Sacklers granted lifetime legal immunity in opioid settlement | Hacker News Reader

Sacklers granted lifetime legal immunity in opioid settlement

arstechnica.com

160 pointssamizdis150 comments

Man if you're Andy Fastow or Jeff Skilling you must be kicking yourself right now. Post 9/11 I can't think of many white collar criminals actually doing jail time. I guess we'll see where Holmes ends up.

This whole thing is just so infuriating. I feel powerless to affect change against an entire system that increasingly feels like it was designed to protect families like the Sacklers.

Sorry for a political rant on HN...

Class differences are understated or poopooed in American politics. But class divides are very real and they marr everything you see, including the Sacklers getting a pass.

> feels like it was designed to protect families

That's because it is designed to protect them. When a good enough team of lawyers can free you from consequences, it equates to being able to buy off justice.

When the majority of financial instrument controls are designed to limit the financial activity of the layman, who does it benefit? Just yesterday I was fighting with my bank about how much I could spend on a single purchase. It was a startlingly low number. The amount I can actually withdraw from an ATM at any point in time is lower.

And what divides the classes most is the law. The law benefits those who can navigate it effectively. This boils down to people wealthy enough to buy, barrow, and steal professionals to navigate it for them. If the law were simple, everyone would benefit because everyone could navigate it easily.

All that to say, you aren't the only one.

There's a Bloomberg opinion piece from earlier today [1] that focuses on shopping around for "friendly" jurisdictions for bankruptcy hearings. It focuses on the judge in this case (Robert Drain). Excerpt:

Bankruptcy lawyers can shop for venues they think will be favorable to their case, and a lot of them bring their corporate clients to Drain’s court. And though Drain told the Wall Street Journal last year that any notion of legal friendliness was “an offensive fantasy,” the bitterly fought settlement in the Purdue Pharma case he announced from the bench on Wednesday would seem to provide ammunition for his critics.

A worthwhile read, in my opinion.

[1] https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/purdue-pharma-oxyconti...

> Class differences are understated or poopooed in American politics.

Class differences are understated or poopooed in American media, and by the Republican and Democratic party leadership. In real life, people talk about class all of the time. The people who own media companies and donate to political parties don't.

> In real life, people talk about class all of the time.

I generally agree with you but I'm not sure about this. IME, the media/government complex has done a very good job of convincing people that the primary cause they should be fighting about and talking about is identity politics, not class.

> When the majority of financial instrument controls are designed to limit the financial activity of the layman, who does it benefit? Just yesterday I was fighting with my bank about how much I could spend on a single purchase. It was a startlingly low number. The amount I can actually withdraw from an ATM at any point in time is lower.

I have no experience like this, other than a bank contacting me if I am trying to use a card outside of my usual locations or outside of my usual amounts and I did not already alert them. Which sounds like a pretty reasonable anti fraud measure, and it only takes a couple minutes to solve.

And you can alert them prior to traveling or spending large amounts, and even do it online, so you are not inconvenienced at the time of purchase.

I also think it is easier than ever for the layman to buy whatever they want than ever. Everything is electronic and mostly instant. People can gamble on options sitting on their couch watching a game. You can buy equities for free. You can buy and sell in foreign currencies and Bitcoin with the clicks of a few buttons. All seems far more accessible than when I was a kid.

Try paying cash for something costing more than 10k USD. Things get hairy pretty quickly.

[edit]And if your bank has no issues with that, then I'd love to know what bank it is. Mine was pretty sketchy about moving more than 3k at once per day.[/edit]

I mainly use BoA, but while I have not had to withdraw or deposit $10k in paper cash in some time, as far as I know, the law requires you to fill out a form.

But I wire much larger amounts of cash all the time online for real estate transactions, and I generally do not even have to talk to someone at the bank. I can do it all online.

Edit: I have not needed to send $3k via Zelle yet, but according to BoA’s website, $3,500 in 24 hour time period should not be a problem:

https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/zelle-transfer-...

Technically, it just means extra paperwork. Tell their compliance department to hop to it.

Just because it's uncommon, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. In fact, the justification for these types of controls is normal people don't do those type of transactions.

Think about that carefully, and you'll start to smell the rat decaying under the floor. In a way, the system is architecting itself to keep the fiscal freedom of the populace low to catch outliers that may just be criminals.

I've just never been able to convince myself that there isn't some economic reality shaping going on there that people don't feel comfortable either talking about or admitting. If I can't easily do a transaction, but that transaction would be an example of good business that everyone wins from; I'd possibly be dissuaded from even trying.

That seems counter to incentivizing good business to facilitate economic mobility.

The form being talked about here is form 8300, for paper cash transactions $10k and over.

It is a pretty simple form identifying the parties in the transaction.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8300.pdf

I do not see how anyone can say it is difficult to comply with this, regardless of the issue of whether or not it should or should not be required.

If there is any part of the system that is designed against lower socioeconomic classes, it is law enforcement (and TSA) being able to seize cash for no reason (civil asset forfeiture). But that has nothing to do with banks or the IRS.

Marx and Lenin's conception of the state was as machinery designed to aid the oppression of one class at the behest of another. Notions within our legal and justice system in the U.S. make much more sense viewed through this lens -- that the U.S. and most so-called liberal democracies are "dictatorships of the bourgeoisie."

They can be "dictatorships of the bourgeoisie", but once upon a time in the US it wasn't so much that way. And maybe I'm romanticizing things. I do know that our tomes of tax law didn't exist 200 years ago, and financial controls and centralized currency also didn't exist 200 years ago.

