13 ms·

The Sackler family’s plan to keep its billions

129 points by hhs 6y ago

AndrewBissell 6y ago
Says a lot about our ruling institutions that the headline is this and not "The Sackler family's plan to ride out the next 30 years in federal prison."
- Upvoter33 6y ago
  It's so sad that we have had so little ability to put people behind bars for how they have profiteered off of addicting and killing people.
  - vmception 6y ago
    One of several reasons this happens is because debilitating the company is like completely skipping an antitrust hearing and granting the remaining companies closer to a monopoly. The government feels like reining in the remaining company's behavior in the future will be that much harder, while the service for customers and society will degrade to that much worse and egregious. Yes, the concept is stretched when half a million people are dead, and many of the others are now addicted to fentanyl as the country has devolved into a narcostate with poisoned supply chains. If you want to understand how we get here, you have to understand the psychology of the governments instead of oversimplifying it with "corruption" because such a simplified view will cause the wrong and ineffective public policy changes to occur, making those dead and dying people's lives be in vain.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Where on the line ranging from opioids through tobacco through sugar through fast food through alcohol through 1970s food pyramid through steak through salads should we place the point representing “everyone who profited from items to the left of here shall be sent to jail”?
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    I've never had debilitating, long-term pain. Have you? I think it's remarkably sadder that people have to deal with pain like this. And you jump right to wanting to lock up people and take your revenge. Isn't that a rather sad state of affairs? I've been in the presence of people who need pain medicines like OxyContin and who are not able to continue living without it. Not because they're addicts, but because they have horrendous medical conditions caused by all sorts of things, ranging from US armed conflict all the way to cooking accidents while on the job at a restaurant. For however many people you think are addicted and killed by drugs like OxyContin, there are far more people that are in need of drugs like these through no fault of their own, and often times, directly due to the very same politicians who are now celebrating this "takedown" of Purdue. The difficulty one of these individuals had in obtaining their necessary Oxycodone during the COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in him attempting suicide. This person is not alone in this dilemma. The ridiculous scapegoating and guilt-tripping of this drug has led to the ruination of countless lives as well. Many people are suffering right now because some people think it's a corporation's fault when they choose to put a highly effective narcotic into their system. We can't send people to foolish overseas conflicts, require people to engage in dangerous jobs like oil rigging and construction work, and then not give them medicine to make their on-the-job injuries livable. Doctors are the ones who make decisions about what to prescribe - they are the ones who commit the fraud of prescribing unnecessary medicines. If you're truly so eager to throw someone into a cage for their terrible crimes against humanity, you may want to start with the doctors and politicians before the wealthy, greedy Sacklers. I know that doesn't fit into the neat little boxes on top of which people love to grandstand these days, but the truth is a lot more valuable than filthy, emotionally-driven platitudes.
    - hilbert42 6y ago
      You've missed the point. There would be precious few who would deny narcotics to those who really need them. They are often the only effective line of pain relief for severe pain and they are on WHO's list of essential drugs! You seem to have not considered these points: (a) The intrinsic nature of narcotics requires them to be managed with great care. This means the dose has to be accurately titrated sufficient to kill pain and no more or addiction results. These facts have been known by the medical and pharmaceutical industries for over 100 years, also the FDA knew this but seems to have forgotten when it was lobbied. (I'm oversimplifying the facts here but it'll have to do.) (b) Sacklers/Purdue were fully aware that intrinsic nature of narcotics requires them to be managed with great care. As this info is in almost every medical text on the planet that deals with the subject, similarly every pharmacopeia text on the subject. (Check for yourself.) (c) Sacklers/Purdue deliberately ignored these well established medical facts about narcotic addiction so as to proffer from drug sales. They willfully pushed OxyContin use to levels well in excess of that recommended by medical best practice. Thus, it hugely increased the numbers of opiate addicts than there would otherwise have been. (d) As I've said above, many medicos were complicit with Purdue and deserve to lose their license to practice. (e) As I also said above 'before OxyContin, there were any number of narcotic painkilling drugs from those that have to be injected to ones that can be swallowed as a tablet or capsule that are made by more reputable drug companies (and have been for decades). OxyContin didn't offer anything over these earlier drugs.' Doctors, pharmacists and the FDA knew this too, yet they deliberately threw away their Hippocratic Oath and 'mistreated' their patients for a few cheap shekels.
