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Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

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Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#181

Post by SoftTalker »

alan-hn wrote: post #42
SoftTalker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are doctors so easy to manipulate? They learn about addiction in medical school. Why would they believe a pharmaceutical company saying "...oh but this opioid is not addictive..."

Because physicians don't get much if any training in evaluating evidence and research, they generally believe what they're told by scientists. Which is a shame, they should be taught critical evaluation of literature They also don't have time because of the artificial limits of physicians graduating every year, combined with more bureaucracy being pushed on them day by day

> physicians don't get much if any training in evaluating evidence and research

I find this surprising, if true.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#182

Post by ein0p »

lupusreal wrote: post #162
ein0p wrote: post #129

There will be people like Sacklers until we start putting them away and throwing away the key. We do need to put rich people in jail at least every now and again, if for no other reason than to demonstrate we're not a banana republic.

[flagged]

They’ve knowingly killed a ton of people. That’s not a “political point”, and it’s really well established

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#183

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ben7799 wrote: post #98
thetinymite wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't argue against the Supreme Court being a political institution. However, I do think the court is more nuanced than popular opinion realizes. The article below shows a nice graphic of how often justices rule together on non-unanimous decisions. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/02/supreme-co...

That's really interesting, because it shows even the most liberal and most conservative justices still are in agreement the majority of the time. Just reading news articles I would never have thought Sotomayor and Alito ruled the same 63% of the time.

I weirdly track SCOTUS opinions. Most of them are incredibly technical.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#184

Post by poopbreath5000 »

legitster wrote: post #120

This is a more complex case than I thought, and the dissent argument is actually very powerful and convincing: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-124_8nk0.pdf Basically, the original judge did a good job - the settlement plan was reasonable and widely popular. And the Sackler family being released from liability by putting billions of personal dollars into the payment fund meant more victims would get mor…

It's really not that complex. The question is NOT whether the plan was a good idea or reasonable. The question was whether the Bankruptcy Code authorized the bankruptcy judge to approve the plan. It doesn't. It's really not more complex than that.

Courts cannot legislate from the bench. Why not? Because the Constitution says so; i.e., Congress gets to say what the statutes say, while the Judiciary gets to say what the Constitutions says. That's the balance of power under the Constitution.

To me...the waaaaaaay bigger and more intriguing thing is: the story underlying this split 5-4 decision.

I mean this spit the "right" justices and the "left" justices. J Jackson came out of nowhere and sided with four "right" justices. Like, what?

Also, I can't for the life of me understand how J Sotomayor and J Kagan could ever come to the conclusion that this sweetheart deal for rich billionaires, who made their money killing $247k humans, was a good idea and totally fine. Again, what? But no the efficacy of the deal doesn't legally matter and is irrelevant.

Nevertheless, we don't know that the victims will be harmed by this decision. However, we DO KNOW that the rich billionaires would have benefited if this decision went the other way.

Remember that.

There's gotta be a Pulitzer worthy story behind this split.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#185

Post by alan-hn »

SoftTalker wrote: post #181
alan-hn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because physicians don't get much if any training in evaluating evidence and research, they generally believe what they're told by scientists. Which is a shame, they should be taught critical evaluation of literature They also don't have time because of the artificial limits of physicians graduating every year, combined with more bureaucracy being pushed on them day by day

> physicians don't get much if any training in evaluating evidence and research I find this surprising, if true.

Well I work at med school, grad students get far more training on research, med students can take an optional research elective. This elective isn't a formal course either, what happens is a med student comes to our lab and we put them on a small project as an assistant doing data analysis or a simple experiment. They don't get formally taught how to evaluate research

You have to remember med students are training to be clinicians not researchers. They have to diagnose and treat patients based on information taught to them by clinicians and basic scientists

This is also why it annoys me when lay people refer to the opinions of physicians on some new research that just came out, like with covid stuff. They are not research experts, they're clinicians. They treat people and make diagnoses

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#186

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

BoredPositron wrote: post #170
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't commend on that. I commented on you replying "no" to the question "If your boss tells you you'll lose your job if you don't have sex with him, and you quit to avoid that, would you disagree with the statement that you were forced to quit?" after which you edited all your previous comments. The first of which originally just read "force?" (a single word) which leads me to believe, along with your original res…

I edited my first comment to clarify and nothing else and YOU commented on that. We can throw dictionaries on each other however we want for me it still stands as long as you have agency over yourself nobody can force you to do anything. If they take away your agency we can talk about your arguments. But looking at your last comment you are not arguing in good faith so the discussion is over me.

>I edited my first comment to clarify and nothing else

You edited "No, words have meanings" to "No, words have specific meanings that should accurately reflect the nuances of the situation at hand." You also edited "So?" (single word) to 'So? "Force to trust" like op wrote made absolutely no sense.'

>for me it still stands as long as you have agency over yourself nobody can force you to do anything.

