always. What crime did FW Woolworth commit? He made it honest.
1
Purdue Pharma the "Sackler family business" was "fined" 645 million dollars after 200,000 deaths were attributed to oxycontin overdose...... no admission of wrongdoing was ,REQUIRED, by the company or owners .........The wealth of the "fined culprits" is 15-20 BILLION !
This is like fining a Columbian or Mexican drug cartel 4.5% of their profit for dealing drugs.......and allowing them to continue in business..........politically and legally implemented and enabled corruption at a highest level...... of capital crime !
20
Greed is a huge problem in this country. The pursuit of the almighty buck is as strong an "addiction" as any pain medication. The social consequences are enormous.
Besides the Sacklers themselves, the top executives and salespeople are complicit. The doctors who ran pill mills and over-prescribed OxyContin are complicit.
Look at Sloan Kettering. A world-renowned cancer researcher lost his job simply due to greed. And he wasn't the only medical researcher there benefiting financially in unethical ways.
The whole culture of the United States is based on a me-first, more more more, never enough money, to heck with the consequences. Even the so-called evangelical Christians are complicit.
And the rest of us pay the price.
20
@Eric
....And people wonder why there has to be so much oversight by government. Who else is going to question and condemn illegal activity in the private sector? A board of directors? Please.
1
The Sackler family is a conspicuous example of how drug companies have used deceptive means to sell drugs that can be addictive and/or dangerous. There are other companies that still use these same techniques. Keep in mind that the most powerful lobby in congress is the pharmaceutical industry. Thank you Barry Meier for your reporting. Keep it up. There is more to be discovered.
15
@Big Mike
Americans are trusting people. We have been very naive.
We have to stop trusting doctors, pharmacists and anyone telling us to take these drugs.
On a personal note I developed diabetes a few years back. I dutifully check my blood sugar 2 or 3 times a day and take my meds.
BUT, my doctor prescribed blood pressure medication, to help prevent kidney disease. Well, I tried it for 3 days and felt so weird and spacy that I stopped. Mind you my blood pressure was normal 120/ 80. So I went onlime to look at the side effects. There were 12 and the last one was death. That was enough for me. I had 4 of the side effects but I decided to weigh the risks of kidney disease which may or may not ever happen vs death. No choice.
Despite frequent admonitions from my doctor and pharmacist, I refused to take the med.
Interestingly, 5 or 6 generic blood pressure meds have been recalled because a cancer causing ingredient was found.
WOW! Moral of the story is RESEARCH DON'T BLINDLY TRUST.
5
@Butterfly Sorry to hear that you have had this familiar experience. I was a prescriber and a part of this system. When I began to question the promises of special interest groups, I became an outcast. The bottom line is that money rules. Our patients have become consumers.
Oh yeah. Lemme guess, all of the stuff purdue did was protected by the constitution because it was free speech. Right, republican supreme court?
6
And Rudy Giuliani played the goofball attorney for the Sacklers, making continued nonsensical statements to confuse the case as he is now performing for Don the Con.
36
I understand Murder Incorporated made good money too.
7
Nothing illustrates the evil resulting from greed better than this sordid tale. The rot starts at the top with the Sacklers. I hope their billions end up going to the families they have destroyed.
21
Outrageous.
Pay $635 million ( make billions) and admit no guilt.
Nothing they do to sanitize their reputation, no amount of Philanthropy will wash away the blood on their greedy, lying, stained hands.
The pain and sorrow they have caused is mind boggling.
When will these drug pushing lowlife see jail time?
I won't hold my breath.
Kudo's to the Mass. DA. A true hero of the people.
J
10
@Joseph M
Do they care? NO
Did Trump care at all about stiffing workers for work done? NO
When all you have to pay is millions when you make billions it's disgusting and shameful but understandable.
So, the fine must be so devastating that it's not worth it.
2
This is the drug cartel American’s should truly fear. 200k American people dead, hundreds of thousands more addicted to opiates, and the president focuses on demonizing immigrants, who are fleeing for their lives. Meanwhile, people at the top of Perdue Pharma get slapped on the wrist with nominal fines and zero accountability. I think it’s clear who pulls the strings at the top of our political system, and who their sitting puppet is.
20
@Huxan
Then can we wake up and take some responsibility?
It's never too late to do the right thing.
Here's how we do it: WRITE AND CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES!!!!
WE HAVE A CHOICE ON HOW WE LIVE.
1
But don't Sacklers "give" millions to "worthy causes"?
Say "thank you" to them, folks!
1
@Har
You can also thank Pablo Escobar for the housing, schools, and soccer fields he "gave" to the poor of Medellin.
2
Please lock them up! The family members responsible for this. No fine will make up for the lives lost, the families destroyed. It's enough.
11
@John
A fine of 20 Billion going to drug rehad and victims families might be a deterrent.
The punishment should fit the crime.
2
As a surgeon, I practiced medicine all through this transition. Suddenly we were bad doctors because patients had pain, even after surgery. Patients were told that new and better medications should manage any discomfort. If you had pain it was because your doctor was negligent. As such, we were scored and rated on pain control abilities.
A recent study compared opioid use after major (very painful) throat cancer surgery at academic hospitals in Hong Kong and in Portland, Oregon (OHSU). Most all of the patients in Hong Kong were off of opioids in just 2-3 days. Most American patients were still on opioids 2 weeks later.
A clear demonstration of the power of patient expectations for pain relief.....
14
@Nick Benton
I would generously say that it's a clear demonstration of Purdue Pharma's success of marketing, and the lack of backbone (and for some, greed) of medical professionals to educate their patients, just like they should when it comes to dealing with obesity, high blood pressure, and other medical areas of self care. As an adult professional, doctors can say "no."
4
I agree! But doctors now are mostly employees of their owners too.
I have never been an employee of a hospital since completing training 28 years ago, but when you get rated by patients at the hospitals where you do have privileges to practice, it is hard to buck the trend of over-treating pain.
You can lose your privileges if your ratings show you to be an outlier. Then you have no place to practice.
2
@Nick Benton
That's been my question all along. What's happening in other advanced countries?
My personal experience is that I detest painkillers other tham Ibuprofen.
I had surgery for a triple ankle fracture a few years ago and I hated the feeling of the Oxy i was given in the hospital. After 2 days I refused it and asked for Ibuprofen. There was pain, as expected, but nothing that Ibuprofen didn't fix.
Now, I'm not saying others don't experience more intense pain, but the side effects, to me, were worse.
My question is do we need to be 100% pain free or are the high feeling from the drugs something to factor in?
2
To the Stackler family: You and your ilk are responsible for my son's death. Was it really worth it?
321
@Nancy
Mine as well Nancy. I would like to witness karma happening to the Sackler family. I know I should forgive evildoers, but it's hard.
34
@Nancy So sorry for your loss. As far as I'm concerned, this family conspired to commit murder.
18
@G and @Nancy - I'm so sorry for your losses. The Sacklers don't care about your kids' deaths. People like them have no use for people like us.
My dad was murdered by an opioid addict. I feel no need to forgive my dad's murderer and like you, hope to hear that karma has visited her before I die.
18
Good for Massachusetts! I urge our new attorney general of the State of New York to do likewise.
On a related note, various institutions in New York that have wings and buildings named after the Sackler family may want to consider changing those names; that money has a distinct dirty smell by now.
8
The strategy apparently adopted by one of the Sacklers has a parallel in a strategy of defense lawyers in murder trials:try to transfer blame from the killer to the victim.
5
The government should attempt to break up the company using a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) lawsuit. The government could try the puppeteers for the crimes of their organization, and then attempt to civilly forfeit the assets of the corporation, erasing stockholder equity.
Of course this will require lobbying our legislators to effect, as there apparently are not any African American men to disenfranchise and therefore no government motivation.
3
I can't find mention in the article of the other 27 states who have already filed suit on the same grounds. Surely they deserve mention.
4
Where are the calls to remove the Sackler name from various museums & institutions? If we’re removing Confederate monuments, to answer for the heinous epidemic of slavery, surely we shouldn’t honor the people who have brought on the opioid epidemic!
9
Trump declared that he would be proud to shut the U.S. government down in order to obtain money for a Southern border wall. Trump says that one of his main points of motivation is his desire to stop the flow if drufs into the country.
However, the Trump administration has done next to nothing to discipline the opioid drug manufacturers.
What would a $5.6 billion dollar wall do to defend America from domestic drug dealers?
13
It is not enough to hold the company and its executives responsible and pay fines. The Sacklers and these executives should be charged with murder or at east manslaughter for the death of 200,000 people. Their lives mattered regardless of what Richard Sackler thinks.
6
When this pill was allowed to be prescribed in such outrageous amounts by pill mills in Florida, I mean one prescription for hundreds at one time, there are other culprits for the opioid crisis - prescribing doctors, state health agencies who did not limit the number of OxyContin pills per prescription, hospitals, for profit addiction recovery centers who paid finders fees to have patients brought to them from any source,labs that used addicted patients for too many lab reports from for profit addiction recovery centers, etc. The Sackler family are at the top of this list of those that crossed the ethical and moral boundaries of ‘Do No Harm.” Now there are regulations all over the place, but there are residual effects of cleaning up this mess that states and individuals have had to contend with from criminal proceedings, jail costs, oversight of all aspects of this crisis, family funerals, and much more. Why is there not more class actions against this company to bankrupt them? They certainly have bankrupt this nation with the scourge of the opioid crisis.
19
Why should we be surprised that these awful people chose grotesquely huge profits over compassion? The medical industry in the US is rife with compassionless profiteers and it's all perfectly legal. Until our society chooses approaches to medical care that eliminate the profit motive in all parts of the industry, we'll continue to hear stories of awful people legally doing awful things to their fellow citizens. And getting filthy rich in the process.
30
@CEC
Just because most people do not know this fact I am posting it, this sort of abusive capitalist behavior was illegal or controlled/prevented by the regulatory structure of the market before de-regulation in the reagan admin.
11
If there is any justice to be found, every last penny of the ill-gotten Sackler family fortune will be confiscated by the courts and earmarked for opioid addiction treatment.
23
@Rusty Blackbird
There are new drugs being promoted for opioid and even alcohol addiction that have the potential to prolong this crime well into the future. Lobbying is going on with in the recovery community disguised as discussion of innovative treatment.
2
So much vitriol about what has been a complicated story. In the 1970’s and 1980’s there was increasing fear of the addiction potential of narcotics. By the 1990’s physicians were being warned about prescribing opiates even to those with terminal cancer, for fear of addiction. There then came, in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, a wave of stern rebukes from academic sources and government regulatory agencies that physicians had been ignoring and under treating pain. Official guidelines encouraged the prescription of opiates for patients with all kinds of chronic pain. With huge amounts of these drugs in circulation, diversion and abuse became, and remain, major problems.