Tools arise when the inventive require them. Those same tools become weapons of oppression when the right (wrong?) people start to use them for their own advantage.

The united states was literally born to be a useful thing for rich white dudes. That's why "by the people, for the people" doesn't mean women or black people or people without enough land. The founders didn't want normal people to have power, and everything they wrote was so the people in power could keep that power. The constitutional convention was literally a room full of powerful people agreeing on what compromises would keep them happy

200 years ago, only the bourgeoisie could vote.

Not too long ago, I had a lawyer tell me unironically, "Justice is for those who can afford it."

This is upsetting to me on so many levels, I'm not even sure how to properly express it.

there are thousands of incarcerated white collar criminals , some serving very long sentences. It's just that 99% of cases are not newsworthy. Enron was a $50 billion fraud, but people go to jail for $5k fraud too, but that is a lot less exciting from a media perspective than a $50 billion fraud.

It's this sort of sentiment that "the govt. needs to do more, we need more retribution" that explains why the US has such a high prison population. There is the perception that criminals are not being punished, but this is wrong: they are, but it is not in the news except for just a tiny number of noteworthy cases.

Painkiller addiction sucks, but so does chronic pain.

> There is the perception that criminals are not being punished

The "perception" is that criminals with power, wealth, and connections aren't being punished, and that's because they aren't. After Enron our justice department lost whatever appetite it had for meaningful criminal prosecution of corporate execs, there's even a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute...

People who get put away for white collar crimes are punished because they stole from someone wealthier or more powerful than them. Hardly anything is systematically being done about "white collar" crimes affecting ordinary disempowered people, which is why millions of workers in the U.S. experience wage theft each year.

plenty of recent post-Enron instances of high-profile and wealthy white collar criminals getting long sentences:

Scott W. Rothstein,Reed Slatkin,Bernie Madoff,Tom Petters,Allen Stanford,

All of your examples are of people stealing from richer people via ponzi schemes, echoing his point that you only go to jail for white collar crime if you stole from the real upper class.

The government does need to do more, against the actual criminals responsible for causing real harm to millions of people. I don't care about people holding (not even distributing) marijuana, but I care about illegal naked short selling the stock market, illegally creating a drug cartel and fraudulently misrepresenting the product, illegally misrepresenting a drug testing product - all of these crimes have HUGE impacts and really harm people. These are the crimes I want to see people in jail for. Hell, honestly maybe we should consider the death penalty for these crimes.

If the justice system would try to actually dole out justice instead of maintaining the status quo, we might actually live in a better world. As it is, the world fucking sucks, and I refuse to defend the status quo.

It's a billionaire's world. You just happen to live in it.

Kings and queens have been replaced by billionaires and politicians.

I was thinking more... feudal landscape before monarchies held much organizational power. Maybe Fulk Nerra's era.

I don't know about politicians, while wealthy they more and more look like tools of trade of the actual rule setters.

Now I wonder how the case against Elizabeth Holmes will go. I mean she committed fraud and possibly some people died but the Sacklers are responsible for hundreds of deaths

I think Holmes will get thrown under the bus frankly. Same as Martha Stewart. No white dude will be used an example.

It's a settlement. That means that both sides give something up.

The Sacklers would have to be complete morons(indeed, self-destructive morons) to have a settlement that did not include legal immunity, because otherwise they will get sued again and again and again. "Sure, we will give you this money and then someone else can file a lawsuit against us later" is not a stance you can reasonably expect out of anyone.

Instead, we ought to be asking "Why settle?" If you want to understand what's going on instead of feeding the outrage beast that the media has been nurturing in you for the last couple of decades, ask that question. And it's a good question: if it is such a slam-dunk, why did the government say, "Sure, we'll settle?"

Possible answers -- ones that someone could maybe do something about -- would include "Because the lawyers would eat up all of the money" and "There was a payoff to the right parties" and "The government wants the money now instead of later" (this one can be thrown out given the fine repayment period) and "the government feared losing its case." Feel free to add more.

It's a lot more constructive than being pointlessly angry.

The media doesn’t need to feed my outrage - I have multiple relatives and friends who have died from OxyContin. The Sacklers should have the entirety of their wealth confiscated, at the very least - it’s all blood money. This agreement is infuriating.

This case might be appealed outside of the courts? Given the general antipathy for them, perhaps the Sacklers would be well-advised to pay special attention to their personal security in the decades to come...

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I know where my sympathies will lie when it happens.

I doubt anyone will ever render their justice, the blame is too diffuse. There is so much vigilantism against the pushers on the street that it never gets all the way to the top.

I had the same thought when I heard of the settlement. There are millions of people with loved ones who have died of OxyContin overdose, and rarely do you have a case like this where a good deal of such visceral suffering was planned and profited off of by such a small and identifiable group

I'm sorry that you're personally affected so greatly by this, and presumably have been for some time. That sounds incredibly difficult and I can't imagine how frustrating this lack of justice is to you.

Most Americans know someone who died from opioids. I know 4 people close to me who’ve over dosed and died. Many more who’s lives were ruined.

Much of the controversy is that this immunity deal grants them immunity from parties not involved in this lawsuit.

So, its not just "both sides compromise", there are parties affected by this that are giving up something without getting anything in return.

What is the legal mechanism that allows this? If I’m not a party to the agreement that says they won’t be sued in the future, how can the agreement enforce that I won’t sue them? Or is it the judges that are saying they won’t hear the case?

It's called a "non-consensual third-party release". They're not very common and pretty controversial.

