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The Sackler family should be completely liquidated. They acted with complete disregard and caused an unbelievable amount of pain. To think, there are people in

The 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 ago
  Let's not do this here. We're better than this.
  - Mizza 6y ago
    I'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 ago
      It 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 ago
        You’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).
        kube-system 6y ago
        You don't think people haven't thought of that idea before? When innocent people are put to death, those involved almost always believed the evidence was absolutely certain. The problem is: they're still sometimes wrong. There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. They all guarantee non-zero rates of innocent death. How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? And for what benefit? A feeling of retribution?
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        > There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. This is a call to implement better systems around capital punishment, not to do away with capital punishment when the crime meets the criteria for it's implementation. As the old Texan proverb goes, “Some people need killin'”. This is not a pro-death, nor pro-revenge stance, this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform (and I believe there is enough criminal justice and behavioral science evidence that supports this thesis, but is beyond the scope of this comment). > How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. There is zero doubt in what the Sacklers did, so I see no point in us continuing to argue over whether the evidence is substantial enough. If you want to hold the position capital punishment is still not acceptable for them, I'm sure I could find enough families and loved ones of those 250k people killed by the Sacklers' actions to rebut such arguments.
        kube-system 6y ago
        > this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform Then they can spend their entire life in prison. Capital punishment adds no additional value. > As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. The bar for putting someone to death is already very high. But when you put someone to death, you may be unknowingly excluding evidence that you are not yet aware of. In most wrongful convictions, it is additional evidence discovered after the fact or a mistake found in the evidence previously used that indicates that the person was innocent. But at the moment of death, everyone was sure they were guilty. Whoops. For justice to be just, mistakes must be correctable when they are found.
      - genocidicbunny 6y ago
        I feel like the death penalty does need to be on the table in very egregious cases. If you are responsible for thousands of deaths, then it is extremely improbable that the evidence against you would be anything less than overwhelming. In such cases, yes, capital punishment should be on the table. Frankly, I am okay with having harsher penalties automatically applied to the extremely rich, including having the death penalty. Extremely rich should be defined fairly generously here, but it should be defined and treated as a separate class. Yes it creates a separate class of people, but lets be realistic -- the extremely rich already are in a separate class.
        kiba 6y ago
        What does this actually accomplish?
        sk0g 6y ago
        Username definitely checks out, but are you advocating for automatically harsher penalties, scaled by net worth? What problem would it solve, except for encouraging poor people to commit more crimes, since they'd now face relatively less severe? No offence, but this reads like Tumblr "communism" propoganda gone too far. The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against the actions committed, not against someone's skin colour, gender, religion, or indeed, net worth.
        justinclift 6y ago
        > The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against ... net worth. That's clearly not working.
        genocidicbunny 6y ago
