Pharmaceutical Executive Sentenced To 66 Months In Prison In Opioid Trial
npr.org
npr.org
This is begging to be made into a movie.
It was a movie.
I have to say, simply because the woman was a stripper does not preclude her from being an effective manager. Perhaps the article could have spent more time talking about dubious moral and unethical things that she did rather than her past history of removing her clothing.
Profiling like this is only necessary when your life is potentially in danger, like being a cop in a dark alley. We're a modern society, can't we treat everyone as individuals to be respected?
The parallels aren’t complete nor exhaustive but the way Gere’s character repeatedly parlays his relationship with Roberts for professional and social advantage (which is only one instance talked about in said wiki article) is one of the more prevalent themes in the film I and presumably the commenter I relied to are alluding to when connecting these dots of “art imitating life”.
This isn’t an ethical argument about how effective sex-workers are in non-sex work careers but a critique of the power dynamics between two individuals. One who merely happened to be a sex-worker.
I also don't recall anything in the movie about her managing anything, but perhaps I missed that. It was quite awhile ago. And if I recall, she encouraged Gere's character to act in a more honest manner.
Really, there seems to be very little connection here.
That’s not what’s happening here.
No, I don't think it's exactly the same thing. Very few things are (except in code).
I have some issues with how the other responder phrased it, but the concerns you present are looked at in what I felt was a pretty significant subplot in that storyline.
Is that me? I'd be agreeable to a discussion of the movie and some of the parallels I found with that particular element of the Kapoor story (at least as reported by NPR here) and try to understand your issues with my own conclusions; this particular thread may not be the best medium for it but I'm always open to a friendly session of 'movie-allegory-as-ethics film theory' being a just a middling movie enthusiast.
This is an interesting contrast with the frequently-expressed view that profiling is especially pernicious when the cops do it.
Was her former profession somehow linked to her persuasion tactics? Otherwise why does it matter?
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200122/insys-fentanyl-s...
Not the submitted NPR link.
Stripper or no--it sounds like she was an effective sales representative.
As for stripping: one of my college classmates was getting her engineering degree and worked as a stripper. Her comment: "I have a 3 year old daughter and I'm getting an engineering degree--both are time consuming. I can strip two days a week for 6 hours each day and bank $2000. What other job can I get that pays better than $150 per hour?"
As long as a stripper doesn't get involved in booze and drugs, she can bank a LOT of money. The problem is that the folks running strip clubs are generally complete scum and are actively trying to get the strippers to use alcohol and drugs as it gives the owners more control.
The death penalty is on the table right?
Anything less than complete dissolution of the company and capital punishments will not curb these behaviors.
Sadly, I think people really do get caught up in the pace and don’t think about anything else. No excuse though.
There's this whole other version of the rat race / climbing the ladder that is either new or I just didn't know about:
If you can be adjacent to the people who can be blamed for something, you get to keep all the bonuses and not go to jail. Unless they find a way to blame the whole thing on you.
Owners and board members certainly do. Despite their stature, executives are merely employees, and their job is to carry out the whims of the board and shareholders.
If as a side benefit, some execs think twice about pushing addictive pills to people who want them, I suppose that is a good thing as well, but to see this as much more then just a way for the prosecutor to "make hay" I feel misses the point.
The irony being that all those dead opioid users didn't have the chance to be old.
I suspect that we are heading in the same direction with pot. In the future, we will be looking back and wonder why we were not careful with the use of it. I think it should be legal but it should not be treated like its use has no consequences.
Opiods? Yes.
Asprin? Uh huh.
Alcohol? Absolutely.
Like tobacco, week can be harm you, but only over a long period of time.
You can overdose yourself with Cannabis Extracts. They are just as legal as the plant.
Maybe they shouldn't be?
IDK.
What I do know is that it's impossible to overdose on marijuana leaf.
>The intragastric LD50 with the emulsion was 800 mg/kg and with the sesame oil formulation, 1270 mg/kg. The iv LD50 was 36–40 mg/kg, similar to the inhalation dose when the latter was corrected for Δ9-THC losses in the rodent nasal passages.
Taking a round 40mg/kg ld50, that's 1,818.181818..mg minimum for inhaled thc. That's about 6 grams of top shelf 30% thc marijuana. That's $30-180 retail. From all evidence I've seen someone is more likely, by at least an order of magnitude, to die by smoke inhalation, burning their house down, tripping down the stairs, or crashing their crash than successfully smoking themselves to death. I also find that ld50 suspicious and am curious to know their testing methodology. I don't have and reason to doubt the iv ld50, but I've also never heard of anyone anywhere ever slamming thc.
Taking the lower of the two ingested ld50s gets us to 121 grams, or a quarter pound of weed. That's around $200, on the cheap side. But if you were just to eat the buds I seriously doubt anything would happen at all. They're nutritious after all.
So, we need 36.3 grams of activated and concentrated thc, probably in the form of hash oil refill syringes. That's like $750 minimum. Realistically over $1500. It has a constituency thicker than molasses, and tastes pretty bad and you'll probably puke it up before it kills you unless you mix it down with something that's easier to palate, but then you're most likely increasing the ld50 to at least 58g.
Let's compare these values.
Pure nicotine: 300-600mg. A typical cigarette has 1mg or less nicotine. That's 15-30 packs. I'm assuming rather quick. Smoke inhalation would probably kill first. $75-150.
