There will be people like Sacklers until we start putting them away and throwing away the key. We do need to put rich people in jail at least every now and again, if for no other reason than to demonstrate we're not a banana republic.
"Purdue flourished under brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, who died in 2010 and 2017, respectively."
It's best to avoid generic tangents in HN threads, especially generic flamewar tangents. They tend to make discussion more repetitive and therefore more tedious and eventually more nasty. This particular one has been repeated hundreds if not thousands of times in the past.
... you do know that banana republics did this exact thing all of the time?
However, their despicable offspring managed to flee the country with their ill-gotten gains; good luck finding them now.
My biggest beef with this case has been that people should not be allowed to just "buy" themselves out of jail. The US does not have a concept of "blood money" in its legal code (at least, not yet anyways). This agreement amounted to blood money, practically. Blood money != justice.
And to that end, the USA must demonstrate that it's totalitarian and abuses people's rights?
(squidbeak's reply is a nice example of following this guideline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40812196)