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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

Fraud is illegal.

The Sacker family leadership was behind the fraudulent claim that Oxycontin was a non-addictive opioid that was suitable for the treatment of everyday pain.

They should be stripped of their ill gotten opioid gains.

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They have been. The Sacklers are social pariahs and outcasts. Their liabilities far exceed their net worth. They had to move away from New York to Florida in order to afford something resembling their old lifestyle. Their family name has been taken down from all the museums they funded. Being upper class people, they still have a lot of wealth earning potential going forward, and you can feel assured that whatever they earn, most of it will go to paying the people who've brought cases against them.

When people sell drugs like cocaine or heroin and the consumer dies, they dealer is prosecuted for their death. The Slacker family has assisted with more deaths than any single street dealer and are not held to the same standards. This show how much political and monetary sway they still have. Slacker family highlights how perverse the US legal system is towards such individuals and how people are still not equal under the law.

Slacker family should be in jail for lying to the FDA about how their product was not addictive and for all the deaths they assisted with.

Yes but the Sacklers would have no income if they're languishing in jail stamping license plates. That means less money to pay the people who brought cases against them. Think about it. Liabilities don't just take their wealth, but their future wealth too.

What a terrible argument. Let's have drug dealers roam the streets because they can pay reparations or taxes. Lol.

I know bro. Last time I was walking down fifth avenue, I saw Richard Sackler getting a dirty water dog and I was so trembling with fear of that gangster that I dove into a manhole cover.

Right, wait until a family member of yours gets addicted to another drug they popularize and then you can act like a smug internet person.

> The Slacker family has assisted with more deaths than any single street dealer and are not held to the same standards

That is because the street dealer did not grounded a company. Companies get away with a lot of crimes in US, compared to individuals. See DuPont for examples.

Huh? Since when do drug dealers get ‘prosecuted for the deaths’ of folks who OD on their products, assuming it was unintentional?

Prosecuted for selling illegal substances yeah. But that’s different.

Here are a few examples. Note that the Slacker family are not low level, they are the top echelon of the OxyContin pushers. [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/06/17/533327584/the-controversy-ove... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fentanyl-deaths-homicde-charger... [3] https://theappeal.org/the-lab/explainers/charging-dealers-wi...

Wonderful. I can't see how a society that stops believing in individual responsibility is going to keep believing in individual autonomy too. We've been seeing the same cultural shift in technology. SB1047 in California seeks to hold developers liable when other people misuse their AI models. There's also people who want to hold normal developers liable when people get hacked due to bugs in their code. If writing code and sharing it is a form of expression, that means no more freedom of expression. People are even being held liable for expression of beliefs too. It's a slippery slope that leads to not being allowed to do anything the state doesn't tell you to do.

That’s California in a nut shell.

Be as weird and unique as you want, as long as it’s an ‘ok’ kind of weird and unique and you’ve filled out the right forms and gotten the correct insurance first.

Or if you’re homeless, do whatever.

I agree it's pretty bogus but it does seem to happen in some jurisdictions. A recent example is Matthew Perry's ketamine dealer.

The Sacklers have not been stripped of the fraudulent earnings that they have previously taken from the company.

> The Sacklers strip-mined Purdue to avoid billions in settlement

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/going-straight-to-top-ar...

Oh no, they have to live in Palm Beach? The Florida punishment for murdering 5 people in cold blood is a needle in your arm. What should be the punishment for murdering a million?

Kissinger ? /s

> The Sacker family leadership was behind the fraudulent claim that Oxycontin was a non-addictive opioid that was suitable for the treatment of everyday pain.

So was the FDA.

More precisely, the FDA’s trust was betrayed by Dr. Curtis Wright IV who did not follow their ethical policies and allowed Purdue to write parts of his review, and then accepted a job with them:

https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

The FDA clearly did not have adequate internal controls but I think equating the two is misleading since their failure was in not detecting fraud rather than perpetrating it.

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