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U.S. states seek $2.2T from OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma
- trynumber9 6y ago>Purdue is only worth a bit more than $2 billion if liquidated. The company values a proposal to settle litigation, which includes providing addiction treatment and overdose-reversing drugs, at more than $10 billion. The Sacklers would contribute $3 billion and cede control of Purdue, with the company becoming a trust run on behalf of plaintiffs. >Those financial realities underscore that Purdue does not have enough money to satisfy the myriad claims against it.
- milofeynman 6y agoThe Sacklers knew this was coming and have been moving money around for years. Here is just one example: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/14/760794331/sackler-family-transferred-money-to-swiss-bank-accounts-new-york-ag-says https://www.npr.org/2019/09/14/760794331/sackler-family-tran... But I've read they have been doing corporate shuffling as well.
- defen 6y agoI thought they didn't make Swiss bank accounts like they used to? e.g. FATCA means you can't really use Swiss bank accounts to hide assets any more (at least not if that bank wants to participate in the international banking system)
- jraby3 6y agoThere are other ways to hide money now. Fatca is one way, allowing the US to get info but not forced to share 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.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoI've heard a good one is to get a foreign company -- one you're in cahoots with, obviously -- to sue you... and you lose. Judgements across borders generally are hands off, and there are easy ways to keep that money out of the IRS once settlements are involved.
- ferros 6y agoWhy even declare such an outlandish number? What’s the difference between saying 2.2T or a gajillion bazillion?
- olliej 6y agoI assume to set the stage for negotiation - presumably significant costs for dealing with the destruction Purdue caused, and also wanting ongoing recovery support from them.
- smnrchrds 6y agoMaybe it's like 1000-year prison terms. It does not make practical sense, but if that is how much harm the company has caused, that is how much the lawsuit would be for.
- ferros 6y agoUnderstand, it just adds a sense of unrealism to that case for me. Everything else looks solid, then after seeing that number, it changes how I see the whole thing.
- jliptzin 6y agoMaybe they did an unreal amount of harm. That could just be where the math adds up. If they're responsible for 100,000 overdose deaths, with each life valued at an average of $20 million, that adds up to ~$2T.
- sudosysgen 6y agoEspecially when you consider those that didn't overdose but were still crippled, which is certainly at least an integer multiple of the number of deaths.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoThat is you problem then. They did cause that much damage to the US economy via addictions, deaths, hospital charges, lost taxes, state raising kids cause mommy and daddy are addicts etc etc.. 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.
- dirtnugget 6y agoWell if this goes through they are definitely bankrupt.
- Supermancho 6y agoPurdue is, the Sacklers (ostensible owners) are not.
- cmehdy 6y ago"Companies are not people" is the best way the world has been swindled into this sort of chaos. If people profit from the company, the company is people. Purdue could entirely go down or not, but I'd much rather see the people who most benefited from it being the ones actually going down. 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 ?
- imgabe 6y agoThere are ways to pierce the corporate veil and it mostly involves criminal activity I think. You can't form a company and murder people then claim it was the company's actions not yours.
- Supermancho 6y agoThe reasoning is partly, that a company is not (usually) a single person, nor is that single person responsible for all the actions of the other parts of the company. In reality, most company decisions (especially sensitive or controversial ones) are controlled by a small group of people. That being said, it's clearly used as a flexible mithril armor for the rich and culpable. This is modern America.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago> 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 ? 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.
- bobobob420 6y agoWe need criminal indictments, where are the prosecutors
- colechristensen 6y agoThey’re chickenshits driven by win rates and overburdened courts so they don’t prosecute anything that isn’t certainly won before it’s even started... while also avoiding prosecutions that might threaten jobs.
- bobobob420 6y agoI agree. It is a shame things are this way. I wonder what the solution could be? Maybe developing an extremely educated society will help in the future mitigate this as people will have higher standards. I cannot think of anything else that will allow for natural change of this and I doubt we will see forced change by anyone.