Alcohol 21oz 80 proof in an hour for a 120lb man. $5?
Opiates? Read some war stories. 10mg oxycontin could make some opiate niave people nod and puke. 80 could stop some peoples breathing. Yet some heavy users take 1,000mg+ plus 'safely'. (2) Name brand opiate pills are expensive. If I'm remembering right its usually $1/mg.
Fentanyl? Carfentanyl? Pictures explain it better: https://dancesafe.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/fatal-doses...
$? a fraction of the name brands. Though you won't find hustling this in baggies or foil. It's possible to inhale enough airborne fentanyl to od. Hell, it could even just land on your skin and get absorbed.
As far as the possibility of fatal overdoses on recreational drugs goes, marijuana is basically benign.
1.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0041008X74...
2. https://www.bluelight.org/xf/threads/how-much-over-your-norm...
If I try to pronounce it to myself, I can do so with intonation that indicates either.
I really don't like to be the guy who is nitpicking, but in an international forum such as this it's helpful to be as clear as possible.
I happen to know it's not specific to American English though.
In this case, I agree with you. It probably means "yes".
Drug companies made time release formulations of basically the same compounds and said they weren’t as addictive as the stuff we used before and that wasn’t true.
In the US Doctors tend to do what the patient wants, which you would expect from a free-market healthcare system. This leads to patients often asking for medications, in addition to marketing reps incentivizing physicians who want to make their patients happy as quickly as possible.
I don’t see a clear parallel.
If only they could go back and haul up all the tobacco executives from nursing homes and golf courses and do the same.
Better than nothing I suppose. But not by much.
https://prisonprofessors.com/rdap-truth-early-release-federa...
She's judged quite a few notable other rulings such as putting a hold on Trump's travel ban and the Harvard lawsuit
Now do the Sacklers.
This case reminds me in some way of the Abacus trial. The only financial institution to be tried for the financial crisis was a small local bank founded by a "Sung".
https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/22/abacus-only-bank-char...
You could watch a documentary about the case.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/abacus/
The Kapoor case, like the Sung case, is really a show trial.
The incentives for these actions can come in part from artificially high prices. More legalization gets you more players, and could perhaps dilute the power to use the machinery of doctors, drug companies, etc. as a top-down drug pushing force.
Additionally, society tends to build up immunity with exposure. You can get more irrational behaviors with highly controlled or scarce things. In the short term, introducing a lot of free/legalized drugs into an already constrained society could increase damage, but for the long term? Not such a clear picture, in my opinion. Perhaps a slow loosing to allow society to adapt.
Honestly, I see very little here to make this a blow against legalizing drugs besides confirmation bias for those already against it.
It also leaves out the cost of the war on drugs, which you would, in a rational analysis, need to compare against the cost/problems of legalization, as the cost/problems of the war on drugs go down. Which one costs more? Organized crime takes a serious hit with legalization, a secondary benefit. Consider Prohibition in the United States. Alcohol's a drug, actually a fairly destructive one. Why did they repeal it?
The incentives for these actions come from any sort of price.
Plus the addictive effect on the user.
I don't see Budweiser execs going to prison for selling alcohol that resulted in someone become addicted or killing someone in an accident...which is most likely killing many more people per year than any other drug.
"Organized crime takes a serious hit with legalization"
This one has been proven false with MJ legalization. In California, for instance, legalization has only gotten more people interested in using and then when they realize they can get it for cheaper on the illegal market, it's put many legal shops out of business.
With legalization comes higher prices (and possibly shortages and the inability to get it whenever you want). As a result, it has really done nothing to curb organized crime or illegal sales.
This was only my theory before it was legalized, and now it has been proven correct. I guess drug users don't really care about paying their fair share.
This was from a year ago, but things haven't changed much:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-crac...
"Consider Prohibition in the United States. Alcohol's a drug, actually a fairly destructive one. Why did they repeal it?"
It only worked because they stamped out corruption and killed/jailed all of the organized criminals involved in the illegal booze business.
With drugs, it's already gotten too big. The corruption in Mexico is at another level. The cartels run the country. The illegal market will never go away, especially since they don't have to deal with regulations and can provide a cheaper product (which will always be the case).
This isn't actually a feature of legalizing trade in something. If you're just contrasting "legal drug sales" with "illegal drug sales", the illegal vendor has much, much higher costs and isn't in a position to charge lower prices.
But California chose to impose ludicrously high compliance costs on the legal vendors, so high that illegal vendors can effortlessly beat them on price.
I disagree. Illegal vendors don't have to follow labor laws (they can get much cheaper labor), regulations (they aren't limited by the rules imposed by their state/city), and taxation (they aren't paying extra taxes on top of their current costs).
All of these equal lower prices. The legal market will almost never be able to complete with the illegal market, for these very reasons.
"But California chose to impose ludicrously high compliance costs on the legal vendors,"
We were told that when MJ was legalized, all illegal vendors would go away and the state would see a boost in tax revenue. Where do you think this extra tax revenue comes from?
Don't drug users want to pay their 'fair share' That I keep hearing about? The reality is they don't really care about paying any taxes and just want their drugs at the cheapest price. The current state of illegal sales clearly shows this.
Two words you rarely see together.
HN can't decide if Facebook is irrelevant, or oppressive, but it's definitely one of those.