There's a decent description of so-called third-party releases, consensual and non-consensual, in an article from May this year; the site is that of a law firm:

https://www.hirschlerlaw.com/newsroom-publications-chapter-1...

> It's a settlement. That means that both sides give something up.

The state gave up...the death penalty. Life without parole. Life with parole. Long sentences. Any sentences. It's too much! I don't accept that we should be completely unable to make white-collar criminals go to prison even when their willful actions caused or contributed to the deaths of maybe half a million people. [1]

Why did the state need to settle?

Or is this just immunity from civil cases, and not criminal? I'm actually not clear on that very important distinction.

[1] That number is a guess. <https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html> says "Nearly 841,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose. ... Opioids were involved in 49,860 overdose deaths in 2019 (70.6% of all drug overdose deaths)." If we assume that year is representative, that's over half a million opioid deaths in total. If that year is not representative, there still were a lot of opioid deaths, and my greater point stands.

This is only because "drugs" and "tobacco" are different and distinct categories.

Tobacco use kills >7x as many people in the US every day/week/month as all opiate overdoses.

I hate tobacco, and don't get me started on last century's Big Tobacco debacle, but at least in this century the people who choose to start using tobacco should know what they are getting into.

Many of the people who started on legally prescribed opioids didn't know how addictive and dangerous they were, and the Sacklers are responsible for that.

I find it hard to believe that any adult that knows smoking is dangerous and addictive doesn't know that opiate prescription pain pills are addictive and dangerous.

In this case, they were intentionally misrepresenting the risk of addiction to doctors: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

If your doctor tells you it's safe and non-addictive and will ease your suffering, I'm willing to bet you'll believe them.

I wonder how much of this overall problem in society is a result of this misinformation they spread via the sales channel, and how much is just that opiates are super fucking addictive (regardless of what you do or don't know about them beforehand).

This is completely irrelevant, and detracts from the issue at hand. You could see precedent from a non-settlement in the case of opioids bend back around and open up the avenue for meaningful tobacco reform.

That all just got sacrificed.

I believe this ratio would be smaller if you count opportunity cost: drugs kill more younger people.

> state gave up...the death penalty. Life without parole. Life with parole. Long sentences. Any sentences.

Did it? This settles the Sacklers’ civil claims. I don’t think you can discharge criminal liability in bankruptcy court.

> > state gave up...the death penalty. Life without parole. Life with parole. Long sentences. Any sentences.

> Did it? This settles the Sacklers’ civil claims. I don’t think you can discharge criminal liability in bankruptcy court.

I'm confused on that point. What you're saying makes sense but the article mentions "a bankruptcy deal with Purdue Pharmaceuticals that allows the Sackler family to avoid criminal prosecution," suggesting otherwise.

[edit: and that 15 states have signed on in some way adds to the plausibility of consequences of this deal extending beyond bankruptcy decisions.]

The death penalty, life without parole, and life with parole were never on the table. Contrary to (very) popular belief, federal prosecutors can't just make up sentences; the offenses where the death penalty can be sought are spelled out in specific statutes, and the elements of those offenses are further spelled out. You may, perhaps reasonably, believe the Sacklers are culpable for "murder", but federal murder has a legal definition (18 USC 1111, I think, for starters), and those definitions are imported into jury instructions.

A reason these kinds of things tend to get sorted out in civil court (where no sentence is on the table whatsoever) is that criminal cases are much harder to win. Criminal defendants are presumed innocent, which isn't just a platitude, but also a principle reflected in a bunch of ways in the law and rules of the court.

The state can do anything it well wants. Laws have never been much of a blocker in the long run if the US had any ambition of stamping down mass murderers who just happens to have enough money to play games in the court rooms.

There are plenty of places where people have disappeared for less, including in the US. Now, I'm not advocating anything extrajudicial here, but let's not be naive and pretend like there's nothing that could be done.

Are you advocating for some form of extrajudicial punishment here?

Yes.

Are you speaking for yourself or interpreting the GGP?

No interpretation is necessary. They said it overtly.

I don't even live in the US, so not even skin in the game. I thought it was worth mentioning that if there was a will, there would be a way. There is just isn't any will.

To elaborate, I don't think even the prosecutors went for the win here. I think they went for some kind of certainty that they could live with. And this is the result.

This was a civil case. What prosecutors are you talking about?

Thanks. I read the article now as I should have done in the beginning. It is overall very disappointing. No justice was done here.

Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for purely financial crimes, surely the DOJ could stack up enough felonies to send the Sacklers to prison for a couple centuries? And given the tens of thousands killed by the opioid crisis and the Sacklers' vast financial resources and access to non-extraditable jurisdictions, I think it would be entirely appropriate to hold them without bail pending trial.

Madoff faced a straightforward case. He was the proprietor of the largest known Ponzi scheme in I think the history of the world. Notably: running a Ponzi scheme is already clearly a felony; no novel or even interesting theory of law was required to charge him (for Mail Fraud, Securities Fraud, Wire Fraud, and Money Laundering, among others).

Even then, the sentencing guidelines complicated things for prosecutors. None of the offenses Madoff was convicted of carried a life imprisonment sentence, but the sentencing guidelines calculations called for one, which meant he had to be charged with the statutory maximums for all his offenses.

My point isn't that the Sacklers couldn't be charged criminally, just that the rules for doing so are complicated, and prosecutors can't just make them up. A not-unlikely result of trying to secure a 150-year sentence for a Sackler is that they might simply win the case.