Opiates remain a class of drugs invaluable since antiquity for the relief of pain. Most patients benefit from their use during the first days after surgery, or for the pain of terminal malignancies, and the availability of these drugs should be appreciated.
10
Paul, You miss the point . Their marketing was knowingly false playing down even assuring people taking OXY would not become addicted. They profited off of persons addicted to their product and they knew it.
1
Exactly the kind of ethics one expects of drug dealers, right?
13
No doubt rock rib Republicans.
9
@Ignatz Farquad Nice guess. According to Wikipedia: "Sackler is a member of the board of advisors of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research".
11
The rich have a bottomless pile of Get Out of Jail cards. Justice is for the Little People, not the wealthy. Regulation is a restraint on their lib'ty. They get to commit the biggest crimes because, well, they're rich, dontcha see?
17
If only we were Libertarians! We could instead have counted on the corporate benevolence and caring attitude hidden somewhere in the heart (liver? spleen?) of the Sackler family.
Oh well, I am a "Hobbitist" who, like my Libertarian friends, has a vision. A vision of living in hobbit holes.
1
Since I don’t believe in capital punishment being the death penalty, these clear thieves who massively looted and made themselves massively wealthy, so obviously by creating faux-profits only through dumping massive ‘negative externality costs’ on our country, our honest fellow tax-payers, our society, and the millions of fellow human beings who were hooked into this extra-legal hell of drug addiction — represents an even more perfect and clear example of why any corporation, family, mob, or syndicate of bankers which uses the dangerous vehicle of ‘negative externality cost dumping’ should be investigated by ‘our’ Department Of Justice (aided by SEC, Treasury, Krugman, and other honest economists who understand the act of ‘negative externality cost dumping’) — and who are found guilty of taxing ‘our’ society with such indirect theaft, should be penalized by immediate and complete ‘claw-back’ of all such revenue (not just faux-profits) of their crime against America(ns) — as the ‘theaft by deception’ Wall Street banks should have been in their 2000 to 2008 mortgage scam heist via ‘negative externality cost dumping’ of useless CDOs, CDSs, Derivatives, and synthetic ETFs (which are yet to implode).
It may well also be neccesary to institute a general ‘Wealth Reform’ (similarly neccesary and successful ‘Land Reforms’ in other countries) to unwind massive; looting, hoarding, monopolization, and taking out of productive use any class of assets more quickly than progressive taxes.
8
Drug pushers who were 'too big to fail.' Or so they thought.
126
@tom
Well, they haven't failed yet. No one has arrested them.
6
@tom
Tom, while “drug pushers” are one category, they are hardly the most destructive to our entire society.
Drug pushing thieves, small ones on the corner, or big corporations like Purdue, are only the tip of the iceberg in the massive, and well disguised scheme in societies gone bad (or ultimately Empires) when an entire system is corrupted by over-reaching for power and wealth.
The Purdue scam of ‘negative externality cost dumping’ to make an extra-legal mint in this country which neither investigates nor punishes this type of indirect looting is corrupted enough to allow this sort of looting to be done by oil companies, banks, auto makers, etc. is a paradise for the really big looters, like the self-titled “Defense Contractors” of probably take the cake for the highest/worst ‘negative externality cost dumping’ devises in the world, which Bertrand Russell tagged, as they should be, “The Merchants of Death” — since weapons of war are 100% ‘negative externality cost dumpers’ dropping from the sky (and certainly not heaven)!
7
We should all remember that little or no tax was paid on the dollars funding the institutions that bear the Sackler name -- and that to me is another scandal.
17
I am a retired physician who never met with a drug representative except to obtain samples for needy patients.
For physicians to depend on these representatives for scientific knowledge is a complete abrogation of physician responsibilities to read the journals and make their prescribing policies based on facts and not on a sales talk.
I do not want the baby to be thrown out with the bath water. There are post operative and cancer patients in severe pain and to them these drugs are a gift from the gods and only a tiny fraction of them will ever become addicts.
55
The big distributors such as McKesson contributed to the spread of these wretched drugs, as did some of the big drug chains like CVS. Their tangled web-- along with the family company profiled here-- led to this. Criminal prosecution sounds great; I want their money to pay for the coming solutions-- not our tax dollars. Deep pockets are so named for a reason.
12
Are these the same Sacklers for whom a medical school in Israel is named? Not a great banner for young doctors to train and learn medical ethics under, I'm afraid.
9
Years ago, a Purdue representative visited my oncology practice and informed me that OxyContin was not addictive. He was asked to leave because I knew this could not be true. I did not know the Sackler name at the time but I made a very good choice.
I have no doubt that many physicians did the same but that did not deter the profit seeking Sackler family.
The direct marketing of complex medications must stop. This would interfere with the increasingly ridiculous prices for drugs and the absolute absence of price competition when several drugs have the same target and nearly identical outcomes.
Purdue is just another example why we need:
1) A strong FDA
2) A single payer healthcare system
3) Nationally organized trials allowing all physicians and patients to participate where everyone learns by experience instead of pharmaceutical propaganda.
We all want
1) a better healthcare system
2) lower costs
3) better outcomes
We do not want or need need multi-billionaire families making more money by abusing those suffering from physical illness and social disparities
150
The next time some politician tells you that we need to get rid of "excessive regulation" on business, ask him/her exactly what regulations they are referring to. Big Pharma needs more regulation, not less, so that the mess created by the Sacklers/Purdue organization (which I sense is probably just the tip of the iceberg) doesn't happen again.
36
People do not set out to become addicts. The Sacklers should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because they knowingly misled physicians. They knew what they were doing and the 200,000 lives that have been cut short because of greed was calculated.
This same greed exists in all areas of the Pharmaceutical Industry. Congress has made no effort to bring drug prices down and many suffer because necessary medications are too expensive. (A 35 dollar inhaler is 700 dollars). As Stephen Hawking once stated, "Greed and ignorance will be the end of human civilization." We are indeed well on our way, especially as the current President represents both ignorance and greed. Another lethal combination...
33
@Lighthouse keeper The American healthcare system has become nothing more than a pusher of prescription drugs. Doctors are paid more for prescribing. They have no time for any recommendations that do not involve a prescription. If carrots and apples and daily walks needed a prescription, they would say something about them, but they don't.
4
Some experts are predicting that we haven't even seen the peak of the opioid crisis yet and that the worst years in terms of deaths are yet to come. Whether that turns out to be the case or not, consider how profound its impact has been thus far: it has played a large role in contributing to a DECREASE in life expectancy in the US for three straight years. That is absolutely staggering, and the punishment has arguably been less than commensurate.
18
The majority of doctors are just pill pushers. Drug companies are not looking for cures, they are looking for profits. Let's stop living in a fantasy world.
7
@kz
as a pediatrician in rural appalachia for 30 years i would love to dee the evidence for this statement. I believe art a gross and harmful generalization...
4
And yet West Virginia is looking into contributing state dollars to Trump's ridiculous wall, stating that border security is the cause of their opioid crisis.
Well, folks, now you can put a name and a face on exactly who to blame and file class action suits accordingly.
34
Purdue Pharma's impact in Kansas City was in the form of a sponsored chair at a bioethics organization for pain management. A obvious conflict of interest.
7
The FDA has been mostly gutted and is funded largely by industry. Google the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Industry pays FDA to review their drugs.
My complaint about regulation is that regulation at the tol has been replaced by a bottom-up scheme - doctors and pharmacists are supposed to control opioids by counseling people rather than FDA, FTC or SEC putting the brakes on corporate machinations.
7
In the bigger picture—the atmosphere that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise to consumers on television needs to be done away with. These companies prod consumers who are not qualified to determine what meds they should be taking to push their doctors toward prescribing these meds. Then you hear the long list of disclaimers that are almost hilarious.
Opioids are terrible drugs that are part of the medical base, when it's really bad pain it seems like they prescribe Oxycontin or Dilaudid. I've never seen an Oxycontin commercial by Purdue, perhaps there have been some. All these companies market their meds vigorously, it sounds like the deaths here are almost entirely from non-prescription use. I hate to have to say I can feel the pain of those close to abusers but self control when on a legal prescription or when using drugs obtained illegally is tantamount to survival and there is ultimately nothing anyone can do to control an individual's consumption short of physically restraining them.
Purdue may be run by greedy people, they are no different than their peers and competitors. Responsibility falls on the FDA to keep these companies in line.
13
I have an idea. Take the statistics of Fentanyl and Heroin, out of the statistics of the prescribed opioids and give us some real numbers about the prescription drug issue. Because in my experience, I'm convinced that this is 2 separate issues, illegal street drugs, vs prescribed opioids. There is a major difference between them and I have no idea why they would combine them.
8
@BorisRoberts
There is NO DIFFERENCE at all between opioids, yes Herioine and OxyContin are both opioids. Ditto Fentanyl.
The cause of the heroine Fentanyl problem is the campaign by the Sackler family to increase sales of their drugs. It would not surprise me at all to find they have an interest in the companies in Asia that are producing the Fentanyl or interests in the worlds drug smuggling gangs.
4
What a pity that we continue to be a nation and world that prizes financial gains over decency and humanity.
44
I am a pain management physician and was on the receiving end of some of Purdue's misleading statements. I knew they were untrue because I actually had specialized training in pain management (I did a year long fellowship after my residency).
The reason the Sackler family and Purdue succeeded in misleading so many doctors is that so many of them had no training in pain management and shouldn't have been prescribing opioids in the first place. There was a W.C. Fields' movie entitled "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man." In the same way, you can't mislead a knowledgeable doctor.
If blame is to be placed, the doctors deserve a major share of it in addition to the Sacklers, Purdue, and other pharmaceutical companies. Where is the outcry from Mr. Meier or any of our elected officials that these docs be held accountable.
As to misleading patients, as they couldn't legally purchase OxyContin or any other opioid without a doctor or dentist prescription, what they knew or didn't know about these drugs is irrelevant unless one is arguing that it is patients who decide whether they receive such prescriptions and I would suggest that medical professionals who do so should lose their licenses.
49
@Steve
Usually MD’s don’t advise that their colleagues lose licenses - so cavalierly.
Instead of such drastic measures for doctors who were (intentionally) misinformed, that these drugs were not addictive - often at conferences where they were encouraged to Rx these meds - wouldn’t it be much better to advocate that all doctors receive education regarding the dangers of these meds?
First do no harm, right?
Using your advice we’d lose tons of fine doctors, who thought they were helping patients.
7
@Steve Some physicians have been held accountable. A friend's son died from prescribed OxyCpntin. That doctor was targeted in at least 10 deaths, comvicted of 2 and went to prison.
But I take your point. My dentist used to prescribe me 10 Vicodin every time he did any work beyond cleaning. I never used them, and after publicity about overdoses he stopped that.
