How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#41

Post by spaetzleesser » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #17

save_ferris wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but this is so naive. They were billionaires yesterday and they’re going to be billionaires tomorrow. Their reputation is going to be fine because we live in a society that absolutely worships money and those who have it. People with that kind of money can pay to scrub the internet.

> People with that kind of money can pay to scrub the internet. I'm sorry but this is so naive. Maybe true if you've got a bit of money and a little bit of notoriety, but I don't think that it would be possible to dissociate the Sacklers' name from the opioid crisis anytime soon.

Wait a few years, let them put their names on some charitable foundations and giving away a small or large percentage of their gains and they will have stellar reputations. Worked for Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, Michael Milken and many others.

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#42

Post by geodel » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

dvduval wrote: post #31

aronpye wrote: post #15

Paywall, didn’t read

Me either. Imagine a world where the poor have no news access, and instead depend on Facebook for news.

I am trying to imagine a world where everyone think they should get for free other persons' labor. I wonder what that thing is called.

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#43

Post by spaetzleesser » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

songshu wrote: post #13

I never understand why doctors are not blamed for prescribing these. Are doctors not supposed to be responsible for prescriptions? If they are not, should we stop allowing them to prescribe? Why don’t doctors unions throw out members who would claim to have been hoodwinked by pharmaceutical companies?

Most organizations are not good at throwing out members that do bad things. Usually they are set up to be defensive no matter what. Looked at police unions who protect bad cops, judges (there was something on Reuter’s about judge misconduct) and doctors (it takes forever and many injured people to get bad surgeons banned). It would be grwat these organizations had higher standards for their members but they don’t.

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#44

Post by spaetzleesser » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #20

songshu wrote: post #13

I never understand why doctors are not blamed for prescribing these. Are doctors not supposed to be responsible for prescriptions? If they are not, should we stop allowing them to prescribe? Why don’t doctors unions throw out members who would claim to have been hoodwinked by pharmaceutical companies?

Why blame doctors when the makers of OxyContin told Congress for years that it was safe and non-addictive. It's a systemic issue with various actors/stakeholders whom all are partially to blame in various capacities.

Both should be blamed. There were plenty of doctors who noticed that the OxyContin promises didn’t work out but they kept prescribing anyway.

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#45

Post by treefish » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

songshu wrote: post #35

blendergeek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don’t doctors unions throw out members who would claim to have been hoodwinked by pharmaceutical companies? If the companies are lying about safety, how are the doctors supposed to know? The only ones with the data necessary to know the dangers of these drugs are the manufacturers and the manufacturers were lying and covering up the dangers.

They are supposed to have learned about it in medical school. If not, that's fine, maybe doctors shouldn't be allowed to prescribe and maybe only pharmacists should be allowed. My point is that it's a very valuable professional quality and we should put the responsibility where the quality is.

Doctors who were prescribing medicine at the time that OxyContin hit the market were not in medical school, they had graduated already. If pharma lies about safety there is no way for a doctor to know unless they conduct their own study, which would require lots of extra time and massive funding. Pharmacists didn't know that the safety data was fudged either. Everyone got their oxycontin from a pharmacist after a doctor prescribed it, so having a pharmacist be the only one allowed to prescribe it wouldn't have changed anything.

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#46

Post by stefan_ » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36

cultus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the money is diffucult to recover by being tied up in byzantine arrangements of LLCs and overseas accounts. That's generally how the rich avoid paying taxes as well. We have due process for the privileged. Tell all of the poor defendants who have been held in Rikers for over a year without a trial that they have due process.

> Much of the money is diffucult to recover by being tied up in byzantine arrangements of LLCs and overseas accounts Yet this reporter was able to assemble the trail from court documents. For every person creating Byzantine structures there are several adept at untangling them. > Tell all of the poor defendants who have been held in Rikers for over a year without a trial Not arguing that they aren’t getting an advant…

"search warrant sacklers" 0 results

It's hard to make a case for something being prosecuted in good faith if there is never any attempt at using the tools that are otherwise so vastly abused in prosecuting the most meaningless "crimes".

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#47

Post by colmvp » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

geodel wrote: post #42

dvduval wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me either. Imagine a world where the poor have no news access, and instead depend on Facebook for news.

I am trying to imagine a world where everyone think they should get for free other persons' labor. I wonder what that thing is called.