If you have a theory of how the Sacklers and their henchpeople could be made to face decades in prison, a straightforward way to articulate that theory would be to cite the offenses you'd see them charged with. Then we can look at the jury instructions for those offenses and see how difficult it would be to convict them under those offenses.

"We might not win" is an excuse prosecutors and politicians use to avoid cases they don't want to take. It sure is strange that this is the case for a well-connected billionaire family... I believe the Sacklers should be charged with everything the DOJ's legal experts think has a shot at success, and in the interim they should pursue asset seizure, freeze assets under AML rules, and seek to hold the defendants without bail until they can be tried. After all, what is the point of these legally questionable tactics if they are used against two-bit pot dealers yet prosecutors are too afraid to leverage them against those with actual power?

We've established these tactics and techniques are apparently legal and morally justifiable, so let's put the screws to those who truly deserve it. Worst case, maybe the Sacklers will even use some of those billions to take some of these issues to the Supreme Court and unfuck the system a little bit for the rest of us.

Ok. Say how.

I'm not familiar with NY state law but could something like negligent homicide fit the bill? They were negligent (pushing pills (either knowingly or knowing it was likely) that it would significantly contribute to an opioid epidemic) and it lead to people dying as a result (homicide).

A bunch of people have written about this. One major obstacle is that it's difficult under the law to get the Sacklers themselves convicted for actions taken random executives in the corporation, especially if (as has been written) the Sacklers were not themselves intimately involved in the operations of Purdue, but rather just the beneficiaries.

I'm not here to defend the Sacklers, who are odious. I'm just saying that there are reasons they aren't on trial for their lives, but rather having their assets attacked.

(I have no opinions about the immunity from further suit they've apparently obtained.)

I guess ultimately it does come down to legal questions but reading some of the cases against them such as this [0] it doesn't seem like there's no ammunition for prosecutors to use. For example on pages (using page numbers listed at the bottom of the page) 104-105 that the Sacklers knew of several doctors that were suspected of prescribing opioids inappropriately yet continued to sell to them. Another example on page 112 states that Sacklers knew that they were selling to an illegal pill mill yet neither stopped selling to them nor reported it for 2 years. I note that other directors and executives are also named as defendants in this case. It most certainly doesn't seem that the Sacklers weren't involved in operations of Perdue, maybe not at a day to day level but they certainly were reported to and advised by Perdue staff very regularly (and they demanded plenty from the staff too).

[0]: https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2019/01/31/Massachusett...

No, it doesn't really say that at all. It says that staff reported to the board that they suspected doctors of diverting pills. In court, prosecutors would have to prove not only that a specific Sackler knew about this, but that they intentionally directed staff to continue supplying opioids to that doctor. The Sackler, in turn, would have an array of defenses, ranging from "I expected staff to stop supplying opioids to that doctor" to "I wasn't involved in that decision but merely present at a meeting where that statistic among many was discussed". The burden in a criminal case is far higher than "preponderance of evidence".

> If you have a theory of how the Sacklers and their henchpeople could be made to face decades in prison,

"Justice will always be impossible. You should just give up and accept that great crimes will always be rewarded by billions." -you

What about felony murder? I understand it to be quite a bit broader than what you're describing (in some states anyway), and I would think it'd apply here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_and_the_death_pe...

Under the federal statute, the felony murder rule applies only in cases of arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children.

(Or, of course, if you intended to kill people).

That's federal. I see from the wikipedia article that 47 states have felony murder laws, and their requirements vary widely by states. I think it's a fair assumption that the Sacklers committed felonies in one or more states.

This brings me back to: I don't really understand the extent of this deal. Apparently 15 states have agreed to it. Does that mean that they've granted immunity to criminal prosecution in those states?

I just did some legwork for this thread. It's your turn. Go find the state felony murder law that would fit the fact pattern of a Sackler case.

I clearly don't understand this case, this deal, or the laws well enough for that. But what I do understand is: it seems like our government has given up on pursuing consequences for people who have done this and on deterring others from doing this again. The Sacklers seem to have broken a lot of laws in a lot of jurisdictions with a lot of evidence and unbelievable harm, so it's very difficult for me to believe nothing could be done.

What makes it seem like they’ve broken a lot of laws in a lot of jurisdictions with a lot of evidence?

Nobody here is claiming the Sacklers are good people, but being evil isn’t a crime. Nobody here seems to be able to point to a law they’ve broken and not been charged under.

I'd like to point out that many of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the early 1940s were not, under their own laws, considered criminal. Nevertheless, it was possible to punish them (rather, a select handful who were egregious enough and also not directly useful enough to the prosecuting nations to recruit, but that's another point) for crimes against humanity.

Broadly speaking, the legal framework is there. Its the legal willpower that is lacking.

They weren't tried under their laws. Their laws were irrelevant once they were conquered. We haven't been conquered; the rule of law prevails; they'll be charged under our laws.

Let's say that's true. Even though they gained billions through actions that they knew would kill people, and half a million people died, there's no applicable law so they face no real criminal consequences. Oh well. Fool me once, shame on you. That's very difficult for me to accept, but let's say I do just for the sake of argument.

Where are the legislators crafting new laws that specifically spell out that you'll go to prison for the rest of your life if you misrepresent the effects of medication to the FDA and doctors in a way that causes this much harm? Or do we really think the exact same thing won't happen again?

No, we should probably pass laws like that. We don't appear to have them now, in the shape that you want, though, and the pesky part of "the rule of law" is that we can't JIT the law.

Little known exception to the constitutional prohibition on ex post facto laws is it doesn't apply if we really don't like the guilty party.