Now, however, I cannot get a prescription for Vicodin from any of my physicians, even though Ithink it would be helpful.
9
@Steve
My orthopedic surgeon, at one point, had smiled at me and told me that I have a high tolerance for pain. I have had 2 knee replacements (not at the same time) but each time I was sent home with a prescription for Oxycontin (which I hadn't taken when in the hospital.) While in the hospital I was routinely offered this medication without description or explanation, just that it was ordered. I refused, of course.
This was at The Hospital for Special Surgery!!
2
But regulations are bad! Government is bad! Businesses will naturally behave in an ethical manner and would NEVER disregard risks of harm or death to consumers merely because it's more profitable to do so, right? That would NEVER happen. Yet another example of the falsehood of a key Republican mantra.
36
As we found out with tobacco, it takes plaintiffs lawyers representing state governments while working on a contingency fee basis to bring down and regulate such evil. Too many federal regulators are coopted by Big Pharma. Let’s litigate them to submission and save some lives.
16
Richard Sackler should be tried for murder, pure and simple. The man knew the risks, lied about them, and blamed the addict. In many cases, victims were teenagers and young adults whose developing brains are more likely to become addicted to any substance. Wisdom tooth removal, shoulder surgery after a lacrosse injury, a work place accident treated with opioids. These simple medical events and the resulting treatment of over prescription of a crazy addictive substance had resulted in families ripped apart by addictions, bankruptcies after countless rehab stays, the addicts turning to heroin as easier to obtain and less expensive once their refills are denied. All so the Sackler’s could build their humongous egos and bank accounts and get their family name hoisted onto more buildings. Disgusting family. All involved deserve jail time.
57
I think it’s dangerous to scapegoat a family for a drug epidemic. There is truth to the fact that pain medication was over-prescribed - but by focusing on the creators of 1 type of pain medication - it is essentially taking the focus off the real culprit which asks why this epidemic is affecting people in rural America more than urban areas? The reason for it has more to do with a lack of economic opportunity and good healthcare options and treatments than it does with the drug itself.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/259261/ASPEEconomicOpportunityOpioidCrisis.pdf
And why is the creator of fentanyl, which is the deadliest drug in America, not being called out?
As a result of this mass hysteria and very one-sided viewpoint on opioids, people who are legitimately suffering from debilitating chronic pain and take their pain medication as prescribed and responsibly, are now being denied the medication that allowed them to live somewhat normal lives. In the most extreme cases, they are committing suicide because they can’t bear the pain any longer.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/07/25/opioid-regulations-husbands-suicide-column/832086002/
We will never make progress on this issue until we start talking about the real villains in the opioid crisis: poverty, lack of jobs and economic opportunity, lack of culture and community in rural areas and most of all - a terrible, failing healthcare system.
9
@Meg How is this family a scapegoat? A scapegoat implies that they are not truly responsible but are being thrown under the bus to have a "fall guy." This family lied, blamed the people who got addicted, and in doing so allowed people to die, all so that they could make a buck.
18
@Meg You really need to do some in depth research on the Sacklers, and this issue. There was a great investigative report I read last year, that really investigated this travesty. I think it was published in The New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe . There was a blatant misleading of the dangers of their product, but greed was the major motivation, as always seems to be the American way.
18
@zorroplata exactly - and American greed is the reason that our healthcare system is in shambles and impoverished people are turning to narcotics in all its forms to deal with a lack of economic opportunity and untreated depression. In the meantime, legitimate sufferers of chronic, debilitating pain are being cut off completely from medication that helps them, doctors have become draconian in their fear of being sued and practices destroyed for prescribing these meds. Its a huge mess and my point is that we shouldn't be ignoring all of the societal conditions that have led up to this point. I'm just sick of seeing a very one-sided argument about this that's sole purpose seems to be banning pain medication all together and prosecuting The Sacklers. It will not fix the fetanyl-heroin related deaths and the general misery that so many rural-based, working class people are dealing with.
2
Capitalism. In all its glory.
18
I've been to doctor's offices when the drug pushers show up.
No wonder doctors fall for their sales pitch. It s the oldest profession.
Just Google pharma reps always pretty women
13
White Collar crime at its worst...All involved need to be charged with felonies and sent away to prison for many years.
9
"They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals." This description of people addicted to prescription drugs by the president of the company that makes and markets those drugs is almost beyond belief.
Mr Slacker is the "reckless criminal" here, as are his brethren in spirit Pablo Escobar and El Chapo. They all make the drugs and sell them to the Americanos for billions regardless of the suffering that results.
11
A murderer is a murderer, no matter how many mansions he owns, no matter how many lines of employees are in his corporate org charts, and no matter how many lawyers he has.
After Sackler was alerted to his drugs causing a rise in overdoses, he was liable for every Oxy-related death after that.
11
This family is at the heart of the massive conspiracy to push opioids on the American public. Their greed and thirst for money has resulted in the deaths of 200,000 people. Forget a push to refuse their philanthropic gifts; why are they not in jail?
9
The Sackler Family are murderers, plain and simple. They’ve hidden behind the family name to donate millions to get their name on museums while the fortune comes at the scourge of the United States and the ruin of millions of families and deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens. And they have no shame, none at all.
8
It's not just OxyContin. The whole country is floating on a sea of dangerous, overused medications.What sense does it really make to widely advertise these chemicals as though they were Tootsie Rolls?
9
It's about time the focus is on the real perpetrators of death. The Sacklers are accessories to murder by overdose, of hundreds of thousands of people, all for pure profit!
They and their agents need to be held accountable, just like the corner drug dealer who sells lethal junk. The only difference between them is the licence to make & sell the known killer product. Make them pay for their greed, and stop honoring them as honorable or legitimate philanthropists.
5
Come on! With the evidence already in the public domain, these people should have been in jail ages ago. The fact they are not just goes to show how utterly corrupted and distorted the US Justice system is, with harsh mandatory jail time for small time drug pushers while these white collar crooks responsible for hundreds of thousands dead and countless other lives shattered can just claim to be doing business. It's beyond disgusting. The bankers got away with it in 2008, but at least they did not kill anyone. These people need to pay, and not just in ill-gotten wealth. Jail is mandatory here.
15
CBS News reported yesterday (January 15, 2019) that "for the first time on record, Americans are more likely to die of an accidental opioid overdose than in a motor vehicle crash, according to a new report from the National Safety Council."
Profits over people.
Ain't America great?
8
Fines are useless. Let's pretend I'm a big drug company executive. In the big meetings, someone says, "We'll make $16 billion dollars a year, minus the $675 million in fines." Fines, schmines. They factor it into their profit.
And Republicans say, "If given freedom, corporations will choose to do the right thing because a competitive market will keep them honest." Well, maybe after 200,000 people are dead, yeah.
6
This is clearly organized crime. The Shacklers be prosecuted under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act).
20
@Pete Exactly. We need to see the Shacklers in jail. Fines don't mean anything to billion $ corporations and the rich.
9
"Breaking Bad" and "The Wire" should make way for a new series: "The Sacklers"
16
My best friend got addicted to OxyContin from legitimate subscriptions. He later started using heroin and then died from heroin laced with fentanyl. I really do not blame the Sackler family for his death. They are most certainly not good people and should face charges for the crimes that they committed, but "they," the ultra rich are just doing what they do. They live their lives at the expense of the poor. They lie cheat and steal to get ahead. Its like the frog and scorpion. You can blame the scorpion for its nature. I still miss my friend, but nothing will bring him back. If its was not the Sacklers it would have been someone else.
7
@Mark it will be "someone else" as long as we continue to assume a helpless and hopeless stance and accept that the rich and powerful will get by with a fine. The Sacklers bear responsibility. Those involved in knowingly pushing a dangerous product, lying to doctors, and covering up their crimes should be charged, imprisoned if found guilty, and stripped of their wealth through bone crushing fines. This is no less than what we do to the poor and people of color arrested on drug charges. This type of behavior will never end but it will be curtailed when the threat of severe consequences is real.
7
@Karen I totally agree, but that is just not how the world works. What if this family was selling morphine or vicoden? They are already known to be habit forming. There was some sound science behind drug abusers not wanting time released pain medicine. Of course simply crushing or chewing the pill absolutely defeated the time release. They later released OCP oxy contin protected. This could not be crushed, rather it needed to be grated or ground up and mixed with water and heated to defeat the time release. I feel that some of the responsibility for this is with the people that were abusing these pills. Going to great lengths to defeat the time release. It took a willing public in pain that needed relief. Oxycontin worked great for most of the people that used it and are still using it today. Many people call it a Godsend.
1
One of my nephews told me last summer that he has lost over ten of his friends from high school (he is thirty now) due to opiate addiction.
Why are these criminals still walking around?
Where is the DOJ when this level of crime has run rampant for so long?
9
the Separate Trials of El Chapo and the Sacklers illustrates the democratic system clearly. A deranged leader of a organization that is only concerned with putting out as much product as they can and pull as much cash in and grease the wheels of the political machine to continue your enterprise.
El Chapo just didn't have the same background as our well heeled Sacklers but they both play the game and deserve the same punishment.
8
Cocaine and Opioids/Heroin/Fentanyl are 2 completely different things. Guzman made his money moving cocaine.
The Sacklers are drug pushers, plain and simple. They have been protected by their wealth and armies of high dollar attorneys, but they are drug pushers in the end. They are knowingly and intentionally responsible for encouraging addiction that resulted in the deaths of thousands. They are just as bad as any drug pusher on the streets. Worse, because patients trusted their doctors who were misled by the Sacklers' aggressive and misleading marketing of OxyContin to doctors. Major kudos to AG Maura Healey for leading the effort to prosecute these criminals.
15
Dealers on the street pushing oxy on addicts risk long prison sentences. Billionaires who conspire with doctors to do the same pal around with politicians and are lauded for their philanthropy. Welcome to America.
8
Despicable. The entire family's photos should be held publicly responsible by being billboarded across the country.
4
If a black guy selling drugs on the street he'd get life in prison. If you're rich or an American corporation you get a slap on the wrist and you continue to make more money. This is justice in America.
30
@Mike Well said. Heck, a black man carrying an ounce of weed will get more time than these evil people ever will. I can't remember whose quote this was, but it goes along the lines of that our justice system isn't broken; it works exactly as it was intended to.