For some reason people online think writers and journalists are paid in Likes/Retweets

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#48

Post by wil421 » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

songshu wrote: post #35

blendergeek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don’t doctors unions throw out members who would claim to have been hoodwinked by pharmaceutical companies? If the companies are lying about safety, how are the doctors supposed to know? The only ones with the data necessary to know the dangers of these drugs are the manufacturers and the manufacturers were lying and covering up the dangers.

They are supposed to have learned about it in medical school. If not, that's fine, maybe doctors shouldn't be allowed to prescribe and maybe only pharmacists should be allowed. My point is that it's a very valuable professional quality and we should put the responsibility where the quality is.

Before a doctor gets a new drug it should’ve been approved by a government agency and gone through trails. The company selling it trains doctors on its use and side affects. The problem is the company was lying and telling half truths. Not only that they pushed use cases where something as strong as Oxy was not needed.

Pill mill doctors are a different story and they are prosecuted for it.

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#49

Post by scottlocklin » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

save_ferris wrote: post #11

lordnacho wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget, there is also a reputation system. It should be made clear that whatever the justice system decides, much of their wealth has derived from an activity that was net negative for humanity. And yes, I have heard that PR companies exist to clean up reputations, but it should be possible to at least make it clear what happened. I think I read somewhere that a hedge fund had decided not to take an allocation…

I’m sorry but this is so naive. They were billionaires yesterday and they’re going to be billionaires tomorrow. Their reputation is going to be fine because we live in a society that absolutely worships money and those who have it. People with that kind of money can pay to scrub the internet.

Most billionaires haven't created a genocidal drug plague in America. Those who have should be at the very least shunned socially if we can't muster up a way of bankrupting them and throwing them in prison. I see the devastation of this all around me; this isn't some minor oopsie that resulted in a large fortune -it was the deliberate poisoning of large swathes of the country for profit.

You should make people aware of it when they invite you to events or places with their name on it. I've seen people call out Jeff Dean for inviting people to some Sackler named event; he seemed pretty horrified as well he should be.

Re: How the Sacklers shifted $10.8B of an opioid fortune built on OxyContin

#50

Post by vanderZwan » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

songshu wrote: post #35

blendergeek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don’t doctors unions throw out members who would claim to have been hoodwinked by pharmaceutical companies? If the companies are lying about safety, how are the doctors supposed to know? The only ones with the data necessary to know the dangers of these drugs are the manufacturers and the manufacturers were lying and covering up the dangers.

They are supposed to have learned about it in medical school. If not, that's fine, maybe doctors shouldn't be allowed to prescribe and maybe only pharmacists should be allowed. My point is that it's a very valuable professional quality and we should put the responsibility where the quality is.

This is (well, was) a new drug. Doctors cannot have learned about a drug in medical school when that drug did not exist when they were studying.

My parents are retired Dutch GPs who also ran a small pharmacy[0], so I know a little about how this works, at least in the Netherlands (I admit that this is a pretty big caveat, because (aside from the obvious biases that this introduces) the opioid crisis doesn't exist here - it seems to be a US-only thing. On the other hand, that only gives me more reason to suspect that the problem is systemic, not something to be blamed on individual doctors).

Every year doctors (or any other medical professional as well) have to attend a mandatory amount of lessons to update their knowledge of recent developments in their medical field. In my parents case this also was true for pharmaceutical knowledge. This is where they learn about new medications and their usage. So yeah, they do in fact learn which drug is supposedly safe to prescribe under which circumstances. But you know what is required for all of that to work? An authoritative source of trustworthy information on drug use.

Doctors only start prescribing a drug after it has been approved by the relevant governmental bodies for their usage. So if OxyContin got through the FDA, and was marked as safe for the usage it was advertised for, then I do not understand why you suggest that it's the fault of doctors that they prescribed it in those cases.

Sure, there might have been some stories going around that this drug might not be quite as safe as claimed, but keep in mind that at any given moment hundreds of quack medicine scaremongering stories are making the rounds. When given a choice between believing those, or the official body that is supposed to verify which drugs are safe or not, doctors will usually pick the latter, and in most cases rightly so.

[0] in the Netherlands this is relatively common in small countryside villages that are too small to sustain a pharmacist, who typically needs at least 5000 clients to be sustainable