- raincom 6y ago
  Ruling institutions collude with the powerful and the uber wealthy. The way this happens in through layers of indirection: ex-DOJ prosecutors as partners at big law firms, revolving door, etc. The rule of law is for everyone else.
- lumberjack 6y ago
  What I find interesting is how the story is framed. In particular why do articles about corruption in the US (and other first world countries), never feature the word "corruption" explicitly? It is implied that there is corruption but it is never explicitly stated. If this article was about some less developed country, the word would appear endlessly throughout the text. Seems like western journalists have bias when it comes to using that word.
  - fedorareis 6y ago
    My guess is to avoid risk of defamation lawsuits. I know in the states a lot of publications are careful how the phrase things to avoid even the risk of a lawsuit regardless of if it would be a legitimate claim.
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    The oligarchs who own the media companies don't want to offend their friends.
throwaway7281 6y ago
Can someone enlighten me on the psychological wiring of people like these? Do you even think a moment about anything else than you very own well-being, no matter the (societal) costs? Is your relation to the world a purely instrumental one? Where does this destructive energy comes from?
- wilde 6y ago
  Few people play the villain in their own story. More likely they thought they were helping people with chronic pain and justified it by thinking that “more good than harm comes of it”. Plenty of people on this site are employed in work with large negative externalities with similar justifications. We just haven’t had the 20 years to see the outcomes yet.
  - d4mi3n 6y ago
    There's also a cruel irony in the fact that addiction has very negative impacts on folk's self esteem. One of the negative cycles in addiction is when someone does become the villain in their own story. It's heart breaking to talk to a loved one suffering from addiction and hearing that they think they deserve to have it due to some self-perceived failing. I really wish the U.S. would get it's act together culturally around how addicts are perceived, treated, and helped.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Furthermore, there are many layers between them and where much of the wrongdoing took place, so they may or may not have had any involvement in the "villainy". Perverse unintentional incentives at one more places in the stack are more than sufficient to create the appearance of villainy without any intentional malice. Hanlon's Razor is far more common than people want to admit. In this story, doctors are looking for easy solutions they can prescribe in 5-15 minute appointments so they can see as many patients in a day. Management is looking to increase sales. Account managers are trying to get doctor's to prescribe. The only "villainy" at the board/shareholder level could be as simple as tasking management with finding other legitimate well meaning use cases for opioids. That incentive alone is enough to create pressure all the way down the stack and when people in the stack are presented with the challenge of meeting goals, all of them in concert making small compromises within their role are enough to produce the illusion of villainy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
justinclift 6y ago
https://archive.vn/PwCLw https://archive.vn/PwCLw
Igelau 6y ago
What is a 'white-shoe fixer'? I've never heard this term before and it sounds strangely racially charged.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  It's not racially tinged (except inasmuch as all forms of elite society have been historically closed to racial minorities until quite recently), but a "white-shoe"[0] law or accountancy firm refers to the companies that make up the very crème de la crème of those industries. These are firms staffed by wealthy and well-connected Ivy League graduates who provide services to help even wealthier and better-connected Ivy League graduates get what they want and make and keep enormous amounts of money. The name comes from a certain style of shoes that used to be fashionable among a certain class. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-shoe_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-shoe_firm
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    I mean. If these shoes are white, then they are made of white people skin.
    - dang 6y ago
      Good grief. Can you please stop posting ideological (and worse, race war) flamebait to HN? It's not what this site is for. Worse, it wrecks what it is for, so we have to ban accounts that keep doing it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    The term specifically indicates members of firms so privileged that they never have to negotiate city streets filled with mud and horse shit so they can wear white shoes or spats that are always clean.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    Thanks. A google search for "white shoe fixer" was only returning glue and polish for shoes. Given the derogatory Ivy League sense of the term, it's a funny one for the author to use. Keefe attended Columbia, Cambridge, London School of Economics, and got a JD from Yale. Those white shoes you can see from space! His 'Wind of Change' podcast was good stuff.
kevmo 6y ago