10
As a physician, it blows my mind that anyone with a medical school education believed the rhetoric of Purdue/Sackler. The obvious response is that not all physicians are ethical, but the problem is more complex. Other layers include a 20 year effort by government to label pain as an unacceptable outcome, which was then co-opted as a metric by which quality of care was measured, which was then tied to public ratings of physician/provider quality and job security. Then add the human issues of people conditioned to view any discomfort as unacceptable, addiction pathology, and the social interface of overworked providers and highly distressed patients. Of course, these social convergences and their counter reactions leave the patients in the middle seeking solutions, many of which are destructive and or illegal. It is a mess as only a blend of profit motives and governmental intervention can create. We stagger forward grasping for fixes and retribution when objective science could have been the guide from the beginning. Politics and money can be dangerous foes that are heavily affected by emotion and stand in the way of objective risk/benefit analysis and discussion on critical topics such as public health, environment, etc., but in a society where all people have an equal right to influence opinion, the ones who can afford the biggest megaphones carry the day and despise social oversight.
29
@Tom
I am a pain management physician and I disagree with Tom.
Most of the doctors who overprescribed and misprescribed opioids had little if any training in pain management. Every report I've read issued by professional organizations f0or the past 30 years have highlighted this lack of education and need to improve it.
If we accept Tom's argument then we would accept that as we encourage many patients with heart disease to get bypass surgery, it would be fine for doctors without any training in cardiac surgery to perform it.
7
@Steve
The key to your general point, which I agree with, is that some physicians fail to maintain or obtain an appropriate professional fund of knowledge, and are misled by such, or worse, don’t care. Managing pain appropriately, which you and I likely agree is not a simple topic, was never questioned in my comment. I hope the related social and scientific
issues on this topic can be objectively addressed through public discourse but then again, is that possible any more?
@Steve - But that's the point. Overlapping the advent of the pain scale and need to get rid of all and every pain was the push for primary care providers to manage all their patients' ills. Why send your patients to a psychiatrist when you can give them Prozac? Why send them to a pain specialist when you can just prescribe Oxy-Contin?
Yes, physicians without pain management skills ran into trouble. They really should not have been involved in prescribing these meds, but the pressures of the medical world encouraged them to do so any way.
The engine behind OxyContin and other problematic medicines is Medicare Part D that by law is required to pay whatever price pharmaceutical sets on approved drugs. The Sacklers figured this out early on, and came out with a slightly reformulated drug, charged an arm and a leg for it, marketed it to doctors like crazy, AND MEDICARE PAID ASKING PRICE. Most other pharmaceutical companies joined up to the game soon afterward.
14
Now we got oxydamia along with frackadamia? How many Sackler schools of medicine are out there? There's nothing like families giving back, you know, out of public spiritedness. At least the Sackler family's various charitable giving arms didn't get their billions off of over hyped computer technology and under regulated hydrocarbons production.
@Michael Berndtson- “at least it’s not overhyped computer technology”?? Purdue Pharma contributed greatly to a massive public health crisis in many states across the country, with staggering costs, deaths, crime, and ruined families/communities in its wake. I’d take more overhyped computer technology anyday...
3
@Michael Berndtson
Philanthropy is just another word for money laundering.
4
If the feds can confiscate the homes and autos of street-level drug dealers, then they should seize the wealth and assets of this morally corrupt drug-dealing family.
49
But the family has the assets to hire the finest attorneys in New York City, who for a price, will keep them out of the joint.
2
The drug that the Sackler family promoted as a panacea turns out to have unleashed a plague.
I have always maintained that the problem with time release pain killers is that they encourage addiction by forcing patients in pain to take larger doses, this causes the accumulation of background opioids systemically and prolongs the withdrawal - detoxification curve. It is axiomatic that this class of drugs promotes addiction. Only billions of dollars in profit could ever lead to a different conclusion.
8
@jwp-nyc Time release pills don't kill people - the Sacklers kill people. Let's point to the real culprits. We can't arrest a pill.
6
@jwp-nyc
All opioids can elicit tolerance, meaning that higher doses of drugs are required in order to achieve a steady analgesia. Physical dependence and tolerance are to be anticipated, and if pain improves the drugs, even at high doses can be tapered down successfully. These phenomena are not related to misuse of the opioids, and are managed clinically. "Addiction" is a horse of a different color---hallmarked by persistent psychological cravings, and emotional dependence that is not related to its analgesic effect. Not to be cheeky: Only billions of dollars of profits could lead to all of the jury trials. Seen any meaningful uptick lawsuits against the major manufacturers of morphine or methadone lately?
1
This is a complex problem, Opium, it's derivatives and the newer opioids create similar difficulties. It should come as no surprise that once Big Pharma discovered the successful path to synthetic opium, they would become pushers too. After all their drugs were legal, and their marketing departments loved to sing the songs of salvation from pain.
Like all corporate predatory lies, it was and continues to be a sham. When one observes the carnage of this greed, I am shocked that the COEs and Sackler family members associated with the atrocities stand trial for murder. Any entity that manipulates and lies to sell and/or facilitate the sale of products that are killing people is guilty.
But justice stops at the mansion and the triplex on Fifth Avenue. What we have always had in America is system that deals harshly with a kid selling joints on a street corner and looks the other way Big Pharma drug dealers behave like a cleaned up version of El Chapo.
Members of the Sackler family who participated in this should go to jail. The crime is murder and Justice needs to be served.
11
@Rodger Parsons . Prime example of the much vaunted "unfettered capitalism". Maybe I missed it but how did bribes, oops, campaign contributions, factor into government approval?
5
1) Vigorously prosecute Sackler and his top marketing team. Jail them for life.
2) Fine major distributors until it hurts.
3) Fire the top FDA officials and state regulators responsible for protecting public health who are found to have aided & abetted the widespread misuse of opioids.
4) Examine AMA role in linking doctors, researchers and spokespeople to drug company marketing campaigns.
5) Fund more deep investigative reporting into pharmaceutical company marketing tactics.
6) Overhaul med school training.
7) Revoke licenses of many more doctors.
8) Dramatically increase health coverage for treatment of addiction.
That’s a start.
37
Speaking as a physician, this crisis highlights the misinformation campaign that the pharmaceutical industry has wagered for a long time and continues to wager. The government should turn off the supply at the spigot. Prosecute any pharmaceutical corporation to the fullest extent of the law that is found to be complicit in promoting these drugs for anything other than medical necessity. Prosecute the distributers and suppliers who have delivered millions of these medications to small, rural communities that cannot and do not need that amount of pills (the DEA took approach recently, but was rebuked by the US government). Revoke the medical license of any physician or healthcare giver who has recklessly prescribed these medications. And finally to any physician who prescribes these medications, exercise due diligence - understand the available evidence for and against this class of medication, and keep the pharmaceutical representatives out of the office. They certainly do not have your best interest in mind, and they are not a meaningful source of information.
24
@PAM
For a long time, it was a legal high, probably paid for by Medicaid.
It is addictive and from my experience no more effective than 600 units of Ibuprofen (Advil/Motrin) an NSAID, which can cause bleeding, in pain reduction.
4
Im going to sing a slightly off-key nostalgic tune. I was a hospice nurse that found time-released,long acting opioids were a small miracle for my patients with intractable pain. Before oxycontin there was a limited arsenal of alternatives, all that lasted for a few hours before petering out, which meant that families and patients had to keep redosing themselves frequently throughout the day and night in order to get comfortable. All opioids are addictive, but as the patents ran out on old generic stalwarts like short acting Oxycodone and Morphine, Big Pharma pushed the marketing on patented formulations of there time release formulations. They were a godsend to people in pain. The only reason why people beat up the Sackler's is they got rich making a terrific product and Purdue raked in the dough. Addicts are to blame for their addictions, and people in pain are the real victims here.
12
@ach Opiates have a real purpose in the setting of hospice care & comfort care in terminal illness. The danger of addiction is very real and devastating outside of that usage. The Sacklers are being beat up b/c their company, in order to get rich, promoted the use of powerful opiates to a population for which it was not appropriate - chronic pain. As a pharmacist I saw this process play out in the medical office, hospitals, pharmacies, legislation enacted to support liberal prescribing of opiates and adding pain as a quality measure. It was a perfect storm to that created the mess we are in today. In my role as a formulary manager for an HMO I saw first hand the aggressive marketing efforts of Purdue. One of my colleagues became a "pain expert" who trained staff (prescribers & pharmacists) in guidelines promulgated by Purdue. He also became a prominent speaker paid by Purdue to promote the expanded use of Oxycontin in chronic pain. I remained skeptical that merely making a drug in a different dosage form would ameliorate the addictive potential. An opiate is an opiate is an opiate. Over the years I have been both grimly amused & horrified at the effectiveness of marketing on our physicians.
13
@ach
Addicts are to blame for their addictions? And you were a hospice nurse?? With compassion like that, I'd sure hate for anyone I loved to draw you as their hospice nurse.
11
Perhaps more effort should be made to research the root cause of the pain and to shoot for eradicating it at the source instead of merely masking the symptom and thinking the issue has been resolved.
I’m not just arbitrarily throwing out a hypothetical from my armchair. I am currently dealing with chronic pain, and among my meds is an opioid I use sparingly.
Why am I so wary? My mother was in constant, intense pain for decades and, as a senior, became addicted to Percaset, Vicodin, and OxyContin. It was not possible to carry on a normal conversation with her when she was out of it from using these drugs. She was eventually weaned off the drugs a few years before she died at 90. She wasn’t pain free, but she didn’t suffer, and she was there.
I have no use for people who profit off the suffering of others, and I am equally disdainful of those who equate cloaking the pain with a cure.
4
It is telling that when black and brown people were sold crack and heroin, they were labled as "junkies" and basicaly thrown away. Now that most addicts look like your average white person, we suddenly have an epidemic. This country could end this "epidemic" overnight by going after the money chain. Pop the people at the head and the entire thing fails. Make it too expensive to peddle harmful compounds and perhaps we can end this scourge.
26
@Pharmer2 It's along the same lines as people who believe "reefer madness" but still are fine taking oxy and/or drinking copious amounts of alcohol. It's almost as if the color of one's skin determines if something is a problem or not.
6
In 2007 Purdue Pharma's lead attorney was Rudy Giuliani
Says it all, doesn't it.
84
@Lori
It doesn't say anything at all. He was their General Counsel? No. He represented them in certain specific litigation? Which? Is a lawyer culpable for his client's crimes? Criminal defense lawyers should be prosecuted? The man who put the heads of the Five Families in prison is himself a criminal?
You may have a point somewhere, but it's not evident.
1
@Wine Country Dude
Read Dopesick by Beth Macy.
He represented them in the 2007 case.
5
@Lori
Rudy defended Purdue when it was sued by the then USA AG for deceptive advertising. The AG was seeking $1 Billion in fines. Rudy cockily declared that at most (thanks his brilliant lawyering) Purdue might pay at most $10 million. After trial, the AG won a judgement of $600 million. Purdue paid. Another Rudy special.
By the way, the AG's name was James Comey.
9
"The statement said the company was working to curtail the use and misuse of prescription painkillers." Laughing all the way to the bank, drug dealers hate it when people buy a lot of drugs. (Now, all Purdue needs to do is get rid of that pesky government oversight). -- Working on it!