It can and often does mean that though. Here's a list of 170,000 books using the phrase "forced to trust"

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22forced+to+trust%2...

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#187

Post by rootusrootus »

I could see shielding from future civil liability as an option, but only after a true bankruptcy has occurred. Liquidate everything, and by that I mean everything, and then you can move on with your life. Definitely no shielding money in offshore accounts.

If you're not willing to do that ... well, see you in court. Over and over, because every individual you hurt should have a chance to come at you with a liability claim.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#188

Post by JumpCrisscross »

legitster wrote: post #177
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get all of the billions back They never gave up any cash to my knowledge. The plan was a promise. We can conclude the Sacklers are worse off right now given they (and the creditors) accepted the deal. They may be materially better off in the future. But the rest of their lives will be about this.

??? The Supreme court case was specifically about the $6 billion dollars the Sacklers committed to the bankruptcy fund. And this ruling says they are not allowed to contribute to it.

> Supreme court case was specifically about the $6 billion dollars the Sacklers committed to the bankruptcy fund

Committed, not contributed.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#189

Post by rayiner »

jcranmer wrote: post #80
psunavy03 wrote: post #25

For those claiming the Supreme Court is a political institution, I'd like to note that this was indeed a 5-4 decision. But one with Justices in the majority who were appointed by Biden, Trump, Bush 43, and Bush 41, and in the minority who were appointed by Bush 43, Obama, and Trump. It was Jackson, Gorsuch, Barrett, Alito, and Thomas in the majority and Sotomayor, Kagan, Roberts, and Kavanaugh in the minority.

Four decisions were released today. We had a decision on the SEC vacating some of its enforcement powers, 6-3 with only the 3 liberal justices dissenting. We had this decision, which was 5-4, although it wasn't a clear ideological split. We had a 5-4 decision vacating an EPA regulation, with the 3 liberal justices and one of the more moderate conservative justices dissenting. We had a 6-3 decision on the EMTALA-abort…

Politicization and ideological polarization are two different things. Take Dobbs for example. That was an ideologically polarized decision, not a political one. Roe is the product of a judicial philosophy that conservatives think is fundamentally wrong, even if they don't oppose abortion. For half a century, conservatives were unified in saying they would overturn Roe, even though--as we have seen subsequently--there was a lot of intra-party conflict about what abortion law should actually be. Dobbs hurt the party that appointed the justices that voted for it. Trump would probably be cruising to the election in 2024 if Biden didn't have that card to play.

Most of the cases you identify split along ideological rather than political lines.

> We had a decision on the SEC vacating some of its enforcement powers, 6-3 with only the 3 liberal justices dissenting.

What the case actually held was that the executive branch imposing fines without a court order violated the Seventh Amendment. It's a separation of powers case, and reflects the same ideological debate about separation of powers that we have had for 100 years. Do you believe that the Constitutional three-branch structure should be respected, or is it obsolete in light of modern society?

> We had a 5-4 decision vacating an EPA regulation, with the 3 liberal justices and one of the more moderate conservative justices dissenting.

This is an executive agency decisionmaking case. Again, same debate we've been having for 100 years.

> We had a 6-3 decision on the EMTALA-abortion decision, with the 3 most conservative justices dissenting.

This was probably the most idiosyncratic and ideological case, but it's not political at all. It's Thomas and Alito willing to die on an ideological hill, not caring that virtually nobody in their party wants to follow them t here.

> Yesterday, we also had a decision on bribery which was 6-3, with the 3 liberal justices dissenting.

It was actually a decision on whether someone could be prosecuted under a bribery statute for a payment he received after taking the official act. Where other parts of federal criminal law make an express distinction between bribery (which corrupt official acts) and gratuities (which create the appearance of corruption but can't directly influence official acts).

This one is probably the most overtly political. Liberals voting to expand the scope of criminal law and conservatives voting to narrow it is weird. But it's worth pointing out that the Court's conservative wing has a strong libertarian streak these days, especially Gorsuch.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#190

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Barraketh wrote: post #83
prepend wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thus, in order to go after the Sackler family's money, you basically have to claw back money that Purdue paid out to the family over the years. Or you can find them personally, directly, criminally liable and their profits the result from a criminal conspiracy. Personal crimes aren’t protected by the “veil” of LLC, so any assets of the family could be liable, after criminal conviction, for any civil claims from vic…

IANAL, but I don't think this would help the victims (and incidentally, that could have still happened even with the settlement). If there were a criminal lawsuit of the Sacklers, and if that lawsuit was successful, the seized money would just go to the justice department. The only way the victims actually see any money is through civil litigation.

> the seized money would just go to the justice department

The DoJ operates victims’ funds [1][2].

[1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/about/crime-victims-fund

[2] https://www.justice.gov/enrd/environmental-crime-victim-assi...

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