The fact that the Sacklers are going to get to keep the billions harvested by ruining the lives of tens of millions of Americans bespeaks a morally bankrupt civil society. The Sackler family literally belongs in prison. Instead, they're going to use their billions to control politicians and ruin countless more lives. The sanctioning of "white collar" criminality is a major component in the USA government's increasing loss of legitimacy.
- sneak 6y ago
  > The fact that the Sacklers are going to get to keep the billions harvested by ruining the lives of tens of millions of Americans bespeaks a morally bankrupt civil society. Selling opiate pills isn't the reason those lives were ruined, any more than selling gasoline is the reason that the climate is changing. Opiates must be put into a body and swallowed to do any harm, and the Sacklers didn't have any involvement whatsoever in that.
  - bepvte 6y ago
    Read the linked new yorker article at the bottom of this one to see how they played a direct critical role in getting doctors to perscribe them for minor pain.
    - sneak 6y ago
      A doctor prescribing them and someone ingesting them are different acts. One does not harm anyone, and is just writing on a piece of paper. The other is extremely dangerous.
      - bepvte 6y ago
        We generally trust doctors to give us medications and advice that help us, and ingest what they prescribe.
        sneak 6y ago
        The fact remains that the ultimate responsibility for what goes into the body of a functioning adult who is not coerced in any way lies solely with that adult. We fault the individual when they don't take their medicine. Why do we fault their physician when they do? State licensing has confused the issue and made most people misplace the "authority" in this chain of events. Your doctor is NOT the authority on what goes into your body: you are.
ffggvv 6y ago
how can one think both of these things: 1. drugs should be legal 2. the sacklers are evil
- pdeffebach 6y ago
  Notions of consent are different. You do what the doctor tells you, and its an enormous ethical violation to recommend drugs without revealing the way you personally gain from it, or to encourage people to recommend drugs that are not medically necessary. With legalized drugs there isn't this trusted arbiter telling you what to do, so you can consent easier when you buy and take them. I agree that it's fraught and there are tons of ethical parallels that need to be worked out but that's one reason.
  - sneak 6y ago
    It's sort of amazing that the reason we have these licensed people who are supposed to be "trusted" to give good instructions is because of the system of prohibition on the sale of drugs by the unlicensed. The argument is, of course, that by restricting the distribution to licensed professionals, the abuse of dangerous drugs would be curbed because the trade would be restricted to to those trained in their safe use. We have the worst of both worlds. This is all a result of prohibition.
- abtom 6y ago
  Because there's a difference between consuming something willingly and a shady corporation conspiring with the system to get unsuspecting people hooked onto their drug of choice for personal benefit?
  - ffggvv 6y ago
    you don’t think of heroin is legalized, there will be corporations conspiring to do the same?
    - gremlinsinc 6y ago
      Not if it's legal for the addict (because mental health issue not criminal), but a crime for the pusher/distributor (because you're taking advantage of those w/ addiction tendencies).
golemotron 6y ago
This should not be a surprise to anyone who understands the purpose of the corporation. It is to create a legal entity that shields owners from liability. See _The Corporation_ by Joel Bakan for details. The answer isn't "get mad at the Sacklers", it's change the law.
- ves 6y ago
  Well, getting mad at the Sacklers may not be productive, but it’s certainly merited.
  - golemotron 6y ago
    But inconsequential compared to changing the law.
- cainxinth 6y ago
  We can do both
  - blackflame7000 6y ago
    No we can't because their medication also helped a lot of people in addition to the abusers that make it difficult for everyone else to get treatment.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - tlrobinson 6y ago
      Roughly half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses since 1998 [1]. I don’t know how many can be directly attributed to OxyContin, but other drugs are pulled from the market over a tiny fraction of that number of deaths or less serious side effects. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/prescription-drug-overdose/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/prescription-drug-overdo...
eigenvalue 6y ago
It's facile and wrong to think of Oxycontin as an unmitigated evil in society. What about all the people who were diagnosed with terminal cancer and were suffering from unimaginable pain? It doesn't matter if you will get a crippling addiction if you're going to be dead in 8 months anyway. From what I've read, Oxycontin was the first available drug that could be easily administered at home once or twice a day and gave meaningful pain relief even for the worst pain. The drug may well have made bearable the last months of millions of people.
- bombela 6y ago
  Yes. But do you need to market that to anybody with a headache?
- GordonS 6y ago
