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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

#671

Post by darawk »

worik wrote: post #554
darawk wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That was a very long time ago. I don't think the middle east was a significant producer of Opium during that time.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#672

Post by darawk »

worik wrote: post #555
darawk wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 U…

> Portugal

Portugal is not the ringing endorsement that it is sometimes touted as. Some indicators have improved, some have worsened substantially:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal#Observ...

Causality is hard to tease out here, but more importantly, all they're doing is decriminalizing it and offering methadone/buprenorphine maintenance treatments. And the effect on number of addicts has not been good:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

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

Coca is really not anything. If you've ever chewed coca leaves, they're mildly stimulating. They're nothing like cocaine.

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

Considered, thoughtful approaches are always better! The question is, what are you considering and being thoughtful about. And the fact of the matter is that the most drug-liberal cities in the US have the worst drug problems, and so do the most drug liberal countries (like Portugal).

The countries that have the fewest problems with addiction are the harshest: Singapore, China, Japan. These things are not an accident. I'm not necessarily advocating adopting policies that harsh, just pointing out that they do actually work, whereas the liberal policies fail disastrously everywhere they're implemented. I'm in favor of criminalization, but only as a tool to force people into deferral/treatment programs. I don't want to see anyone actually put in jail for using drugs, unless they fail to complete their deferral program.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#673

Post by darawk »

com2kid wrote: post #564
darawk wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing happens with ADHD medications, the timed release dosages are supposed to last 12+ hours, but in reality they vary from 8 to 16. Modern ADHD meds are really not comparable to powerful opioids. They are both dopaminergic, but they are night and day in terms of addictiveness. Even weak opioids vs strong opioids is night and day. > There is a large delta between the average response curve and an individu…

> Modern ADHD meds are really not comparable to powerful opioids. They are both dopaminergic, but they are night and day in terms of addictiveness. Even weak opioids vs strong opioids is night and day. True, my point more was that false advertising about "duration of extended release action" is a problem across multiple types of prescription drugs. > True! But the word "average" is actually not, itself, precise. It h…

> Also when we talk about preventative measures, people going to a pill mill doctors to get a refill are already addicted, but what can have a long term impact is putting in the effort to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place, which means understanding how so many people who did not want to get addicted to opioids ended up that way.

This has changed over time. At first it was the pharmaceutical route, largely due to the shift in medical norms to prescribe opioids for chronic, not just acute, pain. Prescribing them for chronic pain is a near guaranteed recipe for addiction. However, I think things have changed in the past decade or so, with people largely moving straight to fentanyl and/or other illicit opioids. I don't think the pipeline is largely pharmaceutical in nature anymore.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#674

Post by deanishe »

labcomputer wrote: post #659
bumby wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least initially, I'm glad to see this verdict if it means such behavior can't hide behind the corporate veil. However, it's important to acknowledge it's not necessarily a win-win-win. By reading Justice Kavanaugh's dissenting opinion, this decision seems to delay opioid victims the settlement they previously won. > "As a result, opioid victims are now deprived of the substantial monetary recovery that they long f…

> By reading Justice Kavanaugh's dissenting opinion, this decision seems to delay opioid victims the settlement they previously won. The problem is that this sets an ugly precedent. The bankruptcy settlement is basically "I can make a deal with A that takes away your ability to sue B, even though I wasn't suing B and you are". It makes no sense. The dissenting opinion is the epitome of "fuck you, I got mine." Suppose…

> the court agreed

As I understand it, the court didn't so much agree as practically force them to accept the deal.

The whole thing was largely engineered by the Sacklers managing to get the case heard by probably the most Sackler-friendly judge in the country.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#675

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #636
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a loss of ~1/2 of their net worth. That's significant. It's a gain of billions of dollars that everyone agrees they should not have had in the first place. That's really much more significant. It's pretty telling that literally nobody says that the Sackler family should actually have this money, just varying degrees of it being hard to claw back from them. If someone walks into my house, stabs me with a knife,…

There's no strong legal structure to allow it, the US justice system strongly favors the rich and corporations. Loose consensus isn't enough if there's no legal mechanism to do so. The deal was pragmatic in the absence of a clear path for actual consequences. It would be easier to rally an angry mob at this point.