        I'm advocating for a disjoint function in terms of penalties, disjoint on net worth. I am not saying we apply a scalar factor based on a person's net worth; but I do think we do need to acknowledge that people who hold hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wealth operate in different worlds from the rest of us. The justice system is different for them, and unless you completely get rid of money and its influence, that won't change. As such, there needs to be _some_ cutoff where we can largely all agree someone holds a disproportionate amount of wealth and power, and thus should be held to a higher standard. I do take offense to this being called 'Tumblr communism'. Yes, Western justice systems should strive towards impartiality, but part and parcel of that is making punishments appropriate. If you fine someone making $35,000 a year $1000 dollars, you will do a lot of harm to them. If you fine someone making $35,000,000 a year $1000, they probably won't even notice. For a more practical example from my own backyard: carpool lane violators in the Bay Area. Before this pandemic, when traffic was still a thing, there would be a lot of BMWs, Audis and Mercedes violating the carpool lane. The common factor was that these were luxury cars and the owners were more likely to be able to slough off a carpool violation fine. They would rarely get ticketed, but for a lot of such drivers, even if they did, a ticket was just the price of business. On the other hand, if you were driving a '98 corolla that you could barely maintain and put the gas into, you would likely not risk a carpool violation just to save a couple of minutes, because if you did get the fine, it would be a serious impact on your finances. Because the law punished both these people the same, it made it financially viable for the wealthier people to ignore the rules, while poorer people had to follow them because they couldn't afford doing otherwise. If in this contrived scenario the punishment was scaled based on income, the fine would be sufficiently punitive for all strata of wealth, and thus no longer incentivize the more well off to break the rules. I was somewhat haughty with my earlier words, and I don't think we should judge people differently based on net worth. After all, if you murder 10,000 people, does it matter much if you live in a palace or a cardboard box? But I do think the punishment should fit not only the crime but the person, and that the very rich should be penalized more harshly than the average person, for the same crime. (As an aside, I'd also like to say that the username definitely does not check out. 'genocidic' is not a word, but it is meant to trip up people thinking it is and that it relates to 'genocide'. It's high school me being clever after watching Monty Python)
      - pabs3 6y ago
        Transformative justice seems like a potentially more useful useful form of justice than retributive justice. https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice/ https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice
      - ponker 6y ago
        That is not in scope for this case. The facts of what the Sacklers have done are not in question. You can make an argument against their execution but it can't be "they got the wrong guy."
        kube-system 6y ago
        And this particular case is not in scope of the decision of whether a criminal justice system should allow capital punishment. If you do allow it, it applies to more cases than this one. If you don't, it doesn't apply to this one.
    - xster 6y ago
      Do you have a link?
    - ipsum2 6y ago
      > I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed. This statement is downright wrong. The regulator was executed, not the CEO. The regulator also approved untested drugs, which killed people. The sentencing was probably not because of the cats. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11846089 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=118460...
  - happytoexplain 6y ago
    The line becomes very blurry when the evil is fantastically enormous.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - causality0 6y ago
    How many people do you have to kill before you deserve to get fed into a wood chipper? The Sacklers are at 250,000 and counting.
  - throwaway8941 6y ago
    Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one) that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support against death penalty would be close to nil.
    - cm2012 6y ago
      Plenty of people deserve to die. Problem is we are awful at accurately knowing who those people are.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Always be wary of FBI assertions without evidence. They are fabulous liars with an agenda to make themselves more powerful and scary.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I mean, I hear all sorts of really heinous crimes…people who serially kidnap, rape, torture, kill victims in the most horrible ways possible. I am extremely doubtful that there is anything that is much worse than that, and yet I'm still against the death penalty. Perhaps he should explain what it is he sees instead of trying claim we're too ignorant to understand why the death penalty should be instituted?
    - kiba 6y ago
      People doing horrifying things justify horrifying things be done to them?
  - polotics 6y ago
    You are looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. You think the clearly responsible party should still be free and wealthy?
