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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

#551

Post by lenerdenator »

janalsncm wrote: post #398

Pound for pound, the Sacklers probably did more damage to America than any other drug dealers in history. More damage than any serial killer or mass shooter. In my mind they should be considered public enemies 1 through N. I sincerely hope they face civil and criminal liabilities for what they’ve done.

I like to think about it this way:

I cannot name another family that helped introduce a nationwide need for a completely new type of first aid, that being naloxone. It's not just ambulances; it's in police cars, pharmacies, libraries, schools, and workplaces. A complete deployment throughout the third-largest society in the world, in less than ten years, because of the frequency of overdose.

Just consider that for a moment.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#552

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

BoredPositron wrote: post #534
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>both edits are not in our comment chain The first edit I mentioned is in this comment chain and the second one was in response to my post in a different chain. >Nobody forced anyone to get vaccinated Really? This is trivially false. For example vaccination was extensively mandated in several countries by law, for example some provinces in China.[0] In the US certain states require proof of vaccination for certain ac…

If your boss sexually harasses or extorts you, you take legal action immediately, you don't quit. China? Really? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I won't delve into the possibility that you might have experienced inconvenience had you not been vaccinated. It appears that you're primarily concerned with your own interests and failed to grasp the broader implications during the COVID-19 pandemic, a perspective you seem to maintain even now.…

>If your boss sexually harasses or extorts you, you take legal action immediately, you don't quit.

It's a hypothetical.

>China? Really? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You mentioned billions of people. So your argument was clearly not limited to the US. Or you just didn't make the point well.

>which you and op are attempting to distort by cherry-picking definitions from various dictionaries, often focusing on the less common usages found at the bottom of these entries.

One of the dictionaries is an ESL dictionary. It gives words as they are used and it gives the usage I quoted as the first definition.[0] The reason that the usage in the other dictionaries have the usages I quoted at the bottom is becasue they all give the noun form of "force" first.

[0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/ame... (force_2 being the verb form as opposed to the noun.)

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#553

Post by worik »

thegrimmest wrote: post #539
worik wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporate leaders do everything right up to the legal boundary in pursuit of their shareholders interests. Yes, that happens Those are evil, short sighted people, sociopaths, who should not be emulated

Sociopaths and other dark triad types have been the driving force in unifying and leading people since prehistory. It takes exactly that kind of person to unite tribes of strangers in order to go conquer, subjugate, and murder your neighbours. "Evil" is immaterial. Markets and society are ecosystems, and the optimal patterns of behaviour in ecosystems are as ruthless as they are predictable.

> "Evil" is immaterial.

No. Never

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#554

Post by worik »

darawk wrote: post #519
worik wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An agree fest ensues I am not advocating pure herion (ironically quite a safe drug aside from addiction) or cocaine powder as modern consumer products. Opium caused upheavals when used as a wedge by Westerners in China, but remember it had been present, and used for millenia in Arabia. The same, roughly, with cocaine and coca It is not a choice between continued sadism or free reign herion and cocaine dealing. We can…

I mostly agree! I'll quibble on two points. "used as a wedge issue by foreigners", while perhaps true in some moral sense, it does not really make much sense, on closer scrutiny. To reduce things down to being some foreign imposition is to suggest that it could have been any product. But it couldn't - only opium has the special properties necessary to become this kind of product. Nobody fought a war over tobacco, or…

> opium growing regions of Arabia

The centre of civilisation for centuries

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#555

Post by worik »

darawk wrote: post #519
worik wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An agree fest ensues I am not advocating pure herion (ironically quite a safe drug aside from addiction) or cocaine powder as modern consumer products. Opium caused upheavals when used as a wedge by Westerners in China, but remember it had been present, and used for millenia in Arabia. The same, roughly, with cocaine and coca It is not a choice between continued sadism or free reign herion and cocaine dealing. We can…