  > From what I've read, Oxycontin was the first available drug that could be easily administered at home once or twice a day There are other opioids with extended release formulas, including morphine - they are nothing new. One of the major problems with OxyContin was that they lied about how long the effects lasted. From memory, they claimed up to 12 hours, and insisted you shouldn't take it more than twice a day. This turned out to be BS, with patients reporting it lasted for 6-8 hours max - just the same as other extended-release opioid formulations.
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    That wasn't a lie. Tolerance is an issue with any narcotic medicine - from amphetamines to opiates. Many patients, whether they take Oxycontin or Vyvanse, will eventually complain that their tolerance will make that claim untrue. It doesn't mean the chemical isn't in their system.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      Tolerance is a separate issue than the one I brought up. The issue of lying about the length of action is not related to tolerance - even patients new to OxyContin complained. I was prescribed OxyContin myself for a while, and know very well that it only works around 6 hours for me, just the same as other ER opioids.
hilbert42 6y ago
How can this possibly happen unless the administration of justice is totally corrupt? It can't and the system is corrupt in more ways than one. The Sacklers and their company Purdue are parasites on our society. The trouble is that government administrations around the world have been complicit or Sacklers couldn't have gotten away with doing what they have done. The fact is that modern medicine has known about the true dangers of narcotics in a reasonably extensive way since the 1860s Civil War, as this was the first time that both 'refined' narcotics and the hypodermic needle were used in combination in a big way. The consequence was that thousands of injured Civil War veterans became severely addicted to the over administrations of laudanum/morphine (it's the classic case historically). By the turn of the 20th Century the narcotics problem was well known around the world and by the end of the first half of the 20th C. international treaties on narcotics were in place and they'd been revised many times. Not remembering the details I've just checked and I offer this quote from Encyclopaedia Britannica on its page on the History of Drug Control: 'In 1909 U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt proposed an international investigation of the opium problem; a meeting of 13 nations held in Shanghai in the same year resulted in recommendations that formed the basis of the first opium convention held at The Hague in 1912. Ratification of the Hague Convention occurred during the meetings of 1913 and 1914. Although further regulatory activity was suspended during the course of World War I, ratification of the Versailles peace treaties of 1919–20 also constituted a ratification of the Hague Convention of 1912. The League of Nations was then given responsibility to supervise agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs.' https://www.britannica.com/topic/drug-use/History-of-drug-control https://www.britannica.com/topic/drug-use/History-of-drug-co... If you read on, you'll see there were many revisions of the drug treaties between WWI and 1950. You don't have to be a medico or in drug regulation to know narcotics are regulated by international treaty for a very good reason, yet in recent years governments around the world have acted as if these treaties (and their own narcotics laws) never existed. Funny isn't it, if I or any of we individuals had smuggled heroin across almost any border of any country and we were caught then we'd be locked up for decades, or in some countries, we'd even be executed as they've death penalty for smuggling narcotics. So how in fucking Hell's name did various governments let these corporate 'pharmaceutical'—drug-peddling corporate cowboys/sleazebags even operate given the history of drug regulation and past and present law—let alone push so much dope to so many for so long? Furthermore, what were all those doctors who prescribed the drugs doing? What on earth was going on in their minds? I am not a medico and even I (as do most of us) know the scripts these doctors were issuing like confetti would lead to serious addiction. As I see it, our governments and their regulating authorities like the FDA are so fucked-up by corporate influence and lobbying that nothing works in the interest of the citizenry anymore, essentially our democracies are stuffed! There cannot be any other possible reason, especially so when even the doctors are deliberately ignoring a central and fundamental tenet of their medical training. We ought to be out on the streets demonstrating over this. There's no way the Sackler family and Purdue should get any concessions over this matter whatsoever—nor should any deal be done with them. Their actions of deliberately pushing their narcotic OxyContin to the extent that patient addition was inevitable makes them fully culpable. Nothing short of them being locked up ought to suffice.
ncmncm 6y ago
Title should have said "scheme".
tinktank 6y ago
As a peon individual, I find it incredibly hard (and it gets harder every day) to live an honest, kind and compassionate life when I see this sort of thing happening. I am influenced not by greed or power, but by the view that if I'm not defensive with regards to myself and those that I hold dear, I will be consumed by a combination of the corporate and legislative entities conspiring to make me (and everyone like me) a peon to their desire.