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      That is clearly not the only other option next to a death penalty.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Why? Why is it fair to execute someone who murders 20 hitchhikers, or 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but not someone who knowingly takes actions that lead to the death of (i.e., murders) 500,000 people? It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform. If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.
    - anchpop 6y ago
      It's not fair to execute anyone. Many countries have banned the death penalty and prominent US politicians oppose it (including Biden). It seems like you're noticing: "We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands." And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.
      - ponker 6y ago
        "It's not fair to execute anyone." That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.
        metiscus 6y ago
        How do you propose to sort out the two classes that you have indicated exist? The inability to do so perfectly is largely behind my opposition to the death penalty in general. You can't be meaningfully exonerated if you are not alive. If punishment is what people desire, the American prison system is perfectly capable of satiation. A life in an American prison is significantly worse, in my opinion, than being dead as being dead ends it immediately and life in prison forces a person to deal with the consequences of their actions for a life-time.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  "Got a call from some dreamers said they was out for revenge, got excited then I thought about it, started crying, because a year ago my cousin was killed looking for his".
  - Mizza 6y ago
    I'm not saying somebody should Rambo it or anything like that. We need an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials or the International Criminal Court but for these kinds of deliberate corporate crimes that result in mass death and destruction.
    - rapnie 6y ago
      In general there needs to be more personal liability for white-collar crime. Now in corporations it often goes something like this (implicitly or not): "So you say we'll probably earn [this amount] and, when discovered, we are likely to have to pay between [this and that amount] in fines? Well then, that's a great ROI you got there, Roy. I'd say we go for it". And they lived happily after.
- asldkjaslkdj 6y ago
  I know people that have overdosed after getting addicted to initially-prescribed pain meds so I can relate to the feeling, but I think destitution and a lifetime of garnished wages might be more frightening than death for these people.
  - annoyingnoob 6y ago
    Can they get hooked on their own drugs, have the drugs taken away, and then lose everything trying to feed the addiction on the street?
    - grogenaut 6y ago
      nope, cruel and unusual punishment.
  - refurb 6y ago
    How about all the doctors prescribing it? Same punishment? People can't get Oxycontin unless a doctor writes a script and if they weren't handing it out like candy it wouldn't have been as big a problem.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      It’s probably completely different in the US but in Europe doctors can get in trouble for not following so-called guidelines.
      - refurb 6y ago
        The DEA is supposed to do it in the US as well. Each doctor has a DEA number and the DEA has access to what they prescribe. I think one issue is if you're a doctor at a pain clinic or at a hospice, you'd prescribe very large amounts of opioids. If you're a family doctor, you shouldn't be. I don't know why the DEA wasn't cracking down more quickly. There were examples of "pill mills" where doctors were writing scripts for hundreds of thousands of pills per month, which clearly shouldn't happen.
- dang 6y ago
  You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how you feel about others or whom you happen to feel it about. This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. It's also completely unsubstantive. Fortunately that's not how your account usually posts. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
diogenescynic 6y ago
They should be executed. They knew exactly what they were doing.
- dang 6y ago
  You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how you feel about others or whom you happen to feel it about. This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - diogenescynic 6y ago
    Clutching your pearls over language while these people kill hundreds of thousands and get away with it. Execution implies a legal sentence. This is a legal process. We should use it when it is appropriate.
    - dang 6y ago
      Posting rage comments to an internet forum does nothing for any of those people. No more of this, please.
pgnas 6y ago
I completely agree. They should be jailed, this unfortunately goes too deep. They are responsible for the death of millions. I would venture to guess close to the amount of people who die in wars

