Sacklers look likely to get the bankruptcy ruling they sought

Just as I feared, a bankruptcy judge has approved the deal that the odious Sackler family sought that would enable them to preserve and even increase the ill-gotten fortunes that they amassed from aggressively pushing their addictive pain-killers on the public, resulting in massive addiction levels and deaths from overdoses.

A US federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday conditionally approved a sweeping, potentially $10bn plan submitted by the OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to settle a mountain of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades.

Under the settlement reached with creditors including individual victims and thousands of state and local governments, the Sackler family will give up ownership of the company and contribute $4.5bn but will be freed from any future lawsuits over opioids.
[Read more…]

The Sacklers get off easy

The Sackler family has made billions of dollars by pushing doctors to aggressively prescribe the opioids produced by their company Purdue Pharmaceuticals to patients, thus helping cause the passive prescription drug addiction problem that has ranged so many families and communities. They then donated money to universities and other cultural institution that put their name on buildings to enable them to pose as philanthropists.
[Read more…]

John Oliver exposes the Sacklers-again

The Sackler family, the owners of the Purdue Pharma that aggressively marketed the painkiller Oxycontin resulting in an explosive growth in drug addiction, has been dragged into the spotlight and are now the target of multiple lawsuits by states. As a result these highly secretive people, who only allow their names to be public when they put it on buildings as part of their ‘philanthropy’, have been forced to give legal depositions. But their lawyers have aggressively worked to have their video depositions sealed
[Read more…]

Samantha Bee shines light on the Sacklers

I have written repeatedly about the awful Sackler family and how they are hiding behind the veil of philanthropy the ugly fact that they are largely responsible for the opioid crisis through their aggressive and deceptive marketing of the drug OxyContin by Purdue Pharma, the company they own.

So I welcome Samantha Bee dragging their name and their association with the drug epidemic into the spotlight.

The rise and fall of the evil Sackler family and the opioid addiction crisis

I have written multiple times before about the opioid overdoses crisis and the major role in its growth played by the Sackler family and their family-owned company Purdue Pharma. I just finished reading the excellent book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe that carefully reveals the sordid history of the family in creating the crisis, something that the family went to great lengths to conceal from the public. He shows that while other companies also manufactured, distributed, and marketed the opioids that have caused so much suffering and deaths and continues to do so even today, the Sacklers played a special role in creating the crisis.

Drugs obtained from the poppy flower (opium and morphine) had long been known to be powerful in combating pain but were prescribed and used very sparingly because they were known to be highly addictive. They also carried with them social stigmas. Opium was associated with seedy underworld opium dens where people smoked pipes in dreamy semi-conscious states while morphine was a powerful drug that was injected and mainly used to treat incurable pain such as from cancer and was also used as a palliative at the end of life. Both those associations discouraged casual use.

What the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma did was develop and market a drug based on the opiod oxycodone under the brand name OxyContin. They claimed that they had eliminated the addictive aspects of the drug by encasing oxycodone in a coating that allowed the drug to be released slowly over a 12-hour period. They said that this eliminated the immediate highs and the subsequent lows of the drug that led to addiction. Furthermore, the drug could now be delivered in a tablet form, even though it required a prescription, and they made it seem like a mild over-the-counter painkiller like aspirin and acetaminophen. They marketed it with a vengeance to physicians and pharmacists, claiming that it should be the painkiller of choice for even everyday pain like that associated with sprains and arthritis and backache, and used their lobbying clout with the FDA and DEA to avoid close scrutiny of their claims by regulators in those agencies, even though they had little or no data to support those claims.
[Read more…]

Lead and criminality

I have written before about the possible connection between the presence of lead in the environment and violent crime by young men. Much of the evidence is correlational but nonetheless suggestive. What researchers such as Rick Nevin found was that the amount of lead in things like gasoline and paint was phased out at different times in different parts of the world (and in different states in the US) and that crime started to drop about two decades after the drop in blood lead content.

This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. The relationship is characterized by best-fit lags (highest R2 and t-value for blood lead) consistent with neurobehavioral damage in the first year of life and the peak age of offending for index crime, burglary, and violent crime. The impact of blood lead is also evident in age-specific arrest and incarceration trends. Regression analysis of average 1985-1994 murder rates across USA cities suggests that murder could be especially associated with more severe cases of childhood lead poisoning.

Now a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser takes a look at whether exposure to lead in childhood resulted in the creation of serial killers. Fraser notes that notorious serial killers Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway all grew up in the same neighborhood near Tacoma, WA around the same time as her, a location with high lead content, which she uses as a springboard for her support of the lead -crime hypothesis.
[Read more…]

Supreme Court rejects Sackler deal

The US Supreme Court rejected the bankruptcy deal that had been negotiated by the Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharmaceuticals that was responsible for aggressively and falsely marketing opioids to large numbers of doctors and their patients, resulting in the massive opioid epidemic that we currently have in the US that has devastated families and communities. The drug was heavily marketed to doctors as having low risk of addiction, which was not true.

The Sacklers had brought the settlement in front of a friendly bankruptcy judge that effectively shielded much of the vast personal fortunes they had accumulated and instead passed the cost on to the company, which has filed for bankruptcy, on friendly terms, while not having to admit guilt and getting total immunity from future lawsuits that will leave their personal fortunes intact. For more details on why the bankruptcy deal was so bad, see here.
[Read more…]

Some good news about the Sackler bankruptcy case

The Sackler family are a really odious bunch, making enormous amounts of money by having their company Purdue Pharmaceuticals aggressively push the opioid OxyContin that their company made and providing all manner of inducements to doctors to overprescribe them, resulting in the massive opioid drug addiction problem that exists right now in the US. They then posed as philanthropists, giving money to various institutions and having their names plastered all over various buildings in universities and museums and galleries. I have written about the actions of this disgusting family many, many times.

The law finally caught up with them and they were sued and the company subjected to massive fines. But even then, they exploited the bankruptcy laws to shift the burden to the company after siphoning off money to them personally while not having to admit guilt, and getting total immunity from future lawsuits that will leave their personal fortunes intact. They did this by making sure that their bankruptcy case was heard by a bankruptcy judge who is notorious for letting wealthy people off easily.
[Read more…]

Alex Jones files for bankruptcy protection

I wrote earlier about how the net was tightening around this spreader of all manner of false and malicious information, including some that made life a living hell for the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, who were already suffering because of the murder of their children. He was under increasing legal pressure and has now started the process by which rich people, like the Sacklers, try to avoid paying for their behavior, by declaring bankruptcy.
[Read more…]

The holdouts against the Sackler deal

The odious Sackler family that heavily promoted the use of their opioid drugs that has resulted in widespread addiction that led to many deaths and much suffering, have been pushing to have the courts sign off on a deal with state governments where their company Purdue Pharma, which is in bankruptcy, will supposedly pay fines that will go towards drug treatment and rehabilitation. The most noxious part of the deal is that the Sacklers’ ill-gotten personal fortunes will be largely untouched, they will not have to admit guilt, and they will gain immunity from future lawsuits by individuals. In other words, they will escape largely unscathed.

At the end of this month, [a New York] court – the second circuit appeals court in New York – will hear arguments over individual liability releases approved by a bankruptcy court charged with distributing Purdue Pharma’s assets. Those releases, another court found in December, weren’t authorized under the law and the plan was reversed.

But under the terms of the now-vacated deal, the Sacker family would contribute $6bn over 18 years to an opioid settlement trust. It’s a situation that angers Isaacs, and thousands of others, who feel that a measure of corporate responsibility may have been assigned, but Purdue’s decision-maker will never be held to account.

[Read more…]