129 points by hhs 6y ago

Says a lot about our ruling institutions that the headline is this and not "The Sackler family's plan to ride out the next 30 years in federal prison."

Upvoter33 6y ago
It's so sad that we have had so little ability to put people behind bars for how they have profiteered off of addicting and killing people.
- vmception 6y ago
  One of several reasons this happens is because debilitating the company is like completely skipping an antitrust hearing and granting the remaining companies closer to a monopoly. The government feels like reining in the remaining company's behavior in the future will be that much harder, while the service for customers and society will degrade to that much worse and egregious. Yes, the concept is stretched when half a million people are dead, and many of the others are now addicted to fentanyl as the country has devolved into a narcostate with poisoned supply chains. If you want to understand how we get here, you have to understand the psychology of the governments instead of oversimplifying it with "corruption" because such a simplified view will cause the wrong and ineffective public policy changes to occur, making those dead and dying people's lives be in vain.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Where on the line ranging from opioids through tobacco through sugar through fast food through alcohol through 1970s food pyramid through steak through salads should we place the point representing “everyone who profited from items to the left of here shall be sent to jail”?
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
  I've never had debilitating, long-term pain. Have you? I think it's remarkably sadder that people have to deal with pain like this. And you jump right to wanting to lock up people and take your revenge. Isn't that a rather sad state of affairs? I've been in the presence of people who need pain medicines like OxyContin and who are not able to continue living without it. Not because they're addicts, but because they have horrendous medical conditions caused by all sorts of things, ranging from US armed conflict all the way to cooking accidents while on the job at a restaurant. For however many people you think are addicted and killed by drugs like OxyContin, there are far more people that are in need of drugs like these through no fault of their own, and often times, directly due to the very same politicians who are now celebrating this "takedown" of Purdue. The difficulty one of these individuals had in obtaining their necessary Oxycodone during the COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in him attempting suicide. This person is not alone in this dilemma. The ridiculous scapegoating and guilt-tripping of this drug has led to the ruination of countless lives as well. Many people are suffering right now because some people think it's a corporation's fault when they choose to put a highly effective narcotic into their system. We can't send people to foolish overseas conflicts, require people to engage in dangerous jobs like oil rigging and construction work, and then not give them medicine to make their on-the-job injuries livable. Doctors are the ones who make decisions about what to prescribe - they are the ones who commit the fraud of prescribing unnecessary medicines. If you're truly so eager to throw someone into a cage for their terrible crimes against humanity, you may want to start with the doctors and politicians before the wealthy, greedy Sacklers. I know that doesn't fit into the neat little boxes on top of which people love to grandstand these days, but the truth is a lot more valuable than filthy, emotionally-driven platitudes.
  - hilbert42 6y ago
    You've missed the point. There would be precious few who would deny narcotics to those who really need them. They are often the only effective line of pain relief for severe pain and they are on WHO's list of essential drugs! You seem to have not considered these points: (a) The intrinsic nature of narcotics requires them to be managed with great care. This means the dose has to be accurately titrated sufficient to kill pain and no more or addiction results. These facts have been known by the medical and pharmaceutical industries for over 100 years, also the FDA knew this but seems to have forgotten when it was lobbied. (I'm oversimplifying the facts here but it'll have to do.) (b) Sacklers/Purdue were fully aware that intrinsic nature of narcotics requires them to be managed with great care. As this info is in almost every medical text on the planet that deals with the subject, similarly every pharmacopeia text on the subject. (Check for yourself.) (c) Sacklers/Purdue deliberately ignored these well established medical facts about narcotic addiction so as to proffer from drug sales. They willfully pushed OxyContin use to levels well in excess of that recommended by medical best practice. Thus, it hugely increased the numbers of opiate addicts than there would otherwise have been. (d) As I've said above, many medicos were complicit with Purdue and deserve to lose their license to practice. (e) As I also said above 'before OxyContin, there were any number of narcotic painkilling drugs from those that have to be injected to ones that can be swallowed as a tablet or capsule that are made by more reputable drug companies (and have been for decades). OxyContin didn't offer anything over these earlier drugs.' Doctors, pharmacists and the FDA knew this too, yet they deliberately threw away their Hippocratic Oath and 'mistreated' their patients for a few cheap shekels.
raincom 6y ago
Ruling institutions collude with the powerful and the uber wealthy. The way this happens in through layers of indirection: ex-DOJ prosecutors as partners at big law firms, revolving door, etc. The rule of law is for everyone else.
lumberjack 6y ago
What I find interesting is how the story is framed. In particular why do articles about corruption in the US (and other first world countries), never feature the word "corruption" explicitly? It is implied that there is corruption but it is never explicitly stated. If this article was about some less developed country, the word would appear endlessly throughout the text. Seems like western journalists have bias when it comes to using that word.
- fedorareis 6y ago
  My guess is to avoid risk of defamation lawsuits. I know in the states a lot of publications are careful how the phrase things to avoid even the risk of a lawsuit regardless of if it would be a legitimate claim.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  The oligarchs who own the media companies don't want to offend their friends.