The death penalty would be laughed out of the court. I can present you with just one argument that would seal the deal, and it's in the form of a Socratic question: when in the several decades have we not understood that opiates (as painkillers, I am not talking about Loperamide although one could make that case as well) are often addictive?

You know it. I know it. Every doctor knows it. Every nurse knows it. Some people just have problems with that whole arena of medications, and we stopped selling laudanum at the corner store some time ago. OxyContin not addictive -- whom are you trying to kid? Everyone just nudged and winked each other, then wrote the scripts. The culpability is diffuse. Everyone going "Shucks golly, we had no idea!" is not convincing.

They made it, but we all bought it: hook, line and sinker. And we wanted to. And we knew better.

They cynically manipulated the American medical system so that they could sell the equivalent of Opium (a historical highly addictive narcotic) to the American populace. Not only did they harm the public for their own material benefit, they have irreparably harmed the trust the American people have in their medical system.

The Chinese literally declared war on Great Britain because they sold Opium to the Chinese population and refused to stop[1]. That's how serious and nation-ending this drug is. I cannot imagine how much lack of respect, if not open contempt, one must have for the law to do what the Sacklers did.

Given the seriousness of their crime and the untold amount of destruction it has done to America, why should they not be endlessly sued? Or face a worse punishment? This settlement communicates to me that our legal system is actually not able to prosecute them to the fullest and is acknowledging that, which should really concern everyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

> government wants the money now instead of later

This is likely most of it. The other shoe, which has yet to drop, is criminal prosecution of the Sacklers who were involved in the company’s day-to-day affairs.

The ones who are now immune from criminal prosecution?

Prosecutors don’t have spines, plain and simple. There is also often a revolving door for nonexplicit corruption where both parties look for a “win” with minimal consequences so they can declare victory while keeping their potential future employers happy.

https://judgeforyourselves.com/ vs https://judgeforyourselves.info

I'm sorry, but this comment is one of the most morally empty things I've read in a long, long time.

The Sacklers deliberately and cynically killed hundreds of thousands of people. They made over $10 billion dollars.

And the punishment? They have to put a couple of billion back. They still made billions.

I would note that opioids have cost America a trillion dollars: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/economic-cost-of-the-opioid-...

Their $2 billion fine would pay for two weeks of the damage they have caused over a decade.

----

They completely won. Complete victory for them. Complete loss for justice.

The law is supposed to act as a deterrent. This is the reverse of a deterrent.

So they got their immunity and will be richer than now once they paid the fine over the extremely long period they negotiated. Additionally they don't plead guilty and get away effectively scott free. I guess crime pays if you get rich enough.

Way to set and example for the next one.

You are correct. Now call your representative and ask them why they agreed....

"15 States Sign on to Proposed $4.5B Opioid Settlement With Purdue Pharma, Sackler Family"

https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/07/12/15-states-including-...

I don't know if they agreed or not, based on that article, as it doesn't list any state other than NY. Paywall or not, at least the NYT gives the list:

"In addition to Massachusetts, New York and Minnesota, the other states who have signed on include Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/health/purdue-pharma-opio...

Highly recommend Empire if Pain about the Sacklers and how they got away with these crimes.

Longer story short they piped the earnings from the opioid crisis out of company for decades and then when the net was finally closing on them, they filed for bankruptcy in a court of their choice with a very favorable judge. It is this same judge who granted the full immunity.

Disgusting.

Even the judge who approved the settlement feels that something is deeply wrong with it:

> "This is a bitter result," Federal Judge Robert Drain said Wednesday in a lengthy explanation of his approval of the settlement. "I believe that at least some of the Sackler parties also have liability for those [opioid] claims... I would have expected a higher settlement."

Several states have already announced plans to appeal the settlement.

This is unlikely to be the last word we hear about this.

Must be nice to be rich enough that you never face consequences for anything you do.

True. This made me realize that being a drug dealer does pay if you sell enough.

P.S. I'm being ironic... sort of.

it's nice until the guillotines return.

> Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.

-- Simone Weil

Ill bet every small time marijuana dealer doing hard time is feeling pretty great about this.

Just remember that Jeffrey Epstein was also granted immunity from future prosecution in 2007 in return for getting 3 1/2 months in an unlocked cell in a private wing of a Palm Beach minimum security resort.

It didn't ultimately work as a combination of media exposes causing public outrage and his many victims sueing him anyway eventually got the government to renege on the deal, the man who originally granted it to resign in shame, and Epstein is dead now.

I, of course, wish we didn't need to rely on a future spiraling outrage cycle to force the Justice Department to actually hold rich criminals accountable for their crimes, but there is at least some solace in the hope that it might happen to the Sackler family, too.

With all the talk about China and their handling of CEOs lately, let us ask ourselves, what would China have done ?

Probably have them executed after a public trial.

Yes. yes. But what about the money?

I don't quite understand how a settlement in a bankruptcy case can include an immunity provision against future criminal charges. What is the mechanism for that?

How can a bankruptcy case for a company result in immunity for individuals from being sued in future lawsuits pertaining to the opioid crisis?

Is this a common thing that happens in bankruptcy cases? Is this really justice?

Our government sells out to the wealthy. Our government is corrupt.

Once again, the political and judicial systems are revealed as a farce.

The voters are revealed - they do nothing and vote for people who do nothing about these problems. Did you do anything?

For a more global audience, in case you might be wondering what this is all about:

Opioids III: The Sacklers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

https://youtu.be/uaCaIhfETsM

I suspect we'll see the same thing happen in 4-5 years with COVID vaccine manufacturers

this comment will age well

Vaccine liability claims in the United States are handled by the federal government [0].