8
While hundreds of thousands of federal workers go without pay and the president throws tantrums about the need to build a wall against perceived threats, the enemy lies within and among us: Rich white drug pushers and a president who shares their lack of moral compass, blaming victims and allowing minorities to bear the grievous burden of their corruption. They are abetted by a GOP that prioritizes increasing the conservatism of a court system wherein African American drug offenders are imprisoned at a rate 6 times higher than whites.
15
If there were not such pain killers available would surgeons ever have been able to offer the industrial knee/hip/joint and other replacements that our aging population now depends on?
3
@Tamsen Merrill
In short, yes. I'm a pharmacist who just had a hip replacement. There are many non-narcotic modalities that exist to help with pain in major surgeries.
7
@Tamsen Merrill
Yes. There were/are alternatives. I was given Hydrocodone, which is apparently NOT Oxycontin -- and cold compresses for the first two painful weeks post surgery. A friend recently only used Tylenol initially. (The problem is to prevent the bleeding -- while controlling for clotting!!) After the narcotics ran out, I used ibuprofen (600mg. is very effective) and more cold compresses.
3
Since 2001, Alqaeda and Islamist terrorists have killed less than 4000 Americans.
In the last 15 years, Opioid has killed more than 200.000 Americans. That's more people than the population of cities like. Salt lake City Utah,or Tallahassee FL.
In the meantime the US has spent several trillions$ fighting Islamic terrorism. As for the Sackler family, most of them must have received medals from public officials, partied with politicians and attend religious services.
617
As for the Sackler family? You should have added many should be in prison and a significant portion of their fortune go to support rehab efforts and centers.
36
@Chaks Add that to gun deaths, and Americans have far more to be afraid of within their borders, than from without.
28
@Chaks
The actor Hugh Laurie once pointed out that as few Americans die due to terrorists attacks but thousands die from heart disease and diabetes, if terrorists really wanted to kill Americans they should open donut shops.
18
And we’re building a wall to keep out drugs when the enemy lies within...
21
Good thing we have a villain here. Might have had to blame the Doctors who over prescribe this junk. This Sackler guy is going to claim that was whom he was talking about in the email. There have been a significant number of Doctors and Pharmacist prosecuted for the crimes Sackler mentions.
5
@mkm. No mistake about it. Doctors bear a lot of responsibility, and liability, for this.
10
By now, everyone knows someone whose family has been impacted. The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma launched this public health tragedy.....along with the complicity of the FDA which failed to protect the population from reckless prescribing.
Take their blood money names off of museums.
11
Oxycontin is not a "pain-killer" it's just a "shut-up-the-patient-pill". It does not kill pain, it simply causes a euphoria that makes you less willing to complain about your pain. This drug needs to be renamed "life-killer" and pulled off the market.
14
@anonymouse The euphoria thing does exist for some people, but only when there's no functional disability involved with the painful condition. There are rare and terrible conditions (e.g. genetic disease) for which long-acting pain medication (not necessarily Oxycontin specifically) means the difference between a professional career and normal life vs. decades of home-bound disability.
In any case, most insurance companies don't cover Oxycontin anymore, so it's very nearly off the market already.
3
@anonymouse I have to disagree. The drug is harmful, especially when pedaled as completely safe and non-addicting as Purdue Pharma did, but I took it when dealing severe pain from major abdominal surgery and chemotherapy and it definitely "killed" the pain.
3
@anonymouse
There is ample empirical evidence that oxycodone and oxycontin are as effective as the gold standard, Morphine, and they represent real analgesia to those with real pain. Try selling your story to someone with bone cancer and see how they feel about your idea to pull opioids off the market.
7
This isn’t white collar crime - this is murder. People at Purdue should be in jail, not fined. These people have destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. It’s akin to handing someone a loaded gun and saying “it’s totally safe, the doctors say so.”
18
The only difference between the Sackler family and a foreign drug cartel is one of semantics and appearance. That Richard Sackler would be so flippant about the overdose deaths from his drugs is borderline sociopathic. Who cares how many people die from a product, as long as profits are robust? This barbaric, greedy way of thinking has infected the business world, and by extent, our politics. It is a horrible and immoral way for our world to be run as the cost in precious lives is very real.
This story is yet another reason why we need universal, single-payer healthcare in this country. We need to reign in the reckless greed of the pharmaceutical industry, device manufacturers, and insurance companies. As long as profit - not care- is the driving force behind healthcare in the United States, deaths and injuries will only increase as companies pursue greater profits at any cost, and will do anything to get them, regardless of what it does to human lives and to the nation.
33
They should go to jail as drug pushers. The hospital tried to insist that I take OxyContin after surgery when Tylenol was all I needed - just half a pill they said! There is a pill for everything when many conditions can be regulated through lifestyle. Yes some people need painkillers but they should not be handed out like candy.
11
@Barbarra I'm not sure of the exact legal definitions, but I would hope that they could be charge with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, etc., but I highly doubt they ever will be.
1
If proven that a non-physician (a Sackler family member) opined on a pharmacological product's addictive capacity (as appears in the news article) and that is practicing medical without a license watch what happens: 1. It is a felony to practice medicine without a license 2. A corporation which colludes with a criminal act becomes a co-actor-conspirator. The corporation becomes a criminal enterprise, a RICO private law action can bankrupt the parties (all of them) for the damages to an entire generation of users both alive and deceased.
10
So, 200,000 dead humans, millions of grieving relatives. Billions and billions spent on programs to alleviate the crisis. The politicians get the campaign contributions while somewhere in Ohio in a cold apartment or worse someones child dies. Just like VietNam in the 60's-just closer. I am sure the Sackler Family has a lot of nice vacation homes to go to in many nice places. Just think of the related lives damaged by all of this. And we do nothing.
13
So the Sacklers were not just indifferent to destroying lives, but promoted destruction. Not to mention their effect upon the Country itself. The Sacklers actually are sackers in the sense of “to steal all the valuable things from a place and destroy it”.
11
If you removed, or at least reduced the insane profit motive from healthcare, perhaps you'd have a system based more on results and efficacy instead of getting paid. Shameful. Yet another reason why Medicare for all, where prices of pharmaceuticals would be negotiated and therefore ransoms reduced and therefore bribery reduced would be a move in the right direction.
There's are reasons why all other OECD countries have national, with the exception of the US. This is not an area to be exceptional. In terms of access, costs and outcomes:
The US has the worst access with 29 millions not covered and many more under covered;
The US has the highest costs that are double to triple most other OECD countries on a per capita basis;
In terms of results, US is middling to bottom ranking typically 25th to 35th by many standards...
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality-u-s-healthcare-system-compare-countries/#item-disease-burden-higher-u-s-comparable-countries-2
https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf
https://www.internationalinsurance.com/news/ranking-top-eleven-healthcare-systems-country.php
9
Narcos, Season 4.
This is the true Narcos story that needs to be told. The homegrown cartel of the Sackler family does not happen without the support of federal regulators and congress members looking the other way. The investigation needs to look beyond the family that led these efforts, and really examine the level of systemic corruption within the US. Where was the FDA? Why were Florida doctors prescribing 80% of Oxy prescriptions and nobody said anything? This story shines a light on the hypocrisy of the failed "war on drugs" that has focused on other countries and not looked at the homegrown pharma cartel built at home.
The War on Drugs has destabilized Latin American economies with government arm sales and support of paramilitary groups resulting in heightened gang activity, forced migration, radical poverty, etc. The Sackler family needs to be incarcerated and their wealth needs to be invested in rehabilitation programs. But the crimes don't stop there.
10
Is this the same Sackler family that has its name on programs in at least two NY universities?
2
@Michael: Yes....as well as a wing at the Met!
2
Let’s see: $634.5 million in fines, divided by 200,000 deaths (and counting) = $3,172.50 per life. That’s not so bad, right, Mr. Sackler? You must be so proud.
10
“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001.
That is despicable! Go Maura!!
7
Now we know who the "reckless criminals" are and who must share jail time with their victims.
6
Why are these folks still rich and free? Oh I remember now, they have "our" politicians in their pockets
15
I hope journalists keep writing about the horrors created by this family. Although many should be in prison, we all know that will never happen. Minimally they should continuously and consistently be outed and shamed.
17
Let's put the Sacklers in prison. How about they share the prison where we punish auto makers (33,000 deaths, 3 million injuries per year), gun makers (39,000 deaths per year), and alcohol makers (80,000 deaths per year). Auto ads show me that driving really fast is great fun. Gun ads tell me I can protect myself and my family. Alcohol ads teach me about the tremendous joys of mild inebriation.
10
...here is another suggestion for Criminal Justice Reform....mandatory life sentence without parole for the commercial manufacture for mass distribution, and/or the sale or distribution of substances known to the manufacturer or distributor to be addictive or otherwise dangerous for human consumption ,but not fully disclosed publicly.
The pharmaceutical industry, like the financial industry, has lobbied itself into impunity in their moral-free quest for profit. The consequences of that quest have devastated our society.
National emergency?? Mexican drug “mule” or amoral capitalist “fat-cat”? No wall will protect us from the enemy not merely within our borders, but entrenched in the power structure.
10
I'm shocked to my core. Lying, greedy corporate "citizens" intentionally harming human citizens in our capitalist country? Where have I seen this before? Oh yes - tobacco industry, pharmaceutical industry, mining industry, student loan industry, financial industry, real estate industry, chemical industry, military industry, etc.
Until corporate CEO & other management are put in jail & stripped of their money, nothing will change. The U.S. will ALWAYS sell out it's human citizens to allow its corporate citizens to make profits. ALWAYS.
16
@June And yet, they ask to be exempted from including birth control in employee health insurance plans, because it violates their consciences. As if a fictional entity can have a conscience.
6
@Terry Well that's because that has nothing to do with religious beliefs, but rather their desire and need to control women.
2
OxyContin's availability and the method of pushing this drug to medical doctors by Purdue Pharma is directly connected to the greed of those who make and market the product. Many of the 72,000 people in the USA who died in 2017 of a drug overdose have a connection to OxyContin and the Sackler family. After serving as mayor of NYC, Rudy Giuliani represented and defended Purdue Pharma so that they might continue to fuel the opioid epidemic. For many Americans Purdue Pharma will not be a problem until their son, daughter, husband or wife will become a full blown drug addict. Only then will the horror of this problem become evident to people. Legislators and elected officials have the opportunity to step in and stop this scourge. The attorney general in MA is to be commended for her actions to limit the damage that Purdue Pharma is allowed to cause.
11
There is no logic to this story, only hatred of capitalists. How is this "misleading"?: "When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted." Yes, I would blame the abusers of the drug for abusing the drug.