throwaway7281 6y ago

Can someone enlighten me on the psychological wiring of people like these? Do you even think a moment about anything else than you very own well-being, no matter the (societal) costs? Is your relation to the world a purely instrumental one? Where does this destructive energy comes from?

wilde 6y ago
Few people play the villain in their own story. More likely they thought they were helping people with chronic pain and justified it by thinking that “more good than harm comes of it”. Plenty of people on this site are employed in work with large negative externalities with similar justifications. We just haven’t had the 20 years to see the outcomes yet.
- d4mi3n 6y ago
  There's also a cruel irony in the fact that addiction has very negative impacts on folk's self esteem. One of the negative cycles in addiction is when someone does become the villain in their own story. It's heart breaking to talk to a loved one suffering from addiction and hearing that they think they deserve to have it due to some self-perceived failing. I really wish the U.S. would get it's act together culturally around how addicts are perceived, treated, and helped.
- malandrew 6y ago
  Furthermore, there are many layers between them and where much of the wrongdoing took place, so they may or may not have had any involvement in the "villainy". Perverse unintentional incentives at one more places in the stack are more than sufficient to create the appearance of villainy without any intentional malice. Hanlon's Razor is far more common than people want to admit. In this story, doctors are looking for easy solutions they can prescribe in 5-15 minute appointments so they can see as many patients in a day. Management is looking to increase sales. Account managers are trying to get doctor's to prescribe. The only "villainy" at the board/shareholder level could be as simple as tasking management with finding other legitimate well meaning use cases for opioids. That incentive alone is enough to create pressure all the way down the stack and when people in the stack are presented with the challenge of meeting goals, all of them in concert making small compromises within their role are enough to produce the illusion of villainy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

justinclift 6y ago

https://archive.vn/PwCLw https://archive.vn/PwCLw

Igelau 6y ago

What is a 'white-shoe fixer'? I've never heard this term before and it sounds strangely racially charged.

ForHackernews 6y ago
It's not racially tinged (except inasmuch as all forms of elite society have been historically closed to racial minorities until quite recently), but a "white-shoe"[0] law or accountancy firm refers to the companies that make up the very crème de la crème of those industries. These are firms staffed by wealthy and well-connected Ivy League graduates who provide services to help even wealthier and better-connected Ivy League graduates get what they want and make and keep enormous amounts of money. The name comes from a certain style of shoes that used to be fashionable among a certain class. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-shoe_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-shoe_firm
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  I mean. If these shoes are white, then they are made of white people skin.
  - dang 6y ago
    Good grief. Can you please stop posting ideological (and worse, race war) flamebait to HN? It's not what this site is for. Worse, it wrecks what it is for, so we have to ban accounts that keep doing it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  The term specifically indicates members of firms so privileged that they never have to negotiate city streets filled with mud and horse shit so they can wear white shoes or spats that are always clean.
- Igelau 6y ago
  Thanks. A google search for "white shoe fixer" was only returning glue and polish for shoes. Given the derogatory Ivy League sense of the term, it's a funny one for the author to use. Keefe attended Columbia, Cambridge, London School of Economics, and got a JD from Yale. Those white shoes you can see from space! His 'Wind of Change' podcast was good stuff.