I can guarantee with absolute certainty that we won’t see this same situation with COVID vaccines, as Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J don’t have any liability for their vaccines, as they were created during a public health emergency [1][2]

The reasoning is nobody would make vaccines if they had unlimited liability.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Comp... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Readiness_and_Emergen... [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/247d-6d

Maybe this isn't constructive or will get downvoted, but I'd be interested to see the overlap between HN commenters who are very outraged by this/doing lots of emotive moralizing, and also the typical HN libertarian who thinks that hard drugs should be legalized. I mean you have to realize that these positions contradict each other, right? If you think the Sacklers are awful monsters for I guess selling a member of the heroin family, you have to basically be for hard drugs being illegal- aka the continuation of the War On Drugs.

I did a number of hard drugs in my misspent youth, including Oxycontin. It was available and people in my social circle did it, and the Sackler family played zero role in my decision. More broadly I think hard drugs should be decriminalized (I am decades past using them myself). I guess I'm a little unclear as to what exactly the Sacklers did that's so terrible. Seeing as alcohol probably wrecks 10x the social damage that opioids do, are the Coors family monsters? The guy who founded Sam Adams or manufactures Smirnoff? What's the distinction?

There is a huge difference between advocating for the right to use drugs freely and intentionally manipulating the medical and legal system so you can sell a highly addictive drug for truckloads of money.

The sacklers product was sold as a medicine.

Many people started on it as such.

You on the other hand knew what you were getting into. Big difference.

And it continues to be a medicine. If God forbid you broke a limb, burned yourself, shocked yourself, were bitten by something.... you'd want a painkiller stat. I just watched an older relative cautiously take an opioid for pain relief when she needed it after an injury. Are you.... arguing against the concept of painkillers? How is it not a medicine? Should we do surgery with whiskey, 19th century-style?

Prohibition proved people want alcohol regardless of the damage it does but we don't need people pushing new societal harms just because the old ones are embedded in the culture. No horse in this race but they were handing out opiods like candy to people who thought it was safe because the doctor gave it to them to solve a medical (not leisure) issue.

“Hard drugs should be legal” is not the same as “addiction is good.”

This thread lays out compactly some of the Sacklers’ perfidy:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1085959572886560768

I believe that hard drugs should be legalized, broadly speaking, but opioids are an exception because of their extreme inherent physical addictiveness. For stuff like that, I would argue that possession and use should still be legal, but distribution should be regulated to ensure that anybody who does get it, has ample warning about the effects, and makes an informed decision to use them anyway.

I'll bite. I strongly support legalization and simultaneously feel that purdue is seriously in the wrong here.

the crime isn't selling oxycodone. pharmaceutical companies are allowed to do that. they're not allowed to make claims about how their time-release formulation makes oxycodone much less addictive, when they know that isn't true (or at least lack sufficient evidence). on top of that, they gave financial incentives to doctors to write prescriptions.

while I don't think it would be appropriate to have heroin for sale at CVS, I do think people should have some way of purchasing pure forms of the drug after being educated on the risks. that doesn't imply that I have to accept fraudulent marketing of a dangerous product and corruption of the doctor-patient relationship.

I can basically agree with this, and I was being slightly provocative. On the other hand, it's become accepted wisdom that the Sacklers are Literally Hitler, and I guess I don't think puffery in marketing is really that horrendous of a moral crime. I also don't really believe that anyone who became addicted to opioids did so specifically because of their marketing practices, and would never have started without said marketing- sorry, I think that's patently absurd. We have centuries of human beings becoming extremely addicted to hard drugs with no marketing campaigns required

I still judge them a bit more harshly, but I do think the sacklers have essentially become the scapegoat for a problem that went far beyond perdue. painkiller prescriptions in the '00s were really wild. I remember a classmate got a thirty day supply of percocet (IR, no time release) when he got his wisdom teeth out. that's simply reckless. nowadays you would probably get less than a weeks worth or even just a recommendation to try ibuprofen first. the government crackdown on overprescription didn't help either. that was when people started overdosing from fentanyl-laced heroin en masse.

that's to me a bit like saying if cars are legal to sell, why is it illegal to fake the odometer before selling your used car. being in favor of decriminalization does not mean that anything goes and that you can knowingly mislead people so that they become addicted, which is what at least the claim against the Sacklers is. Decriminalization also goes hand in hand with redirecting the outrageous amounts of money spent on policing to education on what you're getting yourself into.

The perceived wrong doing isn’t that they sold drugs, but rather that they intentionally lied about the properties of their drugs.

You can run a pot shop legally in Washington state but you cannot lie about what you are selling. Is that not one of the arguments for legalization of drugs in the first place? With legalization the drugs can be regulated and monitored for quality, purity, etc…

Do you really honestly believe that anyone that became addicted really listened intently to Purdue Company marketing and made an informed decision based on that? That if the marketing was more cautious, they would have made a rational decision not use Oxycontin instead? Because I, to put it politely, don't think that's really how human behavior works.

I mean, we have 500+ years of human history where people have become addicted to hard drugs without a marketing campaign. Including many in that same heroin/opium/morphine family. Maybe Occam's Razor is that people would've done the oxys regardless of what the Sacklers disclosed about the chemical compound....?

Feel like there's a Liam Neeson movie in here somewhere...

"Settled"

Yet Shkreli is still in prison. Probably just failed to pay off the right people. In contrast, Epstein who quite literally trafficked children to the elites was on "work release" during his first stint in jail, and if the powers that be had their way he'd never see the inside of the jail cell at all. He also did not kill himself during his second stint in jail.