2
@SHerman I find your comment very interesting. Who or what do you mean by "capitalists"? All of us in the USA are capitalists to a large extent, and we all can point to capitalist businesses that are fairly ethical (Patagonia, Costco), so why do you assert that an article exposing potential misconduct and ethical lapses constitutes "hatred" towards capitalists?
I don’t doubt that Big Pharma is corrupt (like the tobacco industry), and that Purdu lit the match to start this terrible epidemic. But, when I had knee replacement surgery (2) and two herniated discs in my back, my doctors were very conservative in prescribing pain medication.
1
@Miriam Chua
Unfortunatrly, Miriam, many physicians are not as concerned as yours.
My sister-in-law is an artist in Europe - after a car accident and back injury, a doctor prescribed increasingly large doses of OxyContin until she was addicted and chronically sick. She lost ten of the peak years of her burgeoning respected career to the drug before weaning herself off cold turkey. She lives with chronic pain but worse for her is the loss of those crucial years. She will never get that time back. This is one of countless stories of lives incalculably damaged by this drug, these pushers and this morally-bankrupt mendacious family. Her new work is on pain. She is one who has survived in spite of all. But there are so many who have not made it. We were deprived of her company, her companionship, her talent and her presence for many years. For shame on these billionaires.
306
@SusieQ
It doesn't matter how much opioid you gave a person, you can't make them into an addict unless they have the underlying factors especially genetic that predispose them to becoming one.
If convicted, I believe involuntary medication should be part of the sentence.
Oxycodone 80mg daily for six months.
Give them a taste of their own medicine.
6
I’ve been saying this for years but no one ever cared.
1) The Sackler fortune should be seized, liquidated and used to fix the opiod crisis. Every Sackler who benefited from this corrupt enterprise - including ex-wives and children - should be indicted as part of this cabal. You need to try the whole enterprise or it won’t be enough of a deterrent for future unscrupulous businesses.
2) Every nonprofit should dump the Sackler name - it’s clear they will have violated any halfway decent philanthropic agreement. New opportunity for naming rights! Time to step up, millionaires who are also decent human beings.
3) The rest of us need to support the arts and nonprofits so they don’t have to make deals with the devil, either as individuals or through pressuring the government to incentivize giving and to make more government money available.
23
I read Bret Stephens remarks about privatizing the VA and how corrupt and inefficient, over regulated and costly the VA is. What we need is the wonderful private sector. Here's another example of it. I know what he would say: "Nothing's perfect". What's a few billion here , a few billion there, and a few hundred thousand bodies along the way, Bret? Guess it's just a little collateral damage, huh? Nothing could have possibly prevented this. They eventually got caught, didn't they? I guess what we need are a few million veterans, many wounded and traumatized entering the private sector. Think of what the Sacklers could have done to make their lives better. And all the philanthropy hospitals, schools and libraries could have received from them as a result. I have a solution: all filled prescriptions of Oxycontin could come with a coupon for 20% off headstones. For a limited time only.
7
Purdue's guilt is pretty clear, but let's hope the court does not simply fine the company. It's the same problem with the big banks; as long as they just have to pay money, with no real accountability, they will continue to abuse their positions. At the very least, they must pay a large fine from their personal fortunes (rather than pawn it off on shareholders); better would be that they serve some time in prison.
310
@Danny Unfortunately this is not a criminal lawsuit. Those are much harder to prove. Taking their $13B family fortune and putting it toward helping addicts would be fitting.
2
@Karen Green. As I'm not an attorney, I don't know whether it could become a criminal trial, or have a second trial as criminal, given that thousands have died. But if not, you're suggestion is a good one.
2
@Danny
Well - if any district attorney is looking for precedent in imprisoning corporate executives look no further than the Volkswagen executive who was arrested when entering the country in Miami for a holiday and still is in prison for Volkswagen's systematic manipulation of EPA standardized tests on their diesel engines. If this guy - just one of many corporate executives in a company with close to 100,000 employees worldwide - can be imprisoned the Purdue drug dealers can be TOO.
8
this is, plain and simple, a drug cartel, and Sackler, the head behind the operation. but the only difference between the Purdue/Sackler cartel, is that it operates legally under the protection of the US government. While thousands of people are dying of overdoses, this family is enjoying their fortune with total disregard for the fates of their "customers". what's the difference between Sackler and El Chapo? the FDA.
9
So glad we cut their taxes. I wonder how many politicians they contribute to.
10
Best argument for nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry I've heard yet.
7
About 20 years ago I hurt my back and my doctor prescribed this drug. But it made me nauseous and so I didn't take it- thank god. My teenage nephew was not so lucky. His life was nearly destroyed by this drug. After several years of struggle he has managed to get control of his addiction, but he will likely never be truly free of the addiction.
Until I read this article I had naively believed that the addiction issues with this drug was an unintended consequence. It seems now that addiction was the goal all along.
This drug should be viewed as a weapon of mass destruction, and the people behind it treated as terrorists. They are evil and should be criminally prosecuted. A charge of criminal negligence causing death at the very least.
268
Another fine example of how the captains of free market capitalism cannot be trusted.
8
My husband interviewed for a regulatory position at Perdue in the early 2000’s. When he returned he said he would never work for this company, that his entire interview centered not around correct regulatory process and filing, but sales.
432
@Carolyn Congratulations to you and your husband are in order! He choose to do the right thing, stuck by his principles and walked away from what was undoubtedly a good paycheck. The big upside is that he can still look in your eyes without feeling ashamed, and that's worth a lot.
20
AG Healy is one of the best things to happen to Massachusetts. She is a true hero and is unafraid to go after corporate bad guys. I hope she serves the Commonwealth for many years to come.
8
This is why we need public, not private, funding of schools, libraries, and museums. The Sackler family's charity towards these institutions is a sort of morality-laundering.
7
@TrueLeft
So you would want the family to be fined, but you would not take their money for museums? Makes perfect (non)sense.
Let's go over it again, what history has taught us about this since modern objective history was first recorded by the ancient greeks.
The best way to handle a vice/dangerous object is legality, regulation, responsibility and non promotion.
It has worked miracles with drunk driving and cig. smoking, drastically cutting deaths and injuries and failed miserably with our national gun sickness since we did not employ it.
With this issue, we only followed legality and miserably failed on the other three.
3
A few years back I had a dental procedure after which they sent me home with a bottle of Percocet, the main ingredient of which is oxycodone. Sure I had some pain, but I tossed the bottle away and never even thought about taking them. I remember thinking "Wow, if they gave me this junk for such a minor thing, no wonder we have such an addiction problem in this country." Over-prescription is a huge problem.
192
@Jim The exact same thing happened to me last year. I flushed those pills down the toilet and took Advil instead. It's frightening how "easy" it is to be prescribed these kinds of powerful drugs.
19
@Dominic
About five or six years ago, a physician--at a very reputable practice--tried to get me to take opioids on an ongoing basis, even though I wasn't in pain. I have a lifelong disability and have occasional twinges of pain, but it's nothing I can't easily deal with. That's how in love with these drugs the medical profession was. I am glad I had the sense to say no.
29
@Jim
Several years ago, after a move, I experienced the most crucial pain in my lower back. An MRI showed several ruptured disks. My physician prescribed oxycotin for the pain, which was the only medication that alleviated the pain so that I could sleep and walk. I thank the fates that these meds were available, but, the caveat in this, is that I do not have an addictive personality and I was able to put them away when they were no longer needed. Some pain in this world needs strong, and perhaps dangerous, medicine to curb it and provide quality of pain free life to a patient.
However, this does not excuse the cavalier prescribing that occurred with certain medical professionals,nor does it excuse the mendacity nor the outright lying by company executives about the benign properties of these very powerful, and effective, medicines.
20
Perhaps that’s why the rich act with impunity: because they can and know they will be protected from accountability by unscrupulous third parties.
3
When I read stories like this I am reminded of how grateful I am to be married to a man who questions everything. When our son was 17 (1998), he had strained a muscle playing water polo. I took him to a doctor specializing in sports medicine who gave him some exercises to do and some samples of Vicodin-one of the first drugs that was like OxyContin. When we got home, my husband read about all the possible side effects, including addiction and he said you are not taking this drug and threw the pills away. My son took extra strength Tylenol instead and was fine with that and the exercises he was given. How I wish doctors had been as skeptical as my husband.
7
While the undeniable involvement by this family in not only the ruined lives but unfortunately deaths of so many, the question of what to do with their philanthropy in the past.
Most obscenely rich try to assuage their consciences with giving away their fortunes, rather than reduce the price of their goods.
That being said, to return money to filthy rich seems only to enrich them further.
I would have no ethical problem with renaming anything with Sacklers' name on it, and keeping the money as a slight attempt to do some good. Otherwise where will it go? It seems highly unlikely their fortune will be seized, nor any fine levied that will be high enough to do make them flinch.
4
Unfortunately like many other cases involving corporations nothing is going to happen. This company like the tabacco industry will just cut a nice big check and continue working. No one is going to jail. They will simple increase their political donations and politicians will make magic happen.
5
Highly recommend the 2015 book "Dreamland: The True
Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic" by Sam Quinones, a study
that deals with issues either not covered by the press or only
belatedly so. Important book that ties together the tangled web
of how a misread medical article (that Oxycontin was not addictive - wrong) fed into aggressive marketing to the new Pain
Culture, black-tar heroin from Mexico, and greed trumping the
obvious misuse and distribution on the drug. Read it, seethe,
and then weep. Much blame to be accounted for.
9
The silver lining here is that if it can proven they acted as individuals to gain and protect family wealth (instead of acting in just a corporate capacity), then they are not protected behind the corporate wall and can be sued into oblivion.
17
All pharma and the forces behind them should be held accountable for the lives they've shattered. But as proven time and time again, pharma is too big to fail and will only pay a small fine compared to their overall wealth.
I'd be pleasantly surprised if this AG and judge can hold their feet to the fire and get real results.
My bigger question is, with it being proven how deadly and addictive these products are, why can't we pulled them from being prescribed? isn't the FDA and the government at large not responsible in ending this?
3
I have enjoyed the Arthur Sackler Gallery in DC many times, but I don’t think I will ever visit it again without remembering the scourge of addiction in this country and the family’s role in it.
19
@Nancy
That fits my sense of outrage as well. This would be something that could be easily done, nonviolent, and still speak volumes and possibly affect change.
The Sackler Family is one part of this societal problem.
If we all would spend some time and effort on research beforing supporting all sorts of institutions and activities we all could ACT on our best interests and not support those who try to hide in the shadows.
4
@Nancy Arthur Sackler was not involved with Purdue and Oxy. Only his siblings were.