kevmo 6y ago

The fact that the Sacklers are going to get to keep the billions harvested by ruining the lives of tens of millions of Americans bespeaks a morally bankrupt civil society. The Sackler family literally belongs in prison. Instead, they're going to use their billions to control politicians and ruin countless more lives. The sanctioning of "white collar" criminality is a major component in the USA government's increasing loss of legitimacy.

sneak 6y ago
> The fact that the Sacklers are going to get to keep the billions harvested by ruining the lives of tens of millions of Americans bespeaks a morally bankrupt civil society. Selling opiate pills isn't the reason those lives were ruined, any more than selling gasoline is the reason that the climate is changing. Opiates must be put into a body and swallowed to do any harm, and the Sacklers didn't have any involvement whatsoever in that.
- bepvte 6y ago
  Read the linked new yorker article at the bottom of this one to see how they played a direct critical role in getting doctors to perscribe them for minor pain.
  - sneak 6y ago
    A doctor prescribing them and someone ingesting them are different acts. One does not harm anyone, and is just writing on a piece of paper. The other is extremely dangerous.
    - bepvte 6y ago
      We generally trust doctors to give us medications and advice that help us, and ingest what they prescribe.
      - sneak 6y ago
        The fact remains that the ultimate responsibility for what goes into the body of a functioning adult who is not coerced in any way lies solely with that adult. We fault the individual when they don't take their medicine. Why do we fault their physician when they do? State licensing has confused the issue and made most people misplace the "authority" in this chain of events. Your doctor is NOT the authority on what goes into your body: you are.

ffggvv 6y ago

how can one think both of these things: 1. drugs should be legal 2. the sacklers are evil

pdeffebach 6y ago
Notions of consent are different. You do what the doctor tells you, and its an enormous ethical violation to recommend drugs without revealing the way you personally gain from it, or to encourage people to recommend drugs that are not medically necessary. With legalized drugs there isn't this trusted arbiter telling you what to do, so you can consent easier when you buy and take them. I agree that it's fraught and there are tons of ethical parallels that need to be worked out but that's one reason.
- sneak 6y ago
  It's sort of amazing that the reason we have these licensed people who are supposed to be "trusted" to give good instructions is because of the system of prohibition on the sale of drugs by the unlicensed. The argument is, of course, that by restricting the distribution to licensed professionals, the abuse of dangerous drugs would be curbed because the trade would be restricted to to those trained in their safe use. We have the worst of both worlds. This is all a result of prohibition.
abtom 6y ago
Because there's a difference between consuming something willingly and a shady corporation conspiring with the system to get unsuspecting people hooked onto their drug of choice for personal benefit?
- ffggvv 6y ago
  you don’t think of heroin is legalized, there will be corporations conspiring to do the same?
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    Not if it's legal for the addict (because mental health issue not criminal), but a crime for the pusher/distributor (because you're taking advantage of those w/ addiction tendencies).

golemotron 6y ago

This should not be a surprise to anyone who understands the purpose of the corporation. It is to create a legal entity that shields owners from liability. See _The Corporation_ by Joel Bakan for details. The answer isn't "get mad at the Sacklers", it's change the law.

ves 6y ago
Well, getting mad at the Sacklers may not be productive, but it’s certainly merited.
- golemotron 6y ago
  But inconsequential compared to changing the law.
cainxinth 6y ago
We can do both
- blackflame7000 6y ago
  No we can't because their medication also helped a lot of people in addition to the abusers that make it difficult for everyone else to get treatment.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tlrobinson 6y ago
    Roughly half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses since 1998 [1]. I don’t know how many can be directly attributed to OxyContin, but other drugs are pulled from the market over a tiny fraction of that number of deaths or less serious side effects. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/prescription-drug-overdose/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/prescription-drug-overdo...

eigenvalue 6y ago

It's facile and wrong to think of Oxycontin as an unmitigated evil in society. What about all the people who were diagnosed with terminal cancer and were suffering from unimaginable pain? It doesn't matter if you will get a crippling addiction if you're going to be dead in 8 months anyway. From what I've read, Oxycontin was the first available drug that could be easily administered at home once or twice a day and gave meaningful pain relief even for the worst pain. The drug may well have made bearable the last months of millions of people.