I'm certainly willing to hate the Sacklers, but it should be remembered that they didn't work alone. Nor did Purdue. The FDA approved their drugs. The doctors prescribed them and the pharmacists filled these scripts. What they did was entirely legal. They filled out the forms. Got the government approval and worked within the system. It strikes me as a bit unfair for society to turn around, designate them as a scape goat and then ask them to pay for the sins of everyone.

100% this. It’s like the Wall Street 2008 hate. Fuck the Sacklers, for sure. But they were nothing without all of the “pain clinics” that were shoving pills down addicts throats.

The Sacklers heavily incentivized those clinics to do that

The Sacklers knew what they were doing was evil, which is why all the hate. Also, why ask for lifetime immunity if it was all legit?

They got the majority of benefit from the sin, and so deserve the majority of the punishment. Anyway the culpability of others isn't an argument to go easy on the Sacklers, but rather an argument to go after the others, too.

It strikes me as a bit unfair for society to turn around, designate them as a scape goat and then ask them to pay for the sins of everyone

They knew the addictive nature of Oxycontin and that tolerance builds up fast, yet they still told sales reps to pressure doctors to always prescribe subsequent amounts be taken at 12 hours intervals (and not at 8 hour intervals to account for the tolerance buildup). That's fucking egregious. The entire family deserves to be put up against the wall.

That's because the maker of a drug is expected to know more about it than doctors. And when that maker conceals information about it with the deliberate aim of causing overprescription, we are justified in blaming them far more than the doctors they fooled.

Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information. - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/health/purdue-opioids-oxy...

> When the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin in late 1995, the agency permitted Purdue Pharma to make a unique claim for it — that its long-acting formulation was “believed to reduce” its appeal to drug abusers compared with shorter-acting painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin.

It seems like both the FDA and Purdue thought / hoped it would be less addictive, but this was not to be the case. And after it became clear from real-world data that this was not true, the FDA still didn't do anything about it?

> a Canadian physician, Dr. Brian Goldman, wrote that the findings turned thinking about the supposed safety of long-acting opioids like OxyContin on its head by showing that drug abusers “coveted” such drugs. “This should ring alarm bells,” Dr. Goldman, who was then a paid speaker for Purdue Pharma, wrote in the editorial.

Why wouldn't the FDA act on this alarm? Why would we rely on a pharmaceutical company to police its own drug when there is a clearly a massive conflict of interest? Isn't this what the FDA is for?

If the last twenty years have taught us anything, it is that unimaginable amounts of unconscionable evil may be done "legally". That is certainly not the criterion to which thinking people should limit our judgment.

We subjects don't decide our laws and regulations. [0] Instead, those are written by lawyers and lobbyists in the employ of reptiles like the Sacklers. They make the rules by which they play, so when we're told to "hate the game, not the players", well, they get that hate too.

[0] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

> The FDA approved their drugs. The doctors prescribed them and the pharmacists filled these scripts. What they did was entirely legal.

I think everyone who wants a good background on this issue should read this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

Purdue misrepresented many facts in their aggressive marketing.

The media has lied about opiods.

Most people who take opiods do not get addicted.

And most people who are addicted did not start with a legitimate prescription--they started using it as an illicit drug.

What was really strange about the whole Opiod Crisis thing was this weird narrative that was being pushed for a while with all sorts of people claiming that Ibuprofen was just as good as Hydrocodone. I’ve gotten pretty badly messed up a few times, whether a bad landing skydiving or some guy ripping my knee up in jiu jitsu, and I’m sorry but no - Ibuprofen is nowhere near as good for pain relief as opioids are.

A significant amount of addictions came from those who were overprescribed and instructed to take, by their doctors (who were instructed and given bogus studies by the Pharma reps) after surgeries, which led to chemical dependence and addiction.

Perhaps you could like, read before you post incorrect statements, or so that your attempts at trolling won't be so easily shot down.

One of the things I enjoy about HN is the fact that we try to steer away from personal attacks. It’s one of the last places on the net where I enjoy taking part in conversations, because even people who disagree completely with me make an effort to keep their arguments civil. Please help us keep it that way.

Yes, there are thousands of people who got addicted without any history of co-morbidity of addiction. But as a portion of people who were prescribed, they are small. Remember we are talking about a drug that had 245 million prescriptions in the US in 2014. Also, 30% of Americans are living with chronic pain. [2] If anything, we may be under-prescribing these drugs.

1. The narrative is that some poor guy took pain meds for a legitimate reason then ended up addicted. While this does occur, it's actually not very common.

> Among people who are prescribed opioids, addiction is relatively uncommon. The percentage of patients who become addicted after taking opioids for chronic pain is measured in the single digits; studies show an incidence from less than 1 percent to 8 percent. Most of the estimates are skewed toward the low end of this range, when those at risk (due to a history of substance abuse or, to a lesser but meaningful extent, a concurrent mental illness) are removed from the sample.

2. Most addicts had a history of drug abuse.

> People who abuse pills are rarely new to drugs. The federal government’s 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, for example, revealed that more than three-fourths of misusers had used non-prescribed benzodiazepines, such as Valium or Xanax, or inhalants. A study of Oxycontin users in treatment found that they “were not naive individuals with accidental addictions who were introduced to painkillers by their physicians as reported by the media … [Instead they had] extensive drug use histories.”

