U.S. states seek $2.2T from OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma
reuters.com
reuters.com
>Those financial realities underscore that Purdue does not have enough money to satisfy the myriad claims against it.
So the new way is to have a US company (from Nevada, Wyoming, etc.) with at least one foreign partner.
If you’re interested in this I suggest reading Moneyland by Oliver Bullough.
"Exploitation" is a word so overused and often paired with many economic fallacies including feudal ones that merchants had to be ripping people off to make a profit because of the cost of transport plus a "universal fixed price" assumption.
start nonprofit companies in many sectors that lean heavily on automation and sell at cost direct to consumers open sourced/open designed products
What’s the difference between saying 2.2T or a gajillion bazillion?
Everything else looks solid, then after seeing that number, it changes how I see the whole thing.
The other side can and will challenge the damages via experts. Obviously they will not see $2 Trillion, but you ask for at least to be made whole.
We estimate it has caused 2,2T in damage and are seeking 100B.
They are obviously very smart people and haven’t done it like this for a reason.
(A dollar bill is .0043in thick, so unless imperial unit-challenged me messed up doing the conversions, it should be almost 2/3 of the way from Earth to The Moon.)
This would be awfully inconvenient, though - if you use $100 bills instead, you'd have a still very inconvenient, but more manageable stack of 1,500 miles.
More manageable still would be to just put the ones in a warehouse - they'd require 88M cubic feet of space, or a cube with sides of 445ft. It should fit nicely inside the Saturn V Vehicle Assembly Building.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total "economic burden" of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.
That totals $1.57T over 20 years and is purely economic, and doesn't include any value of human life.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos...
Yes, the strategy here is effectively just to throw out a huge number to argue that the damage done would be impossible to truly correct. But as a general principle you can't go to court and just ask for whatever number you feel like, you need to justify to the court exactly why you are owed that much. So they ran the numbers and $2.15T is what they thought they could justify.
Their system sounds a damn sight more beneficial to society than ours, but it’s still a far cry from the “all drugs are legal” experiment being proposed here.
My instinct says that “legalize and regulate” works better for the vast majority of drugs, and “decriminalize possession but not sale or manufacture” for the rest. There wouldn’t be much call for meth if MDMA or coca products were cheap and legal. Opiates wouldn’t be spiked with fentanyl if they were regulated. This is just my guess, and I wish I had data to point to. Maybe something can be extrapolated from Portugal’s outcomes, but the situation is not the same.
There's a madness in society right now, akin to the reefer madness of the early 20th century. The negative of opiates themselves have been blown ludicrously out of proportion.
I think we've cast far too negative light on opiates and too little light on the damage that's actually caused by their prohibition and thus people seeking street drugs.
We've gone so far in the wrong direction that people with actual pain are being denied opiates. People are forced to suffer in order to avoid what, constipation?
We should be both easing people off of opiates, and providing them to people in genuine pain.
Ever been to a doctor's office, get prescribed a certain medicine, and then look around the office and see 5 different knick-knacks from the Pharmaco (i.e. Calendars, Notepads, general adverts) in the room as they're writing the script?
The issue is far far larger than Opioids. I think a bigger message should be sent on this issue. We are one of the only first world countries that even allows advertisement of Medications, and have repeatedly seen the impacts of these companies' marketing tactics.
I certainly could not, I am not so heartless, and I certainly hope the same of my own doctors.
I think we forgot that by and large near all these people were in genuine pain. It’s easy to disparage them from the sidelines, but walk a mile in their shoes.
What I am not interested in is my friend getting 100 Vicodin for a bit of pain after some dental visit (maybe wisdom teeth removed? can't remember), that he later realized was way more than he needed and had him temporarily addicted.
The failure is on all of us for creating a society in which being addicted to opiates will ruin your life. There's no reason this has to be the case.
I believe the solution is to make opiates easily, cheaply and safely available in a controlled clinical setting, much like how Portugal got their opiate problem under control. Keeps people off street drugs, thus keeping their doses reasonable and opiates out of the hands of people who are not recovering.
Overdose on legally manufactured drugs being much overshadowed by the black market sourced drugs.
It is difficult to come to conclusions about how much of the reactions are showboating and how much are legitimate, but it seems clear that the net negative outcomes can be minimized if you teach people about the drugs they want to take, allow them access to a reliable source, allow them access to treatment for misuse and addiction, and target the sources of suffering that lead people to try to escape with drugs.
The situation though is considerably more complex than just these points.
I've heard this claim so much but I can't possibly comprehend the basis of it.