bombela 6y ago
Yes. But do you need to market that to anybody with a headache?
GordonS 6y ago
> From what I've read, Oxycontin was the first available drug that could be easily administered at home once or twice a day There are other opioids with extended release formulas, including morphine - they are nothing new. One of the major problems with OxyContin was that they lied about how long the effects lasted. From memory, they claimed up to 12 hours, and insisted you shouldn't take it more than twice a day. This turned out to be BS, with patients reporting it lasted for 6-8 hours max - just the same as other extended-release opioid formulations.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
  That wasn't a lie. Tolerance is an issue with any narcotic medicine - from amphetamines to opiates. Many patients, whether they take Oxycontin or Vyvanse, will eventually complain that their tolerance will make that claim untrue. It doesn't mean the chemical isn't in their system.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Tolerance is a separate issue than the one I brought up. The issue of lying about the length of action is not related to tolerance - even patients new to OxyContin complained. I was prescribed OxyContin myself for a while, and know very well that it only works around 6 hours for me, just the same as other ER opioids.

hilbert42 6y ago

How can this possibly happen unless the administration of justice is totally corrupt? It can't and the system is corrupt in more ways than one. The Sacklers and their company Purdue are parasites on our society. The trouble is that government administrations around the world have been complicit or Sacklers couldn't have gotten away with doing what they have done. The fact is that modern medicine has known about the true dangers of narcotics in a reasonably extensive way since the 1860s Civil War, as this was the first time that both 'refined' narcotics and the hypodermic needle were used in combination in a big way. The consequence was that thousands of injured Civil War veterans became severely addicted to the over administrations of laudanum/morphine (it's the classic case historically). By the turn of the 20th Century the narcotics problem was well known around the world and by the end of the first half of the 20th C. international treaties on narcotics were in place and they'd been revised many times. Not remembering the details I've just checked and I offer this quote from Encyclopaedia Britannica on its page on the History of Drug Control: 'In 1909 U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt proposed an international investigation of the opium problem; a meeting of 13 nations held in Shanghai in the same year resulted in recommendations that formed the basis of the first opium convention held at The Hague in 1912. Ratification of the Hague Convention occurred during the meetings of 1913 and 1914. Although further regulatory activity was suspended during the course of World War I, ratification of the Versailles peace treaties of 1919–20 also constituted a ratification of the Hague Convention of 1912. The League of Nations was then given responsibility to supervise agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs.' https://www.britannica.com/topic/drug-use/History-of-drug-control https://www.britannica.com/topic/drug-use/History-of-drug-co... If you read on, you'll see there were many revisions of the drug treaties between WWI and 1950. You don't have to be a medico or in drug regulation to know narcotics are regulated by international treaty for a very good reason, yet in recent years governments around the world have acted as if these treaties (and their own narcotics laws) never existed. Funny isn't it, if I or any of we individuals had smuggled heroin across almost any border of any country and we were caught then we'd be locked up for decades, or in some countries, we'd even be executed as they've death penalty for smuggling narcotics. So how in fucking Hell's name did various governments let these corporate 'pharmaceutical'—drug-peddling corporate cowboys/sleazebags even operate given the history of drug regulation and past and present law—let alone push so much dope to so many for so long? Furthermore, what were all those doctors who prescribed the drugs doing? What on earth was going on in their minds? I am not a medico and even I (as do most of us) know the scripts these doctors were issuing like confetti would lead to serious addiction. As I see it, our governments and their regulating authorities like the FDA are so fucked-up by corporate influence and lobbying that nothing works in the interest of the citizenry anymore, essentially our democracies are stuffed! There cannot be any other possible reason, especially so when even the doctors are deliberately ignoring a central and fundamental tenet of their medical training. We ought to be out on the streets demonstrating over this. There's no way the Sackler family and Purdue should get any concessions over this matter whatsoever—nor should any deal be done with them. Their actions of deliberately pushing their narcotic OxyContin to the extent that patient addition was inevitable makes them fully culpable. Nothing short of them being locked up ought to suffice.

ncmncm 6y ago

Title should have said "scheme".

tinktank 6y ago

As a peon individual, I find it incredibly hard (and it gets harder every day) to live an honest, kind and compassionate life when I see this sort of thing happening. I am influenced not by greed or power, but by the view that if I'm not defensive with regards to myself and those that I hold dear, I will be consumed by a combination of the corporate and legislative entities conspiring to make me (and everyone like me) a peon to their desire.