I mostly agree! I'll quibble on two points. "used as a wedge issue by foreigners", while perhaps true in some moral sense, it does not really make much sense, on closer scrutiny. To reduce things down to being some foreign imposition is to suggest that it could have been any product. But it couldn't - only opium has the special properties necessary to become this kind of product. Nobody fought a war over tobacco, or…

> But I don't observe anything in the world that would support it,

Portugal

Legalisation of capabilities across the globe

Coca in Bolivia (I am on thin ice, I know too little, but they elected a coca grower as president)

I think there is plenty of evidence that a considered thoughtful approach to drugs is better

But the psychopaths and sociopaths that make up the bulk of our governments (here in Aotearoa and in the USA) refuse to pay attention

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#556

Post by worik »

darawk wrote: post #519
worik wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An agree fest ensues I am not advocating pure herion (ironically quite a safe drug aside from addiction) or cocaine powder as modern consumer products. Opium caused upheavals when used as a wedge by Westerners in China, but remember it had been present, and used for millenia in Arabia. The same, roughly, with cocaine and coca It is not a choice between continued sadism or free reign herion and cocaine dealing. We can…

I mostly agree! I'll quibble on two points. "used as a wedge issue by foreigners", while perhaps true in some moral sense, it does not really make much sense, on closer scrutiny. To reduce things down to being some foreign imposition is to suggest that it could have been any product. But it couldn't - only opium has the special properties necessary to become this kind of product. Nobody fought a war over tobacco, or…

> without courting disaster

Too late?

weeping...

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#557

Post by zer00eyz »

Retric wrote: post #543
zer00eyz wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> total amount prescribed opioids through time This... Dr were involved too! > long term pain management opioids suck Opioids suck. And the medical profession was complicit. For a class that is supposed to be professional and well informed most Dr's are, shockingly, not that bright.

> Dr where involved too! The actions of individual Doctors acting on their own simply don’t explain trends. Doctors and the FDA etc were straight up lied to. I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold Doctors accountable for when some pharmaceutical company commits fraud. That doesn’t mean every doctor was blameless, but individual Doctors have always behaved poorly it was true before the opioid epidemic and it’s still tr…

> Doctors and the FDA etc were straight up lied to

Oh please.

Doctors, did not believe the preponderance of evidence that ulcers were caused by bacteria. The reason, the person who discovered it was a vet.

They had to give the man a Nobel Prize to get Dr's to pry their heads out of their self aggrandizing asses and pay attention to reality.

Opioids were addictive. They never stoped being that. Dr's were fiscally motivated to prescribe. Nothing more nothing less.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#558

Post by burnished »

thegrimmest wrote: post #405
darawk wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nece…

> That last thing was their crime Taboos are bullshit. Either something is a clearly articulated, written, rule with an enforcement mechanism, or it's fair game. Prescribing doctors are responsible for the opioid epidemic. Doctors failed in their duty of care to patients. Doctors massively overprescribed, failed to track their patient's medication usage, and failed to spot addictive behaviour. Why aren't we holding t…

Taboos are part of how a society functions. Taboos can prevent the 'tragedy of the commons' in a way that rules and laws cannot. Think about it - people break the law all the time. They rarely break taboos.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#559

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

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…

> and that the house you grew up in or the favorable college you got into or whatever lifestyle you had growing up

Are we talking about wealth I inherited? About wealth I wrongfully inherited from the wrung necks of the dead? When in this framing do we start to consider where that money should have been vs where it is now? I presumably in this scenario did nothing wrong personally, and yet what wealth do I _deserve_? Do I _deserve_ this wealth extracted by mass destruction enacted by my relatives, granted not by myself, but that someone else would otherwise have?

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#560

Post by harry8 »

Matt Levine at Bloomberg gives an excellent explanation of what happened, the ruling, why etc without telling you what you should think is the right thing or right outcome.

His explanations from first principles covering ground you already know are just excellent. Worthwhile reading for anyone who has to explain detailed, complex & technical subject matter.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-27/purdue...

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