2
@C
Read the oct 30, 2017
Article in the New Yorker called “the family that built an empire of pain”
“later began selling Oxycontin.Critics of the Sackler family and Purdue contend that the same marketing techniques used when Arthur consulted to pharmaceutical companies selling non-opioid medications were later abused in the marketing of Oxycontin by his brothers and his nephew, Richard Sackler, contributing to the opioid epidemic. Psychiatrist Allen Frances told the New Yorker, “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.”
3
Even if individually innocent, the Sackler family could start with a public apology. They could give up some of their wealth to help those who are still suffering. Self-serving gifts to museums and hospitals doesn't cut it.
This should also serve as a reflective moment for all of us. Many of us have benefited from actions that harm others, including from pension plans that invest in companies that do harm (including Purdue Pharma), hundreds of years of slave labor that built the wealth of this country, and the theft of a continent from those here before us.
26
@Stephen Your response is very apt and touching. We must all take note of our individual capitalistic greed, which we have been conditioned to. Each person plays a moral part in this world.
3
@Stephen
Purdue Pharma is a private company. Your pension plan did not invest in it.
2
What becomes very clear is that the activities of the Sackler family combined with those of Purdue Pharma have hurt many patients and their families. Those same actions have hurt future patients in need of pain relief. What Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family have done is why we need class action suits, a strong FDA that is funded to the maximum level (And multinational or extremely large American pharmaceutical companies can afford to cover the costs. They can pay their CEOs a bit less.), and officials who are not accepting monies from them for anything.
If the health of American citizens is so important to health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, hospitals, the AMA, and so on, we should be able to expect a real medical care system to work for us and replace the current wealth care system we have. There is no reason for Purdue Pharma or the Sackler family to be spared criticism or financial penalties. And any monies that they forfeit ought to be funneled into treatment for the addicts they have helped to create.
16
It's past time that the pharma industry undergoes a complete overhaul. The marketing reps need to go away - they're not "educating" doctors, they're drug pushers - to not only reduce prescription cost but to greatly reduce off-label use and abuse overall. And, Richard Sackler should have his day in court - on murder charges.
50
My good friend’s lawyer and friend had a back problem. No surgery, just a bad back. His doctor’s ‘plan’ was to treat with OxyContin. Which in a matter of months became 8 80mg pills/day. 640mg. Then, big surprise, his doctor thought he was “addicted”. No kidding. Without a real plan in place to treat him for getting addicted to a drug that was supposed to be free from the scourge, the prescription remained. He was dead in 4 months, at 51.
This was in the early 2000s, but this story is sadly, not that unusual. This current opioid epidemic can almost entirely be laid at the feet of Purdue, and it seems, the Sacklers. The addictions that rose from OxyContin often moved to heroin when the spigot was finally closed on the earlier ‘snortable’ recipe, and later the free-flowing prescriptions. If a heroin dealer’s ‘customer’ dies, the dealer can get life. I can’t see how Mr. Sackler is even remotely different.
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@Rad Rabbit
Trump is touting his wall to stop drug dealers and illegal importation mid drugs. Won’t work because our drug dealers are in CT. At our own firms
These people should be prosecuted and jailed.
9
This misanthropic scheme could not work without accomplices in the medical profession. Although less attention is focused on that end of this problem, it must be addressed if this epidemic is to be contained. The first line of defense seems to be the hope that medical organizations such as the AMA would influence physicians to become more aware of the perils of these pills, but their oversight and influence seems weak or nonexistent. Medical schools could sound the alarm but they also seem to be missing in action. The fact that drug company money flows to medical schools and medical organizations further complicates this problem. This epidemic cannot be brought under control until all of the accomplices of the drug companies are investigated.
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@William Indeed. Many accomplices. I'd add: FDA, medical education and research funding in the U.S. that focuses on pharma solutions vs integrative (holistic) approaches to whatever ills us (like many Euro countries do); the insurance industry that drives much medical treatment; ongoing class struggle in the US that exacerbates psychosocial stress; complex interpersonal trauma and institutional trauma with lack of recognition and treatment that is also holistic and ongoing (as this is frequently a vulnerability to addiction); lack of institutional research and funding of mental health and all types of holistic health care so that reliance on drugs -- prescribed or not -- is lessened. I'm sure I'm missing other things as well.
4
It appears that the Sackler family through Purdue Pharma pulled the same tricks that the cigarette companies pulled in the 50's and 60's and that is lied about how damaging their products are and blamed any abuses on the consumers. My question is where was the FDA from 2007 to present day in all this? They approved the drug and then found that the Sackler family lied in 2007. How is it the public is just finding this out now? This drug while it helps many is highly additive and has damaged many other lives. When the Republicans claim that there are too many regulations that hinder business development they should look at the damage done by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. The family member involved with Purdue Pharma should be in jail and not enjoying the riches at the expense of Oxycontin addicts.
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@VMG
Yes, just the cigarette companies. But don't forget about Exxon. They knew about climate change in the 80's -- however, the folks complicit in covering that up have been the Republicans.
32
Pharma companies who knowingly enabled pill mills harmed everyone, and I don't just mean people who developed addiction. Remember also, patients with lifelong incurable and severely painful conditions are increasingly - and falsely - portrayed as nothing more than hapless victims of corporate crime.
The few doctors who still accept last-resort patients for long-term palliative care are under constant pressure from every direction, with so much of the public reading articles like this and (incorrectly) concluding every doctor who prescribes pain medication is part of a scam. Even in cases where pain medication cures profound disability, where the benefit of medication vastly outweighs the risk - we are rare, but we do exist.
In calling corporations to account for their crimes, it's also important not to demonize patients who legitimately benefit from pain medication. Some of us with gruesome conditions you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy (e.g. rare genetic disease) are living completely normal lives because of opioid pain medication. After every other treatment and therapy failed, our only other alternative would have been total home-bound disability.
Many of the staunchest advocates for recovery and de-stigmatizing addiction are also vocally supportive of the right to pain medication for people who legitimately need it. The country should follow their lead.
59
Between the Fall of 2000 and the Spring of 2013 my husband had 6 major surgeries, including open heart surgery and a lung biopsy (which is very major surgery).
Each time he was prescribed OxyContin. Each and every time.
Now, he’s both a pack rat and very reluctant to take any medications. So after a couple days at home, he just used over the counter things like aspirin, etc. But kept all those bottles of a dangerous medication. Not knowing they were all the same thing. (He still has them.)
This is just one example of how many of these drugs were prescribed. And how easily a person could have become addicted - if he’d taken them all as “prescribed” and even renewed those prescriptions.
This is also an example of how giving dangerous meds to one person “could” have resulted in someone else in the household having access to them. And gotten addicted.
That one family was gaining from this, and FOSTERED this, is unconscionable! As a society, we cannot let this go. They did this knowingly. This did this out of greed. It has led to millions of people getting addicted. (It could so easily have happened to us.)
Trump won’t care. He’ll probably celebrate this family’s greed and lack of conscience. He would have done it himself.
We need a revolution of conscience in this nation. If we do not get back to caring about each other, rather than celebrating money first, we are lost as a society. This is just one example, one symptom, of a much larger problem.
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@TheraP Anecdotes as determinants of policy are dangerous. This story is particularly dangerous because it assumes that people feel pain the same way and argues that if people simply had more willpower, pain medication would be unnecessary. It is in contradiction to the most important fact regarding pain medication, that many patients benefit from it. This single best comment posted warns against demonizing patients who materially benefit from pain medication. These drugs must remain available.
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@Michael
This commenter seems to have missed the points I was making. And made up things I never said, which he then attacked.
My comment stands on its own.
9
@TheraP I agree. The Consumer Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, was an attempt to put caring for each other over Wall St profits, and look what happened to it under Republican Party rule? Instead of de-fanging it, we need to expand the Consumer Protection mandate and its independent authority to punish wrongdoers. It should cover big pharma/health care, for-profit (fake) colleges, and housing, three big-ticket items the average person needs. And it should be empowered to put the people behind corporate greed into prison, not just levy fines on corporate shells.
3
Behind every great fortune there is a great crime...Balzac.
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@John Balzac is as entitled to his opinion as the rest of us. But I would opine that 'many fortunes' is closer to accuracy.
3
@bill - True. For example, I don't believe that JK Rowling committed a "great crime" by writing several popular kids' books. But I would wager that people like her are in the minority of the uber-wealthy.
16
@bill /Jim
It's an aphorism!!!
aph·o·rism
/ˈafəˌrizəm/Submit
noun
a pithy observation that contains a general truth, such as, “if it ain't broke, don't fix it.”.
"the old aphorism “the child is father to the man”"
6
This is one of the most egregious but far from the only reprehensible action of Big Pharma to rain death and destruction on American society.
It takes a whole supply chain of pill pushers from predatory billionaires like the Sacklers to the FDA, from highly motivated pharma sales teams to distributors and doctors, and especially Congressional enablers like one of my favorites, Tom Marino, Trump's nominee for Drug Czar. Marino was forced to withdraw when 60 Minutes revealed his sponsorship of a bill in Congress that would limit DEA enforcement actions in cases where patterns of excessive opioid sales by distributors were found.
It was not a good look for a future US Drug Czar, though Trump continued to praise his nominee as "a fine man".
The bill of course was passed, which shows the power Big Pharma has over the political process in Washington.
Combine this with families ruined financially and curable conditions like Hepatitis C untreated because of high drug prices, which are often protected by baseless patent extensions and you have a more complete picture of why health care in America is in such a terrible state.
92
Memo to self: boycott the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, as well as any other art exhibits where a Sackler is listed as one of the sponsors. It's the least I can do to pay these crooked drug dealers back.
46
Arthur Sackler died in 1987. Oxycontin was introduced in 1995. How does punishing an art museum make sense? Why not focus your efforts on reducing the political influence of big pharma (and big business generally), and insisting that our government work for its citizens instead?
49
@Sticks and Stones The Sacklers are drug dealers in the most negative sense of the term, the same as leaders of the South American drug cartels. Would museums accept an El Chapo Wing?
Everyone who accepts these people into their social milieu, who invites them to a dinner or a fundraiser, is complicit in their crimes. They should be ostracized, every member of the family, unless they redeem themselves socially by dedicating a large part of their ill gotten fortunes to helping those they have harmed. To ignore the family's crimes and welcome them into society as "normal" people is to continue saying it is okay to do whatever you can get away with. Giving more people an incentive to ignore the law and the cost to society.
43
@Mark Lebow
I may find wandering about a museum funded to a large part by the Sacklers. I know the Harvard Art Muesems have major contributions by that family.
I won’t necessarily avoid the exhibits, but should I find myself in one, i’ll recognize the source of its funding. This is how I approach listening to anything by Wagner. The proceeds from his music funded virulent anti-semitism.
I honestly don’t know what the right response is regarding these cultural treasures.
3
When in doubt, “blame the victims”.
The Sackler family, and much of big PhRMa, is a well-dressed criminal syndicate.
