A slap on the wrist. After a half million Americans have died from a crisis they helped kickstart, they should be facing criminal charges and jail time. The rich and powerful once again are allowed to buy their freedom.
Became a full blown addict after getting prescribed for the subsequent back injury.
She lost everything, disappeared, became a homeless addict drifting from DC to Baltimore to NYC and back, until she died of an overdose of heroin in a parking lot of a 7-11 in DC in December 2015. Her story and the impact on me and my 4 siblings is a drop in an ocean of suffering these smug assholes inflicted on this country.
This slap on the wrist is an insult to all of us, especially us Appalachians, who saw this starting in the 90s and got ignored because “hillbillies are genetically prone to addiction” as Purdue told the FDA.
How do companies like McKinsey get away with this?
Money. Any other questions?
It's like asking why money didn't work for Bernie Madoff but it has worked for Jake Paul and other crypto scammers. Bernie stole from the rich.
He's also not old money or especially supportive of old money; he's just some script kiddy who scammed his way to the top on the back of the kind of confidence that tends to only come when you're built like an NFL lineman but can also read documentation. The seethe is easy to understand.
Joe Biden just pardoned his son from crimes that would have gotten you and me in jail already.
Similarly, your Clintons, Bushs, Blairs, Bidens, Trumps, none of them or their friends and family will ever see a day in jail no matter their crimes. That's influence money alone can't buy. Those are the 1% of the 1%. They can kill or pardon people, start and end wars without answering to anyone.
Kim Dotcom is a nobody compared or those guys.
The only crime there is evidence he committed is never prosecuted against regular people, so it's the exact opposite of what you claim.
It was a witch hunt from the start.
Because of judiciary, regulatory and congressional capture, of course. This means you it's gotten away with unless someone like Luigi martyrs themselves.
Elites never face personal consequences beyond fines, maybe expect when they defraud investors.
If you want to kill people and get away with it, just form a corporation and have your CxO and SVP staff make decisions that kill people.
Note this only works for indirect deaths. If you form a corporation and then order a hit on someone, that's still illegal and you'll still go to jail. If you form a corporation, build a coal power plant that follows all regulations, and the particulate pollution sends a few hundred people to their early deaths that's fine.
As long as housing and mental health remains an open issue, personally I'd rather have them consume stuff made by an actual pharmaceutical company at pharmaceutical grade instead of completely unregulated dark market stuff that can have absolutely wild (and deadly!) swings in dosage, even from the same batch.
I keep reading people who say, over and over again, that the war on drugs is a failure and that it's a mistake to try criminally prosecute suppliers and send them to prison. People will always find a way to get the drugs if they want them, we're told.
But then I see the same people turn around that McKinsey is responsible for millions of deaths from the opioid crisis, and the execs involved should be held criminally responsible.
It's hard to reconcile the calls for criminal prosecution against McKinsey execs with the argument that drugs should be legalized and that we shouldn't go after other suppliers of drugs.
That’s BS. OxyContin addicts tend to experience withdrawal symptoms before the recommended 12 hours is up, they also develop tolerance, so they end up requiring larger and larger dosage with increasing frequency. You’re not going to sustainably live a long, happy and productive life even if you have a cheap, steady, relatively clean supply of it.
Both would be heavily regulated if they were new prescription medications.
Life long customer.
People get these mixed up and use them interchangeably but they're very different. There will (and should) never be heroin shops that look like Apple stores like there are for weed.
Decrim can be for production, distribution and possession but people generally use it to mean possession. That means that possession of amounts for personal use are not a criminal matter, which makes sense if we see it as an addiction that needs to be treated. In that scenario, production and distribution can be (and often are) illegal.
There are other nuances in how to handle decriminalization in terms of social services offered and how to disrupt demand.
I see the claim made often, it even commonly pops up on HN. The claim is that the War on Drugs is a failure, because any prohibition efforts are doomed. Laws against a substance merely push it into the criminal sector and don't actually disrupt the supply. So the only outcome is that we get more crime and suffering, but the amount of people using the drug doesn't change.