Mizza 6y ago

> The Sackler family should be completely liquidated. This, but literally.

metiscus 6y ago
Let's not do this here. We're better than this.
- Mizza 6y ago
  I'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 ago
    It 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 ago
      You’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).
      - kube-system 6y ago
        You don't think people haven't thought of that idea before? When innocent people are put to death, those involved almost always believed the evidence was absolutely certain. The problem is: they're still sometimes wrong. There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. They all guarantee non-zero rates of innocent death. How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? And for what benefit? A feeling of retribution?
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        > There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. This is a call to implement better systems around capital punishment, not to do away with capital punishment when the crime meets the criteria for it's implementation. As the old Texan proverb goes, “Some people need killin'”. This is not a pro-death, nor pro-revenge stance, this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform (and I believe there is enough criminal justice and behavioral science evidence that supports this thesis, but is beyond the scope of this comment). > How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. There is zero doubt in what the Sacklers did, so I see no point in us continuing to argue over whether the evidence is substantial enough. If you want to hold the position capital punishment is still not acceptable for them, I'm sure I could find enough families and loved ones of those 250k people killed by the Sacklers' actions to rebut such arguments.
        kube-system 6y ago
        > this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform Then they can spend their entire life in prison. Capital punishment adds no additional value. > As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. The bar for putting someone to death is already very high. But when you put someone to death, you may be unknowingly excluding evidence that you are not yet aware of. In most wrongful convictions, it is additional evidence discovered after the fact or a mistake found in the evidence previously used that indicates that the person was innocent. But at the moment of death, everyone was sure they were guilty. Whoops. For justice to be just, mistakes must be correctable when they are found.
    - genocidicbunny 6y ago
      I feel like the death penalty does need to be on the table in very egregious cases. If you are responsible for thousands of deaths, then it is extremely improbable that the evidence against you would be anything less than overwhelming. In such cases, yes, capital punishment should be on the table. Frankly, I am okay with having harsher penalties automatically applied to the extremely rich, including having the death penalty. Extremely rich should be defined fairly generously here, but it should be defined and treated as a separate class. Yes it creates a separate class of people, but lets be realistic -- the extremely rich already are in a separate class.
      - kiba 6y ago
        What does this actually accomplish?
      - sk0g 6y ago
        Username definitely checks out, but are you advocating for automatically harsher penalties, scaled by net worth? What problem would it solve, except for encouraging poor people to commit more crimes, since they'd now face relatively less severe? No offence, but this reads like Tumblr "communism" propoganda gone too far. The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against the actions committed, not against someone's skin colour, gender, religion, or indeed, net worth.
        justinclift 6y ago
        > The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against ... net worth. That's clearly not working.
        genocidicbunny 6y ago
        I'm advocating for a disjoint function in terms of penalties, disjoint on net worth. I am not saying we apply a scalar factor based on a person's net worth; but I do think we do need to acknowledge that people who hold hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wealth operate in different worlds from the rest of us. The justice system is different for them, and unless you completely get rid of money and its influence, that won't change. As such, there needs to be _some_ cutoff where we can largely all agree someone holds a disproportionate amount of wealth and power, and thus should be held to a higher standard. I do take offense to this being called 'Tumblr communism'. Yes, Western justice systems should strive towards impartiality, but part and parcel of that is making punishments appropriate. If you fine someone making $35,000 a year $1000 dollars, you will do a lot of harm to them. If you fine someone making $35,000,000 a year $1000, they probably won't even notice. For a more practical example from my own backyard: carpool lane violators in the Bay Area. Before this pandemic, when traffic was still a thing, there would be a lot of BMWs, Audis and Mercedes violating the carpool lane. The common factor was that these were luxury cars and the owners were more likely to be able to slough off a carpool violation fine. They would rarely get ticketed, but for a lot of such drivers, even if they did, a ticket was just the price of business. On the other hand, if you were driving a '98 corolla that you could barely maintain and put the gas into, you would likely not risk a carpool violation just to save a couple of minutes, because if you did get the fine, it would be a serious impact on your finances. Because the law punished both these people the same, it made it financially viable for the wealthier people to ignore the rules, while poorer people had to follow them because they couldn't afford doing otherwise. If in this contrived scenario the punishment was scaled based on income, the fine would be sufficiently punitive for all strata of wealth, and thus no longer incentivize the more well off to break the rules. I was somewhat haughty with my earlier words, and I don't think we should judge people differently based on net worth. After all, if you murder 10,000 people, does it matter much if you live in a palace or a cardboard box? But I do think the punishment should fit not only the crime but the person, and that the very rich should be penalized more harshly than the average person, for the same crime. (As an aside, I'd also like to say that the username definitely does not check out. 'genocidic' is not a word, but it is meant to trip up people thinking it is and that it relates to 'genocide'. It's high school me being clever after watching Monty Python)
    - pabs3 6y ago
      Transformative justice seems like a potentially more useful useful form of justice than retributive justice. https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice/ https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice
    - ponker 6y ago
      That is not in scope for this case. The facts of what the Sacklers have done are not in question. You can make an argument against their execution but it can't be "they got the wrong guy."