It sounds like you agree with me, since this is exactly a variation of it being hard to claw back, which is annoyingly analogous to letting rich people get away with whatever they want including theft and murder because trying is hard.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#676

Post by FpUser »

harimau777 wrote: post #624
FpUser wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"There is no criminal underclass of convicted billionaire sociopaths" To that I agree. However you can not make laws specifically criminalizing rich for "violations of accepted ethical norms". It will just open floodgates diverting regular and poor to underclass. This whole criminal background check should be made illegal with some very specific exceptions. It hunts people for the rest of their lives. Europe handles…

My understanding is that for regular theft, there are different classes of charges depending on the amount stolen. Perhaps we could apply a similar approach at the top end? E.g. laws that only kick in when there has been more than a billion in damages or thousands of deaths?

>"more than a billion in damages or thousands of deaths?"

They were proposing criminal charges for "violating ethical norms" which is a bit different.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#677

Post by worik »

jjk166 wrote: post #621
worik wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a lawyer. I am from a legal family (three generations) and I understand jurisprudence > you instead leave ambiguity that harms the well meaning and benefits the malicious. Two points 1. Law advantages those with access, and often benefits the malicious and harms the good. Case in point: Drug law. Another is IP law 2. Law is not objective. The words that form it are in black and white, but there are courts an…

> Sotp, just stop! This is the idea that we must punish and scantion people into being good. You're not understanding what this conversation is about. Taboos punish and sanction people into being good. We are in full agreement that this is undesirable. There are some things that should be banned, and if they should be banned, they should be banned explicitly. There are many other things that should not be banned, and…

> There are some things that should be banned, and if they should be banned, they should be banned explicitly.

What about the things that are missed? Are you going to make an explicit rule for every bad thing?

Is the only way to be good, to be punished?

The creative bad folks, they are free to do their bad stuff, so long as they are more creative than the rule makers?

I do not want to live in the world where the only reason good things happen, is because all the options for being bad are outlawed

I want to live in a world, li,e the one I mostly live in, where we cooperate and love one another.

I am not advocating taboos. I am advocating the literal opposite

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#678

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

juliusgeo wrote: post #667
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over a million Americans have died so far in the opioid epidemic. Which of those million died from Oxycontin overdoses, which of them died from hepatitis they caught when shooting up pills with a reused drug needle?

That’s a good question. You should do some research. Maybe you can ask the families of the victims?

Don't have to. Virtually none. People die from the street heroin they bought as a substitute for the oxy they couldn't get once the DEA cracked down.

You can see it on every fucking graph, the very week that the DEA did this, if the dates have enough resolution. This is why we don't ask "the families of the victims", because you're irrational with grief and can't process what the problem is.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#679

Post by micromacrofoot »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #675
micromacrofoot wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no strong legal structure to allow it, the US justice system strongly favors the rich and corporations. Loose consensus isn't enough if there's no legal mechanism to do so. The deal was pragmatic in the absence of a clear path for actual consequences. It would be easier to rally an angry mob at this point.

It sounds like you agree with me, since this is exactly a variation of it being hard to claw back, which is annoyingly analogous to letting rich people get away with whatever they want including theft and murder because trying is hard.

"Trying is hard" is kind of an edge-lord take on an incredibly complicated problem. People have been trying to fix this longer than we've been alive.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#680

Post by dathayron »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #678
juliusgeo wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a good question. You should do some research. Maybe you can ask the families of the victims?

Don't have to. Virtually none. People die from the street heroin they bought as a substitute for the oxy they couldn't get once the DEA cracked down. You can see it on every fucking graph, the very week that the DEA did this, if the dates have enough resolution. This is why we don't ask "the families of the victims", because you're irrational with grief and can't process what the problem is.

In America, if I shot you in the leg and you died years later from an infection incurred because of that bullet wound I can and likely would be charged with murder because of the long string of consequence caused by my action.

So I can draw a pretty solid causal line from “my father died in a tent in the woods behind a gas station off of I-95 to the Oxy he was once on.” Maybe the pill itself didn’t directly kill him but it sure lead there.

Perhaps I’m just too emotional here, having literally dealt with the above last month. Can’t think straight?

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