It's hard to bring this up without straying into classism or victim blaming. The reality is that most people without comorbidities and abuse history are quite safe, and these are drugs we need.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/what-ameri... [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1507771

My claims are actually backed by published research (cited within the Atlantic article if you want to check)... Maybe you could like read before you get shot down.

Anecdotal, but I had a dear and close friend who started with a totally innocent prescription who is no longer with me due to abuse. He wouldn't even touch marijuana prior; I would like to see the data of how common this is; I suspect it is more likely than you are implying.

When I looked at this a year ago, I ran across this article which I saved: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1507771

> Although published estimates of iatrogenic addiction vary substantially from less than 1% to more than 26% of cases, part of this variability is due to confusion in definition. Rates of carefully diagnosed addiction have averaged less than 8% in published studies, whereas rates of misuse, abuse, and addiction-related aberrant behaviors have ranged from 15 to 26%. A small (estimated at 4%) but growing percentage of persons who are addicted to prescription opioids transition to heroin

In short, people who have no history of addiction (and to a lesser extent comorbid mental illness) are unlikely to become addicted, but of course even a small chance is still worth considering.

The media isn't lying about the individual cases they mention. Yes, there are thousands of people like your friend. But I also think they built a narrative about these drugs being extremely addictive when the truth is much more subtle.

I see your point, but there have certainly been accusations that the Sacklers directed operations and while knowing risks associated with drug doses. An NYT article from 2019 [1] Sacklers Directed Efforts to Mislead Public About OxyContin, Court Filing Claims lays out the accusations. (I'll try to find the subsequent ruling and add to this.)

From that article, albeit citing the prosecutor's case, "... internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.

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."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/health/sacklers-purdue-ox...

Edit to add: Actually, there's a pretty good (and seemingly neutral) history of the Massachusetts case on Wikipedia, with background info and related cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Purdue

Why would we rely on a pharmaceutical company's marketing department to give us unbiased data on the safety of a drug? This is what studies and the FDA are for. If we're letting marketing departments dictate drug doseage then something is severely broken in the system.

Legality has nothing to do with justice; I'm all for bringing everyone you just described to justice. Laws are made by the rich, not the just.

Don't forget the DEA, who are chartered with keeping tabs on doctors who overprescribe.

There's also the factor of systemic issues that drove doctors to overprescribe: Pain Management Questionnaires[1]:

> ...pain management is the only clinical measurement among eight components of Hospital Value-Based Purchasing, and many physicians see their patient satisfaction scores in patient surveys drop as a result of changes in their prescribing practices. These scores affect compensation and promotion.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4880256/

Because people want to blame someone, so why not blame the people that got filthy rich off it. Meanwhile it's the FDA's responsibility to make sure that drugs are safe. The FDA thought oxycontin wouldnt be as addictive as it was, and apparently neither did Purdue. But then when the data rolled in that it was actually highly addictive (A Purdue doctor said alarmed bells should be raised[0] after a study in Canada), the FDA didn't do anything about it. People expect a drug company to say their own drug is too dangerous when the FDA says it is fine? Is that a good system for drug safety in our country?

[0]: https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/159/2/149.full.pdf

While I don't want blame OFF the Sacklers, there's an enormous point there. If society is willing to JUST blame the Sacklers, we're pretty much fucked.

We already saw this play out with the mortgage crises. It was all the banks.

It wasn't the Congress pushing banks to get homes to everyone. (requiring things like a job disproportionately impacts my district!) Nevermind the tremendous number of ways Congress could have intervened.

It wasn't the fault of the borrowers. No, they are all noble people just struggling to get by on pennies. They weren't buying houses on credit and paying by flipping them on the run-up. Deep down, a lot of people knew they couldn't afford the house, but chose to do it anyway.

We saw this play out with cigarettes. The execs get dragged before congress and their performance was certainly ludicrous, but somehow the blame is entirely on them. The result is cigarettes are taxed more. They kill, but are taxed more. So the outrage was used to assign blame so the states could pull in more money.

Same thing here as far as I can see. Everyone has enjoyed their cut of the pharma pie, and when blame goes out the state which has been regulating this entire market heavily from top to bottom is blaming someone else and then absolving liability in exchange for money.

We really need to stop looking for single points of blame for these things. If it's at the point where we say, "look at the last 20 years how obviously reckless this behavior was" it's well beyond the fault of the person exhibiting that behavior.

So when we legalize all drugs because 'the drug war isn't working' (something I agree with) who do we sue then?

I just think the public is overly reactive to whatever problem is at hand. When the drugs are causing crime we want them legalised. When they are causing addiction we want to producers prosecuted.

Opiods helped a lot of people. And the media has constructed this narrative around them being highly addictive which isn't really true.

legalization is really an orthogonal issue. opioid painkillers are a very useful class of drugs that also have serious potential for addiction. doctors understand this and must balance the risk/benefit trade off. the problem here is not that purdue sold addictive drugs, it is that the company intentionally deceived the public about how addictive their formulation is. even if all drugs were fully legal, it still ought to be illegal to misrepresent your product this way.

Well I agree. It is the misrepresentation that gets them in trouble.

The reason I bring it up is that it's a good test of what will happen if we do legalise drugs.

So the claim is that there were a bunch of so-called pain clinics, but which were in reality just fronts for prescribing opioids to addicts. This might be true.

But that's effectively the same result as what we will have if we fully legalize drugs--they are just proposing we replace the 'pain clinics' with 'dispensaries' and dispense with the wink-wink claims of addicts needing to feign shoulder/back/whatever pain.

I actually lean in favour of legalizing drugs, but I just sense a bit of hypocrisy and pitchfork-raising in the internet mob.

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