Somehow, the death penalty seems quite appropriate for these millionaire sociopaths happy to devastate the countryside for personal profit.
The United States of Greed is a cold-blooded killer.
312
@Socrates. While the death penalty may be deserved in this instance, given the extent of the harm caused, calling for it as a penalty is rhetorically and morally reckless.
2
@Socrates
Although the Saklers should be put in a cage somewhere, killing them will lead to more killing — as it always does.
4
The evidence seems pretty compelling that this company "pushed" their oxycontin, maybe not on the street corners, but definitely pushed by the sales staff, the CEO, and others in Purdue, and found ways to negate the potential criticism by blaming the addicts. Shame on Mass General and Tufts for falling under the guise of funding programs to encourage the spread of the drug, the education and training. If the courts find this family and company complicit in the crimes proposed by the MA AG, I think this should go beyond civil damages like big tobacco, but include some jail time. About time these corporate leaders take some personal responsibility in either condoning, leading or supporting these acts against our population.
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@David
What they especially pushed was the (false!) message that taking OxyContin was safe and non-addictive!
So the paused the Med and they pushed a Lie about it!
1
I am presently reading the book ‘Dopesick’ exploring this (legal) drug crisis.
As a European what is most surprising to me is the culture where the company’s objectives are placed above the protection of the consumer. Pharmaceutical companies are focused on cutting regulations to advertise on tv and are then focusing on moving away from solely focusing on individuals suffering pain (post operation) and instead focusing on family doctors (bigger sales).
The bottom line is that people have been executed for less. What this company has been responsible for has been unconscionable. But when you prioritise profitability over communities this is the logical conclusion.
277
@Alex the priority pecking order is bricks & bricks of cash, company parties, utter disbelief, donations, clients, overdosed victim’s families, and victims. In capitalist corners, the heap is about the number of bricks, social media likes from the lavish parties, and their are plenty more victims to take advantage of.
5
@Alex I just finished reading Dopesick, and I agree with your comments. The Sackler family hides behind their wealth and charitable work—supporting art galleries, etc. But their hands are just as dirty as the street pushers of this menace. They’ll get a pass, though. They and Purdue Pharma and the doctors who give these pills out like candy should be held to account, but it will never happen.
28
@Alex, unfortunately, "profit before people" is the American rule, rarely the exception. You'd like your community to allow a group home for six young women with developmental disabilities? Nope. The town won't allow it because the property won't generate tax revenue. It doesn't matter how wealthy the community, it's never enough. Addiction to the dollar is the baseline here and it spreads and infects everything. I just hope good sense and people's consciences will be enough to inoculate us.
23
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s daughter has led the company that produces Epi-pens, the life saving treatment for allergic reactions.
These injectibles should cost very little, but she and her company have charged hundreds of dollars more for them. We’re not talking an addictive type medication. We’re talking the difference between life and death.
My granddaughter is allergic to nuts, as are many kids. She has epi-pens just in case. As a camp nurse I used an epi-pen over 20 years ago on a camper, allergic to nuts, as there were touches of nuts in the ice cream served, unbeknownst. This was emergent.
School nurses have epi-pens in every school cabinet - or should have. Emergency workers, the same.
Now, if the caregivers of these kids with allergies can not afford the astronomical cost Joe Manchin’s daughter is responsible charging, who is to blame? Manchin’s daughter? The consequence from not having this drug certainly could be death.
The whole pharmaceutical business is rigged. Now this is a crisis, not a concrete nor a steel wall for heaven’s sake.
629
In Deed...!
"When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.
“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”"
44
@Dick Grayson - And Richard Sackler knows from reckless criminals.
There are people incarcerated FOR LIFE for marijuana possession. This family, in my opinion, is no better than the pushers on the streets. The bottom line may be the ugliest line in America.
820
@Maureen A Donnelly
Were we to ask (pro bono?) presidential advisor Rush Limbaugh his opinion on hard drug pushers, would he STILL want them all executed, regardless of their Wealth?
20
Yes and any bets other than a fine worth about 10% of their wealth, no one pays with jail time. Disgusting.
13
@Willy P
Didn't Rush get busted at the airport once with some of these drugs w/o a prescription?
12
Having had too many wakes and funerals to attend in the past 10 years due to OD's from their drug pushing, I truly hope the Sackler family tries to make a difference with their enormous wealth.
Shame on them.
43
This family should be treated the same as El Chapo. Won’t happen though because they operated as a legitimate business that legally paid people off to push their drugs. How this can happen is a lesson in the huge problems with our government and health system.
443
Tom:
If proven that a non-physician (a Sackler family member) opined on a pharmacological product's addictive capacity (as appears in the news article) and that is practicing medical without a license watch what happens: 1. It is a felony to practice medicine without a license 2. A corporation which colludes with a criminal act becomes a co-actor-conspirator. The corporation becomes a criminal enterprise, a RICO private law action can bankrupt the parties (all of them) for the damages to an entire generation of users both alive and deceased.
21
@Renaud
Corporate shills, I mean lawyers, would keep those indictments loop-holed for years, if not for decades.
5
As El Chapo allegedly suborned last Mexican President Peña Nieto to the tune of $100 million, so Americans may assume that Purdue & Sacklers have suborned all US legislators needed to maintain their financial ascent.
10
There’s an incredible book by Beth Macy called “ DOPESICK” which also outlines Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis. There needs to be accountability.
51
Not a single Sackler will see a day in prison, nor will any other corporate pill pusher, especially with so many politicians benefiting from their largess.
119
This kind of reminds me of that famous quote “what is the best way to a rob a bank” own it of course. So what’s the best way to get rich off of illegal drugs? Own a pharmaceutical company I guess.
169
Another vindication of my unwavering cynicism. We continue to stand on the sidelines watching as white-collar criminals march in a parade of greed and immorality. From Trump family to Wall Street to drug companies to corporations destroying the environment, we are all helpless victims of the Greed Machine.
373
Blood money - Slacker’s and Purdue Pharma’s greed has caused immeasurable harm and put millions of Americans and their families at risk all for profit. “Since OxyCotin came on the market in 1966, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription drugs.”
36
Out of curiosity, is there a legal definition for, "drug pusher"?
28
The Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art needs to be re-named.
554
There is also a Sackler (Asian) Art Gallery at the Smithsonian.
19
@Mandrake Brandeis University has received a ton of money from them.
10
@Mandrake no it doesn't, because Arthur Sackler is the brother behind that wing and he was the sibling who was not involved with this scandal. His brothers Mortimer and Raymond were. He died in 1987, long before Oxycontin was invented, at which time he sold his share of Purdue to his brothers.
22
I remember back during the "War on Drugs" in the Nixon Administration, commentators were blaming "The Black Family" for drug use, as though there really is such a thing as "The Black Family". Now that drugs are affecting white people in large numbers, where are all the people blaming "The White Family"? Just sayin'.
126
@Jonathan The commenters blaming the “Black Family” back in the Nixon administration are for the most part now dead. The world has moved on in the last half century. Focusing on this past injustice risks diverting attention from the crisis that threatens to engulf all of us - white and black, rural and urban - in the here and now.
2
@BlueNorth "The world has moved on"... tell that to the millions of black people, mostly men, who are living and dying behind bars for drug-related nonviolent crimes. Their families--esp. their children--and communities are still suffering thanks to Nixon's racist policies that were meant to preserve his political power at the expense of black people.
"Focusing on this past injustice" isn't just about simmering in pain from the past, even for the millions of Americans that are still dealing with its repercussions. It is about learning from those injustices so we can make the "here and now" better. Now that we're seeing a new drug epidemic--one whose victims are mostly white--we see much more sympathy towards the people who are addicted and their communities. Thankfully, one lesson we seem to have learned is that criminalizing people who are addicted to drugs is costly and ineffective.
3
Our Commonwealth's Attorney General Maura Healy is fearless and vigilant and a wonderful example of what a hard working public servant is and should be.
135
I think 200000 murders comes under ‘ crimes against humanity’ and I hope she charges them with that.
10
Even if Richard Sackler were fined $2 billion for his zealous promotion of a drug he knew was destroying lives, and his blatant lies about his involvement, it would make no difference to his lifestyle. What did Purdue Pharma care about $635 million in fines, when they were raking in billions? Sackler should be sent to prison for a looong time; only that might stop others from following his example. And never mind refusing his charitable donations (most of which are simply to glorify the family name) — his money should be forcibly taken from him, and devoted to rehab centers, aid to families who lost someone to OxyContin, etc. etc. Of course, there is zero chance that any of this will happen.
513
@sasha58
And why is there zero chance? Is the United States a dishonest country or something?
7
@sasha58
"...his money should be forcibly taken from him...."
By whom? By what authority, if any? Please reply.
1
So thousand of petty store corner drug dealers sit in jail for dozens of years while the drug bosses of big time pharma enjoy their billions. Welcome to America
723
@richard Big Pharma = America's drug cartel.
9
The proverbial “wall” would not have helped. These drug dealers were already on the inside. Of course less regulation would have helped stop this epidemic from starting correct?
92
People have a right to medication that can improve their lives, and that some will become addicted does not preclude those in need from access to that medication, in my estimation. Moreover, pharmaceuticals are a known dosage, so people can only overdose if they don't follow the guidelines. The answer to the opiate overdose epidemic is more pharmaceuticals, lab grade smack perhaps, as England does, along with suboxone for some.
6
@1stPlebian - The company told doctors that the drug is not addictive and to prescribe it liberally; doctors complied. Then people got addicted anddied - after the doctors said the drug was fairly benign because that was the script Purdue fed them. What part of that do you not understand?
2
@1stPlebian. Thoughtful people would not argue that all opiate pain medication be banned. Neither would thoughtful people suppport the prescription of opiate pain medication as a first resort, in most cases. Unfortunately, OxyContin was too freely prescribed and the patients were not fully advised of it’s risk. The toll on our society from the misuse of OxyContin is immense. Purdue Pharma should be sued into oblivion and their executives sentenced to prison.
One can only hope that justice prevails, such that the Sackler family members who helped direct the damage that Oxycontin has wreaked on so many people will land in jail, penniless. The Sackler name should also be removed from the institutions which have honored them for their philanthropic efforts, now that we know that some of the money that supported their magnanimous donations was made on the backs of unsuspecting victims of their deceptive marketing.
133
200,000 victims.
No further regulation or scrutiny needed here.
I bet the family and the company get another slap on the wrist and go on their merry way supporting the arts and our political class while misleading legions medical practitioners.
Another son of wealth; 200,000 life sentences in prison seems fair.
194
@cfd5 I agree with all that you said, except, any medical practitioner that could at this point be mislead shouldn't have a medical license and those that pretend they were mislead are pushers and should receive the same criminal punishment that any killer drug pusher would get.
7