71–80 of 211 posts
This is AKA the body broker model. There was a discussion about it on HN not too long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024185
Report body brokers: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f13909.pdf
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Because in US money speaks: Between 2006 and 2015, Purdue and other painkiller producers, along with their associated nonprofits, spent nearly nine hundred million dollars on lobbying and political contributions—eight times what the gun lobby spent during that period. And the revolving door: He had also enlisted Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and his associate Bernard Kerik to preëmpt any government…
Not exactly. If money speaks than the cannabis would be generally accessible in every state because it brings in huge amount of tax to government and income for companies.
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I'm not so sure Capitalism is the correct term for this (it's the most misused "'ism"). If there was a free market for drugs (legalization), I suspect we would not be in a crisis.
Yes. I think a better term here might be corporate personhood , where corporations have some of the rights that people have while shielding their owners from liability.
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The family are all Democrats. That isn't the sole reason, but if you compare the "shadowy financier" tone of many stories about right-of-center families to the stories about opioids, you'll see that the "shadowiness" component of the reporting suddenly disappears.
What bothers me is that this can be interpreted as a "New York thing", to quote Lorne Michaels, and I don't like going down that road.
EDIT: I googled it, I see where you're going with that...
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The family are all Democrats. That isn't the sole reason, but if you compare the "shadowy financier" tone of many stories about right-of-center families to the stories about opioids, you'll see that the "shadowiness" component of the reporting suddenly disappears.
This seems objectively false after even a brief cursory search and I'm curious as to why you think it has anything to do with this topic.
The reason it matters is that political clout and general goodwill helps shield them from legislative action and judicial inquiry.
Capitalism is sinister like this. It doesn't intentionally do it, because capitalism isn't a person, but when everything is monetized by our creative entrepreneurs, it grows; our problems being no exception. Once someone makes money, they want more of it. Capitalism demands more of it. And we stretch every line of the law, even cross it, just to get more from where that came from. Unfortunately one person suppressing…
> Unfortunately one person suppressing their unethical behavior is inconsequential. If an opportunity exists, eventually someone will use it. This isn't solely a feature of capitalism. Any system is going to devolve into the strong eating the weak unless the strong identify with and have solidarity with the weak. I have recently become much more willing to listen to ethno-nationalists of all ethnoses based on this re…
(Indeed, the ironically-pan-nationalist ethno-nationalism of today is largely foreign to America and is opposed to the consensus of American nationalism developed during and after WW2 and on into the civil rights era... Of course this is a thing that hasn't been entirely resolved.)
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I'm not so sure Capitalism is the correct term for this (it's the most misused "'ism"). If there was a free market for drugs (legalization), I suspect we would not be in a crisis.
"If there was a free market for drugs (legalization), I suspect we would not be in a crisis." If not in direct crisis we'd always be on the knife's edge of one.
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Because what they sell isnt on the schedual and does have medical use. Hate opiods addiction and overprescription, but dont forget that these things have a place.
Absolutely yes. We don't want to go back to a world without drugs for chronic and severe pain. For all the hoopla around the addiction problem, we must never forget there are real people who need these things. With some of the treatment options, as I understand it, it's even possible to be an addict and a functioning member of society. I start worrying in public discussions when people ascribe too much good or evil t…
Absolutely. Unfortunately it's often very hard to get good treatment options. A close friend of mine has to travel 45 minutes each way, each day, to get to a clinic where she pays $20 each day.
...and she's fortunate that she was able to get a spot there after spending months buying suboxone from other addicts because she couldn't get a doctor to prescribe it because doctors are constrained on how many prescriptions they can write.
When you're poor and have no reliable transportation, that's a brutal way to live. Falling into addiction is easy, and often you never truly escape.
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I'm not so sure Capitalism is the correct term for this (it's the most misused "'ism"). If there was a free market for drugs (legalization), I suspect we would not be in a crisis.
> it's the most misused "'ism" Right up there with socialism, ironically. There needs to be a trendier name for regulatory capture.