The U.S. Supreme Court today halted a Purdue Pharma settlement that would have protected the billionaire Sackler family from civil lawsuits related to the opioid crisis.
The Sacklers, who amassed their wealth through the promotion of an addictive and deadly drug, must be perplexed at this turn of events. — Read the rest
Opioids helped kill friends of mine. Even more frustrating is that this is not particularly unique or interesting. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services:
More than 760,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.
Propublica has obtained a tranche of leaked internal communications between the Sackler family's Purdue Pharma, makers of the lethal opioid Oxycontin, and Dezenhall Resources, known as "The Pitbull of Public Relations," whose previous client roster includes Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, Exxon and other "beleaguered corporations," who masterminded a "blame the victim" strategy that apportioned responsibility for Oxycontin's mounting death toll on the people who became addicted to it — not the Sacklers and Purdue, who falsified science, bribed doctors, and made billions from an epidemic that has now claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War.
The Sackler family (previously) made more money than the Rockefellers when their family business, Purdue Pharma, misled the public about the addictiveness of its flagship opioid, Oxycontin, and induced doctors to overprescribe it, kicking off an epidemic that has killed more Americans than the Vietnam war, with the body count at 400,000 and still climbing.
The Sacklers (previously) are a reclusive, super-secretive family of billionaires whose fortune comes from their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Oxycontin, the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic, which has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam war, with the death-toll still mounting.
The Sackler family (previously) is one of the richest in the world, and if you've heard of them, it's probably because their family name adorns so many art galleries, museums, and academic institutions around the world: but they way they got that money is less-well-known.
Have you heard that the National Drug Dealers Consortium is planning on spiking your children's Halloween candy bowl with rainbow-colored fentanyl this year? To hear the local news tell, these evil, mustache-twirling criminals are planning to give away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of illicit painkillers in hopes that a few 8-year-olds might get so hooked on the (genuinely addictive) pills that they start stealing money from their unknowing parents' purses and turn into regular customers for the hustlers. — Read the rest
After a decades-long marriage, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Purdue Pharma's Sackler family are parting ways: the disgraced Sacklers, who have been pushing their highly addictive Oxycontin since 1996, will have their name stripped from all seven of the museum's exhibition spaces. — Read the rest
Nearly 500,000 Americans died from opioids between 1999 and 2019 while the Sackler drug-dealing family enriched itself by illegally pushing addictive Oxycontin on patients.
New York Magazine reports that 15 state attorneys general have agreed to settle lawsuits against Purdue Pharma for its illegal sales practices that caused millions of people to become addicted to OxyContin. — Read the rest
The past two years have seen a tremendous shift in the public perception of capitalism and socialism, the character of philanthropy as reputation-laundry rather than generosity, and the nature of wealth as an indicator of sociopathy, not virtue or cleverness.
The Sackler family are owners of the drug company that caused a devastating drug crisis in the United States by making false claims about the safety of its highly addictive OxyContin. According to an AP story, Mundipharma, a Chinese company owned by the Sackler family is now using the same tactics in China. — Read the rest
In an interview with Bloomberg, Bill Gates dismissed the idea of breakups as a remedy for Big Tech's monopolistic market concentration; Gates said that breaking up an abusive company will just produce more abusive companies. Instead, Gates believes that specific monopolistic activities should be banned.
Purdue Pharma (and its richer-than-the-Rockefellers owners, the Sackler family are increasingly being dragged into state courts to account for their role in the opioid epidemic, which has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not the first state to sue Purdue Pharma, members of the Sackler family (who own the company), and other board members for their role in deliberately seeking to addict people to their powerful opioid Oxycontin, but unlike other states, Massachusetts is conducting the suit in the public eye, targeting a court judgment rather than a quiet settlement with an accompanying gag-order.
Laura Poitras (previously) is the Academy Award-winning director of Citizenfour; she teamed up with the activist group Forensic Archicture (previously), whose incredible combination of data-visualization and documentary filmmaking have made them a potent force for holding war criminals and authoritarians to account: together, they created Triple Chaser, a short documentary that uses novel machine-learning techniques to document the ways in which tear gas and bullets made by companies belonging to "philanthropist" Warren Kanders have been used against civilians to suppress anti-authoritarian movements, and even to murder innocents, including children.
The Sackler family got richer than the Rockefellers by marketing Oxycontin in ways that kickstarted the global opioid epidemic, whose body count continues to rise — more than 200,000 dead in the US alone, which is more Americans than died in the Vietnam war.
Philanthropy is theoretically an expression of generosity and fellow-feeling, but in an increasingly unequal world, charitable giving is a form of reputation laundering for super-rich oligarchs who build their massive fortunes on savage programs of exploitation and immiseration. The idea is that you can paper over the fact that deliberately starting the opioid crisis made you richer than the Rockefellers by having your name plastered all over the world's leading art galleries and museums.
[Addendum 2/20/2020: Following a legal complaint, the Guardian removed its article of 14 June 2019 and apologised to Mrs Peel. We are happy to clarify that Yana Peel is not, and was not, personally involved in the operation or decisions of the regulated Novalpina Capital investment fund, which is managed by her husband Stephen Peel, and others. — Read the rest