Sacklers–who made $11B off opioid crisis–to pay $225M in damages

These cases are damn hard to win. Surprised they even got more than 100 million.

But the legal bill... easily hundreds of million.

Hey, they didn’t force the pill don’t anyone’s mouth!

The Sacklers engaged in unethical behavior to get people hooked on something that made them money. Easy opioid prescriptions created thousands of (mostly) functional addicts who were getting their fix in a high-quality control form via their doctor on a monthly basis. That's bad but that's not an opioid "crisis". You don't get a crisis because of a few evil billionaires. More things have to go wrong. What really turned the opioid problem into a crisis is when the feds cracked down. The doctors had to cut the junkies off or lose their licenses. The junkies predictably switched to the street for their supply with predictably tragic results.

The Sacklers may have done unethical, arguably evil, things to make a buck but there's plenty of blame that should be cast in the direction of other parties here.

I know everybody loves to hate on the Sacklers, but my life was dramatically better when I had access to opioids. Because of the "crisis" it has gotten really difficult to get them, even for people who need them. There are days when it's difficult to do much more than lie in bed in agony, but nobody beyond a small community of other pain sufferers seems to care.

I'm at least grateful for the few good years I did get thanks to opioids, before they became radioactive. I hope some day we can swing the pendulum back toward compassion a bit.

Everybody seems to want politicians and cops (DEA) deciding who should get them and who shouldn't. That may be an impossible mindset to change.