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Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#381

Post by s1artibartfast »

richwater wrote: post #327
s1artibartfast wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case and settlement has almost nothing to do with solving the problem at a societal level, with either outcome being negligible. Real progress would involve systemic changes to the treatment and causes of drug addiction, as well as medical treatment philosophy. To hang the opioid epidemic on perdue is a gross oversimplification, essentially a scapegoating of a multifactorial problem. Perdue sold the same pills in…

> To hang the opioid epidemic on perdue is a gross oversimplification The only sane comment here. It's laughably ridiculous to call for retribution against a single family as if they were personally responsible for every overdose the country has seen.

I don't excuse their unethical and potentially criminal behavior, but I do think they way people talk about it is detached from reality. The corporate choices likely had some effect on the margin, but I dont think the appropriate disclosure around addiction potential and would have moved the needle much.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#382

Post by ygjb »

richwater wrote: post #312
hyeonwho4 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EPA values one human life at $10M. A conservative estimate of the number of people killed by the Sackler family's companies (testified in court) was ~~245,000~~ Edit: probably at least 100,000, see below. So if opiates were environmental pollutants, the Sacklers would be on the hook for $1T in damages. Their immediate settlement was $6B. Roughly three orders of magnitude too small.

Attributing every single opioid overdose to solely the Sackler family is so laughably ludicrous it's hard to take this comment seriously.

ok, so now you are just arguing percentages. What is an appropriate amount of the harm to be apportioned to the Sackler family?

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#383

Post by standardUser »

legitster wrote: post #179

I find the Supreme court decisions to be fascinating reads and overall much more interesting and complicated than most news services make them out to be.

I studied international politics in college and as a result I read not only a ton of news, but often the primary sources they were based on, and I was shocked by the amount of omissions and oversimplifications. I've never understood people who don't "trust" the news given that it is provably accurate and factual nearly all of the time. But I've long despised the arrogance from mainstream media wherein they confidently decide what to print and what not to print with no explanation or accountability on those decisions.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#384

Post by hyeonwho4 »

richwater wrote: post #312
hyeonwho4 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EPA values one human life at $10M. A conservative estimate of the number of people killed by the Sackler family's companies (testified in court) was ~~245,000~~ Edit: probably at least 100,000, see below. So if opiates were environmental pollutants, the Sacklers would be on the hook for $1T in damages. Their immediate settlement was $6B. Roughly three orders of magnitude too small.

Attributing every single opioid overdose to solely the Sackler family is so laughably ludicrous it's hard to take this comment seriously.

The number of opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2021 was 645,000, according to CDC. Purdue Pharma brought in $35B in OxyContin revenue from 1995 to 2017. OxyContin was prescribed to 6.2 million people in 2002.

I'll edit the number above to ~100,000 as an estimate of the number of victims, since it looks like I misremembered 645,000 as the number of Purdue-related deaths. Still, that's assuming only 1.6% of those 6.2 million people taking OxyContin in 2002 developed an addiction, which seems low.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#385

Post by lesuorac »

legitster wrote: post #330
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$6 billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's also just half of what they profited from what was effectively mass murder. Is that really something you want to let people buy their way out of for less than they profited?

Think of it this way - if you found out your great-grand-uncle was a Nazi official, and that the house you grew up in or the favorable college you got into or whatever lifestyle you had growing up was initially partly funded by his misdeeds? Could your assets be targeted by descendants of the victims and you personally be made bankrupt? That's a bit of an exaggeration, but a lot of the wealth of the Sackler family is…

I don't think "partly funded by his misdeeds" is an accurate description.

Members of the Sackler family ran Perdue Pharma and they aren't dead. Sure, a relative of the Perdue Pharma executives should be off limit for liability. But there's still plenty of actual executives that should be held accountable.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#386

Post by suslik »

michael_vo wrote: post #326
Mistletoe wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I have been prescribed opioids many times and I just take them as prescribed and they help the pain of the surgery or whatever. I don’t even take the whole bottle. What will replace the opioids if we don’t allow them to be prescribed?

Could you have recovered without pain killers? Or maybe used a pain killer that is much weaker that doesn't kill all the pain but is much safer like marijuana? Are there scientific studies that shows that opioids help patients recover quicker?

