3 ms·

While I don't want blame OFF the Sacklers, there's an enormous point there. If society is willing to JUST blame the Sacklers, we're pretty much fucked.

• LanceH 5y ago
  We already saw this play out with the mortgage crises. It was all the banks. It wasn't the Congress pushing banks to get homes to everyone. (requiring things like a job disproportionately impacts my district!) Nevermind the tremendous number of ways Congress could have intervened. It wasn't the fault of the borrowers. No, they are all noble people just struggling to get by on pennies. They weren't buying houses on credit and paying by flipping them on the run-up. Deep down, a lot of people knew they couldn't afford the house, but chose to do it anyway. We saw this play out with cigarettes. The execs get dragged before congress and their performance was certainly ludicrous, but somehow the blame is entirely on them. The result is cigarettes are taxed more. They kill, but are taxed more. So the outrage was used to assign blame so the states could pull in more money. Same thing here as far as I can see. Everyone has enjoyed their cut of the pharma pie, and when blame goes out the state which has been regulating this entire market heavily from top to bottom is blaming someone else and then absolving liability in exchange for money. We really need to stop looking for single points of blame for these things. If it's at the point where we say, "look at the last 20 years how obviously reckless this behavior was" it's well beyond the fault of the person exhibiting that behavior.