      - kube-system 6y ago
        And this particular case is not in scope of the decision of whether a criminal justice system should allow capital punishment. If you do allow it, it applies to more cases than this one. If you don't, it doesn't apply to this one.
  - xster 6y ago
    Do you have a link?
  - ipsum2 6y ago
    > I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed. This statement is downright wrong. The regulator was executed, not the CEO. The regulator also approved untested drugs, which killed people. The sentencing was probably not because of the cats. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11846089 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=118460...
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  The line becomes very blurry when the evil is fantastically enormous.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- causality0 6y ago
  How many people do you have to kill before you deserve to get fed into a wood chipper? The Sacklers are at 250,000 and counting.
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one) that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support against death penalty would be close to nil.
  - cm2012 6y ago
    Plenty of people deserve to die. Problem is we are awful at accurately knowing who those people are.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Always be wary of FBI assertions without evidence. They are fabulous liars with an agenda to make themselves more powerful and scary.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I mean, I hear all sorts of really heinous crimes…people who serially kidnap, rape, torture, kill victims in the most horrible ways possible. I am extremely doubtful that there is anything that is much worse than that, and yet I'm still against the death penalty. Perhaps he should explain what it is he sees instead of trying claim we're too ignorant to understand why the death penalty should be instituted?
  - kiba 6y ago
    People doing horrifying things justify horrifying things be done to them?
- polotics 6y ago
  You are looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. You think the clearly responsible party should still be free and wealthy?
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    That is clearly not the only other option next to a death penalty.
- ponker 6y ago
  Why? Why is it fair to execute someone who murders 20 hitchhikers, or 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but not someone who knowingly takes actions that lead to the death of (i.e., murders) 500,000 people? It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform. If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.
  - anchpop 6y ago
    It's not fair to execute anyone. Many countries have banned the death penalty and prominent US politicians oppose it (including Biden). It seems like you're noticing: "We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands." And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.
    - ponker 6y ago
      "It's not fair to execute anyone." That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.
      - metiscus 6y ago
        How do you propose to sort out the two classes that you have indicated exist? The inability to do so perfectly is largely behind my opposition to the death penalty in general. You can't be meaningfully exonerated if you are not alive. If punishment is what people desire, the American prison system is perfectly capable of satiation. A life in an American prison is significantly worse, in my opinion, than being dead as being dead ends it immediately and life in prison forces a person to deal with the consequences of their actions for a life-time.
CameronNemo 6y ago
"Got a call from some dreamers said they was out for revenge, got excited then I thought about it, started crying, because a year ago my cousin was killed looking for his".
- Mizza 6y ago
  I'm not saying somebody should Rambo it or anything like that. We need an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials or the International Criminal Court but for these kinds of deliberate corporate crimes that result in mass death and destruction.
  - rapnie 6y ago
    In general there needs to be more personal liability for white-collar crime. Now in corporations it often goes something like this (implicitly or not): "So you say we'll probably earn [this amount] and, when discovered, we are likely to have to pay between [this and that amount] in fines? Well then, that's a great ROI you got there, Roy. I'd say we go for it". And they lived happily after.
asldkjaslkdj 6y ago
I know people that have overdosed after getting addicted to initially-prescribed pain meds so I can relate to the feeling, but I think destitution and a lifetime of garnished wages might be more frightening than death for these people.
- annoyingnoob 6y ago
  Can they get hooked on their own drugs, have the drugs taken away, and then lose everything trying to feed the addiction on the street?
  - grogenaut 6y ago
    nope, cruel and unusual punishment.
- refurb 6y ago
  How about all the doctors prescribing it? Same punishment? People can't get Oxycontin unless a doctor writes a script and if they weren't handing it out like candy it wouldn't have been as big a problem.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    It’s probably completely different in the US but in Europe doctors can get in trouble for not following so-called guidelines.
    - refurb 6y ago
      The DEA is supposed to do it in the US as well. Each doctor has a DEA number and the DEA has access to what they prescribe. I think one issue is if you're a doctor at a pain clinic or at a hospice, you'd prescribe very large amounts of opioids. If you're a family doctor, you shouldn't be. I don't know why the DEA wasn't cracking down more quickly. There were examples of "pill mills" where doctors were writing scripts for hundreds of thousands of pills per month, which clearly shouldn't happen.
dang 6y ago
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how you feel about others or whom you happen to feel it about. This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. It's also completely unsubstantive. Fortunately that's not how your account usually posts. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

diogenescynic 6y ago

They should be executed. They knew exactly what they were doing.

dang 6y ago
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how you feel about others or whom you happen to feel it about. This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- diogenescynic 6y ago
  Clutching your pearls over language while these people kill hundreds of thousands and get away with it. Execution implies a legal sentence. This is a legal process. We should use it when it is appropriate.
  - dang 6y ago
    Posting rage comments to an internet forum does nothing for any of those people. No more of this, please.

pgnas 6y ago

I completely agree. They should be jailed, this unfortunately goes too deep. They are responsible for the death of millions. I would venture to guess close to the amount of people who die in wars