- 0xy 6y agoThe Sacklers paying $3 billion is a joke. They have a net worth of $13 billion, most of which is proceeds from ostensibly an illegal drug trafficking operation targeting poor communities. 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.
- asldkjaslkdj 6y agoThe Sackler family should be completely liquidated. They acted with complete disregard and caused an unbelievable amount of pain. To think, there are people in prison for marijuana charges and these people still walk free. It's an absurd injustice.
- Mizza 6y ago> The Sackler family should be completely liquidated. This, but literally.
- metiscus 6y agoLet's not do this here. We're better than this.
- Mizza 6y agoI'm not joking. They're mass murderers as far as I'm concerned. I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed. I've had multiple people I know die of the Oxy-to-Heroin pipeline. These CEOs are billionaires.
- kube-system 6y agoIt doesn't matter how bad the crime may be, as long as criminal justice is carried out by fallible humans, capital punishment will result in innocent deaths. As nice as retribution might feel, it only adds to the problem.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoYou’re not innocent if you’re convicted and the evidence is overwhelming. In this case, the evidence is overwhelming. I have no better example in recent US domestic affairs history for capital punishment being deserved. Of course, don’t execute people when the evidence is uncertain or unclear. The evidence in this case is irrefutable, and the magnitude comparable to genocide (~250k deaths caused).
- innagadadavida 6y agoGiven the seriousness of this issue, why ain’t the congress probing these guys instead of going after a bunch of tech companies? The priorities seem to skewed here.
- eggsmediumrare 6y agoThey can, and should, do both.
- seigando 6y agoIt's kind of amazing how much of our culture is predicated on consumer exploitation. Justice and reparations seem like a pipe dream.
- throwaway815190 6y agoEven if you were to get it, what would that change? The culture of consumer exploitation would still be there. How do you change something that's been a cultural cornerstone for over a century?
- seigando 6y agoThat's what justice and reparations means to me. Changing the culture.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThat implies punishing people but neither the crime nor the workable alternatives have been clearly established. "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.
- seigando 6y ago...I mean if someone is dependent on your service and there aren't viable alternatives or a means of making a viable alternative, and your pricing is exploitative and meant to siphon away customer's money so you can get rich at their expense, maybe the issue is that you don't believe 'exploitation' exists because of how much you love money over regular people.
- throwaway815190 6y agoThose are not the definitions of those words. Neither Justice nor reparations are designed to change the culture. In fact, they're designed to do the opposite: maintain the status quo.
- dantheman 6y agoI wonder what would have happened if drugs were just legal, and anyone could buy whatever they wanted.
- colechristensen 6y agoLook into Portugal.
- filoeleven 6y agoPortugal did not legalize the sale, possession, and use of drugs. For those already addicted, they changed possession from a criminal to an administrative offense. So it’s decriminalized in one aspect, but far from legal. Producing and selling drugs is still illegal and still targeted. 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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
- R0b0t1 6y agoFor opiates a UK study found that people eventually get bored of them and quit. For other drugs it is not necessarily clear, but other experiments exist indicating it is likely the same. E.g. mice will intentionally go through withdrawals when there are enough resources available to procreate and other mice present.
- donatj 6y agoOpiates in and of themselves are relatively safe, only slightly worse for you than caffeine, although clearly (arguably?) more addictive. They have very few long-term effects and the biggest negative health impact being constipation. 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.
- obmelvin 6y agoYou make it sound like there's a problem with the people getting addicted, not the systemic overprescription of addictive drugs to unwitting patients who followed the authority of naive, at best, or even malicious medical professionals.
- DuskStar 6y agoI think he's saying that the drug war is the problem, not the addiction. That the steps that we're taking to fight addiction are worse than the addiction itself.
- to11mtm 6y agoI would still argue the bigger problem is the way pharmaceutical companies push products on Doctors. 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.
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