Why is this question important? The primary purpose of pain medication is not to facilitate recovery, but to reduce suffering and increase quality of life.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#387

Post by monetus »

doublet00th wrote: post #308
shawndrost wrote: post #280

I understand people who think the Sacklers are villains who destroyed lives, Purdue should be shut down, and we should transform the legal regime around opioids. I understand people who think Purdue should continue, the status quo is OK, and the Sacklers are not [simply] villainous. I don't understand people who think the Sacklers are villains who destroyed lives, but Purdue should continue operating more-or-less as-…

I think there's a misunderstanding in what the settlement is about. As part of Purdue's bankruptcy, the Sackler family is voluntarily providing 6 billion dollars to help settle claims opioid victims have brought against Purdue Pharma. As a condition to provide the 6 billion dollars, the Sackler family has asked the bankruptcy judge to not even allow any new suits against the Sacklers related to the Opioid epidemic. T…

https://archive.ph/Co2A1

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#388

Post by alan-hn »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #292
alan-hn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can trust the process of science but we need to be mindful of how to critically examine a body of literature. When I see most lay people examine literature all they do is cherry pick what they like and discard the rest and ignore any analysis or methodological concerns

It's incredibly hard to do anything else, since it's pretty easy to cherry pick methodological concerns for any given conclusion you don't care for, since it's incredibly rare for a given body of work to be free of methodological flaws.

Something I have noticed is that non scientists don't understand the methods so when they do try and critique the methods those critiques don't make sense because they lack the understanding of the underlying principles

There is a lot of basic science that is quite solid and is replicable yet people tend to throw it out with nonsense complaints

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#389

Post by darawk »

shawndrost wrote: post #280

I understand people who think the Sacklers are villains who destroyed lives, Purdue should be shut down, and we should transform the legal regime around opioids. I understand people who think Purdue should continue, the status quo is OK, and the Sacklers are not [simply] villainous. I don't understand people who think the Sacklers are villains who destroyed lives, but Purdue should continue operating more-or-less as-…

Yes of course there are realistic ways to prescribe opioids routine and safely. Purdue did not invent opioids, what they did is patent a particularly strong formulation, and then work to undermine the cultural taboo in medicine around their use. That last thing was their crime.

There isn't, at this time, any other way to treat serious pain (in all cases). Opioid prescriptions will continue to be an unfortunately necessary feature of our medical system until we invent painkillers strong/good enough to replace them. I say this as someone who was personally addicted to opioids in general and Oxycontin in particular and feel very lucky to have only one dead friend as a result.

Opioids can't be banned until we can replace them with something equally generally effective. But what we should do is reinstate the taboo around prescribing them, and probably stop offering take home fentanyl prescriptions at all (it's still useful for anaesthesia, in hospitals). Perhaps more importantly, I think the cat is kind of out of the bag on prescriptions. I haven't been around that world for a long time, but it seems to me like pharmaceuticals aren't the primary entrypoint to opioid addiction anymore - people just start with fentanyl.

Dealing with fentanyl seems to me to be basically impossible. One kilogram of pure fentanyl is ~2,000,000 doses, for someone without a tolerance. This is impossible to interdict at the border. It is also fully synthetic, with no great choke point on synthesis routes. I have heard that there are other, even more dangerous, compounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etonitazene that are also even easier to synthesize. I don't really know if there is a good way out of this other than doing the slightly less impossible thing, which is curing addiction.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#390

Post by micromacrofoot »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #296
micromacrofoot wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, it will be played out in a number of separate cases and each case is in a weaker position separately simply due to scale and resources. The Sacklers have an estimated $1bn liquid available to fight these things. The $6bn ruling was significant and not an amazing outcome for either side (so, a compromise). Additionally most of the Sacklers are well into old age, so they'll probably die before losing $6bn.

> The $6bn ruling was significant and not an amazing outcome for either side (so, a compromise). I find this framing extremely bizarre. A $6bn ruling means the family profits $5 BILLION. In no universe is that not an amazing outcome for them.

It's a loss of ~1/2 of their net worth. That's significant.

They are now likely to pay much less by settling smaller individual cases, which will take significantly longer and cost claimants significantly more to pursue.

When they die (which will be soon, most of them are 75+) it'll become even more difficult to get anything.

The deal that was overruled was certainly not justice, but reality will likely be worse. There's no outcome that will render them not billionaires within their lifetimes.

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