The menace of philanthropists

I have reached such a level of cynicism that now when I hear someone described as a philanthropist, I immediately assume that they must be really awful people who have either got their money by practices that abuse and exploit people or that they are personally abusive to those immediately around them or most likely both, and they are now using their gifts to hide the ugly sources of their wealth or to buy silence. The burden of proof has shifted to them to show that they are not awful people.
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These so-called philanthropists are really ruthless monsters

A new report from ProPublica says that Purdue Pharma, a major manufacturer of opioids such as OxyContin that was founded by the Sackler family, aggressively marketed them in ways that led to addiction and is now also trying to profit from drugs that seek to combat addiction or reverse the effects of overdoses. In other words, they want to benefit both ways from addiction, first by causing it and then selling treatments for the problem that they continue to cause. This information came from a filing in a case against the company
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Some pharmaceutical companies are just “drug dealers in lab coats”

Like with many other public health crises, the opioid epidemic is frequently thought of as having just somehow happened, the result of a confluence of unintended consequences for which no single individual or corporation is really at fault but that must now be dealt with collectively. But journalist Christopher Glazek in a long article in Esquire magazine, traces how the secretive Sackler family, through their private company called Purdue Pharma in the US and Napp Pharmaceuticals in the UK that invented OxyContin, downplayed the risks of addiction and exploited doctors’ confusion over the drug’s strength and, helped create the opioid crisis. What they did was take the drug and market it as the salve for a wide array of problems, the same strategy they had used earlier to make Valium a huge marketing success.
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