Virtually nobody is out there overdosing and dying of caffeine (although it does happen). It's very addictive, yes, but if you deprived someone of their coffee for a month, they'll call you an asshole but they'll go about their normal life. With opiates, people are willing to live on the streets because they're more driven to put the drug over their personal well-being. I've known people who talked about having to empty their bowels with a spoon because they can't do it normally. Withdrawal is described as absolute hell and many people accept the possibility of overdose rather than the agony of going without it. People who built up a tolerance, quit using, then return often die because they took a little beyond their current tolerance. One major long term effect is that many people find it hard to find any joy in life as great as heroin.
It's not reefer madness. Thousands are dying and people are oftentimes knowingly sacrificing their lives for opiates. The argument that it's not bad when used responsibly and in small amounts is true of virtually every drug ever. In practice, many people aren't using them responsibly, and the nature of some drugs makes them even more apt to be abused than others.
People are desperate enough to see all the examples of people dying or otherwise destroying their lives for the drug but still deciding it's worth trying. The prohibition isn't the problem. The problem is people are struggling in life and opiates are providing an out. Making them more open and available will not help, and the oft-cited example of Portugal decriminalizing drugs doesn't mean every society should make opiates available. Drug overdoses recently increased in Portugal. [1]
[1] https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2019/por...
From 1999-2018:
Prescription opioid deaths went from 1 to 5 per 100,000.
Heroin deaths went from 1 to 5 per 100,000.
Deaths from fentanyl went from 0 to 10 per 100,000.
So at peak, prescription opioid deaths were ~25% of all opioid overdoses. And most deaths had others drugs in their system.
[1]https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/addiction/opioi...
A lot of the push is on the supply side rather than the demand side.
Opium is much harder to smuggle.
The problem is it's incredibly potent. For an adult, you might start at 25 ug. Not a big deal when you're drawing up a 100 ug/mL solution, but it's a big problem when you're trying to eyeball a powder of unknown purity. Plus fentanyl is showing up as an adulterant in street drugs like cocaine, where no one is expecting it.
I was reading that in Canada there were seeing a number of overdoses where the blood levels of fentanyl were >200ng/L. That's an absolutely massive overdose as typical therapeutic concentrations are 1-3 ng/L. People end up needing a naloxone infusion for a day or more until their body metabolizes all of the drug.
This, but literally.
It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform.
If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.
"We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands."
And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.
That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.
We need an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials or the International Criminal Court but for these kinds of deliberate corporate crimes that result in mass death and destruction.
This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. It's also completely unsubstantive. Fortunately that's not how your account usually posts.
Companies aren't evil, they're just things. We don't jail guns for killing people, we jail people for killing people. Why in hell should this be any different when money is involved ?
That being said, it's clearly used as a flexible mithril armor for the rich and culpable. This is modern America.
The general idea goes like this. Suppose you take out a car loan from the bank, then you drive recklessly and cause more damage than you have assets or insurance. Should the victims be able to go after the bank? Only if you don't want anybody to be able to get a car loan.
And it's the same thing with corporations. Do you want your retirement account to be able to hold index funds? With unlimited liability you can forget about it, because you'd end up being a minority shareholder in everything including whatever the next company to blow up the world economy is, and thereby get wiped out.
So that's the idea. You should be able to invest in something and limit your exposure to the amount invested.
And that's not even the problem here. What we're wanting to happen here isn't to wipe out some grandma who happened to own two shares of Purdue Pharma, it's to get after the people actually responsible for doing the deed, i.e. the managers of the company who actually made the decisions rather than the non-manager shareholders. But that is, in principle, already possible. If you incorporate a murder for hire company and then try to assert corporate limited liability when they come for you, good luck with that.
The real problem is that once a company has figured out that it's going down, it can engage in a lot of complicated restructuring that makes it hard to suss out where the money has gone by the time you get around to actually pinning the liability to them. But they'd be able to do the same thing with contracts and such regardless of limited liability. It's a hard problem, and the hardness isn't where you think it is.
The difference between the loan and the investment is that I took a loan because I couldn't afford paying for it cash, otherwise there's no reason I would augment my costs and risks (although you're going to tell me that there are ways to restructure financing to come out on top, which is exactly back to my initial point). I'm basically making a sub-optimal choice that, for a rational actor, implies coercion (i.e. I have to do it in order to get to my job, for example).
Investment is money that I say I have and consciously decide to put into the system in order to make a profit, so the comparison falls flat. Why is it that we should be for example "eco-conscious" when it comes to our consumption (what you eat, what you buy, and so on) and not our investments?
The real bullshit in this system is that we've added layers where we bet on the lack of rationality of the actors while designing systems that have that (broken) assumption baked into it.
The problem is hard because we're being wilfully ignorant, not because it's magically beyond human beings.
A fair trial will decide who is appropriately guilty, and who is not sufficiently deserving of criminal punishment.
There's enough evidence of criminal behaviour by the Sackler family personally to warrant piercing the corporate veil and going after Sackler family assets.
They should be in jail. They have killed substantially more people than COVID.