We saw a similarly argument often used when marijuana legalization was being discussed - legalization wouldn't actually impact the number of people who used the drugs, because prohibition laws don't stop people from acquiring a substance. Naturally, the validity of marijuana legalization goes well beyond it's impact on the number of users, but there were many claims that it wouldn't impact the number of users.
Of course, one can make the argument that the War on Drugs is a good thing but that it's implementation has often been wrong (for instance, that there should be more effort made on going after suppliers rather than users). But it's very common to see people claim that any attempts at prohibition are doomed to failure and cause more harm with little to no benefit.
Edit: To give an example, here's a HN discussion where most of the people are in favor of fully legalizing all drugs:
humans will do drugs. you have to start there. no matter what you try and “prohibit” this is your ground zero. from here you can decide which policy has the greatest chance of “success” once you define what success means to you.
Ignoring everything else, do you really fail to see how bribing doctor to lie to people about the nature of highly addictive drugs is different from a consensual transaction between two adults?
Patients typically have to trust a doctor; the definition of consent in those circumstances is very strict, side effects have to be declared etc etc. Any abuse of that consent, like in this case, must be treated like a crime.
Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.
> Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.
The problem with this framing (and some of the other comments have used this framing as well) is acting as if other drugs would not have the same issues as opioids. But if anything, the opioid epidemic has shown the opposite to be the case - people irresponsibly push drugs onto people even when access is limited to a group like doctors who are supposed to be well educated and discerning.
> blue collar crime
> Today’s resolution marks the first time a management consulting firm has been held criminally responsible for advice resulting in the commission of a crime by a client and reflects the Justice Department’s ongoing efforts to hold actors accountable for their roles in the opioid crisis. The resolution is also the largest civil recovery for such conduct.
> Additionally, a former McKinsey senior partner who worked on Purdue matters has been charged with obstruction of justice in federal court in Abingdon, Virginia. Martin E. Elling, 60, a U.S. citizen currently residing in Bangkok, Thailand, has been charged with one count of knowingly destroying records, documents and tangible objects with the intent to impede, obstruct and influence the investigation and proper administration of a matter within the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. Elling has agreed to plead guilty and is expected to appear in federal court in Abingdon to enter his plea and for sentencing at later dates.
…
> Elling faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine up to $250,000 for the obstruction of justice charge
All I ask is that the leadership of McKinsey be treated to that same standard. Let their golden parachutes be literal.
The broader cultural impact of them (and of the war guilt) imposed on Germany landed fairly well, though. Unfortunately, it is possible that it might have landed less well if the punishments actually fit the crimes.
Observe and contrast it to Japan's take on its war guilt, and its less-than-enthusiastic attitude towards taking responsibility.
Yeah, Martin Elling made 2 million in political donations over the years: https://www.businessinsider.com/mckinsey-company-oxycontin-d...
> During the past two decades, Elling has spread nearly $2 million among dozens of federal-level political committees, almost all Democratic. The political committees of President Joe Biden and dozens of US Senate and House candidates have benefited from Elling's contributions.
Viewed in isolation, the atrocities committed by these men deserve punishment. But in the bigger picture, the function these trials serve is for the institution in charge to be able to say "see? We do hold ourselves accountable" even though the vast majority of war crimes went uninvestigated and unpunished.
More heads, and more important heads, should roll. Not just that of one fall guy. Tens of thousands of deaths every year, and even more lives ruined. But we all know what side the US government is on, so I'm not holding my breath.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
Well... have you seen the news lately?
Opioids are just the most obvious and egregious example of how the system is abusively hostile.
Hunter Biden pardoned, Trump’s convictions not resulting in punishment, high ranking executives getting bonuses for layoffs, etc…
My bad. I see you were disagreeing with the poster sarcastically.