Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but the trick seems to be to kill thousands rather than one. Then you have the full might of the law out to protect you. Exhibit A is the Sacklers family.
Again, no. If some drug company killed a single person with a weird side effect that they buried, do you think it'll be discovered, much less prosecuted? The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge, not because they passed some magical threshold so it's magically fine.
No, the Sacklers didn't get prosecuted or even hindered, but aided at every turn, therefore the opioid epidemic got huge. Eventually it became so expensive for society as a whole that it couldn't be allowed to continue, and then the Sacklers were stopped.
They weren't "prosecuted," though. Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands dead, no criminal charges, and they're all still impossibly wealthy. I was once prosecuted for sitting on a sidewalk, and spent the night in jail. No Sackler has spent the night in jail, or missed a massage appointment. Why? Because they passed some "magical" threshold that makes it "magically" fine.
If you go pick up the heroin that you and a friend later do together, and the friend overdoses, you will likely be thrown into prison for murder or manslaughter if you take them to the hospital. The Sacklers still get to own pharmaceutical companies, as long as they don't sell opioids.
https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/2025/01/the-sackler-family-le...
They literally had to be taken to the Supreme Court to lose civil immunity (barely, 5-4) granted by lower court bankruptcy judges. The criminal immunity is not official, it's simply because of their class as owners. The law is written in an intentionally childish way so that to prosecute them criminally means you have to prove that they had murderous intentions, rather than it being enough that they were top-level opioid dealers who ignored and buried anything that would lose them money.
As long as they just wanted to make money, it's A-OK. They can only be charged if their goal was to murder people, regardless of money. This logic somehow does not apply to lower-level drug dealers who have failed to become "magical," to your best friend who gave you half their heroin for free and rushed you to the hospital when you started looking bad, or to Matthew Perry's dealers.