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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

#251

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

esd_g0d wrote: post #236
xeckr wrote: post #231

I don't understand the hatred directed at the Sacklers. Oxycodone is, just like all other opiates, highly effective at suppressing pain, potentially addictive, and deadly in large enough doses. This has been common medical knowledge for millennia. Why do so many people believe that they are responsible for overdose deaths?

Exactly. It took the collaboration of many different people, all of which also profited from it, to bring about the opioid crisis.

The vendor who sells many different things seems to be at least a bit less culpable than the provider who sells just their thing while lying about certain effects of it. Yes, we can examine how we got into this situation where doctors take drug advice from the people who make the drugs but the people who lied for profit deserve the lion's share of the criticism.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#252

Post by dang »

delichon wrote: post #28

Thank you. For my purpose as a reader it is editorial incompetence that the article neither provided that link, nor the name of the case to make it easy to lookup.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811187.)

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#253

Post by legitster »

xeckr wrote: post #231

I don't understand the hatred directed at the Sacklers. Oxycodone is, just like all other opiates, highly effective at suppressing pain, potentially addictive, and deadly in large enough doses. This has been common medical knowledge for millennia. Why do so many people believe that they are responsible for overdose deaths?

It's especially tough for me because they clearly pushed their sketchy marketing and sales tactics because they honestly believed they were helping people, and in their lifetimes the medical industry lauded them as heroes for "safe" and affordable ways to ease suffering.

Right now people have no problem suppressing research they don't like about the negative effects of marijuana or anti-depressants or whatever their de jour personal treatment is - in 20 years if something bad really comes to light everyone is going to pretend that they knew all along and that everything was a smoking gun. Hindsight is 20/20 and history is written by the victors.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#254

Post by nickff »

legitster wrote: post #238
esd_g0d wrote: post #226

What share of the guild do the medical providers that prescribed the opioids to their patients have? There would be no opioid crisis if none were willing to do it.

Scott Alexander had a very interesting writeup about his experiences: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudo...

I just read it (because of your link), and commend it to other people in this thread; quite a well-described and interesting position.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#257

Post by tacticalturtle »

xeckr wrote: post #231

I don't understand the hatred directed at the Sacklers. Oxycodone is, just like all other opiates, highly effective at suppressing pain, potentially addictive, and deadly in large enough doses. This has been common medical knowledge for millennia. Why do so many people believe that they are responsible for overdose deaths?

How much of this issue have you investigated already?

It’s worth skimming through the Massachusetts AG complaint about their actions, and the strategies employed by Purdue (of which the Sacklers always held the majority of board seats)

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/u...

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#258

Post by micromacrofoot »

qarl wrote: post #216
adastra22 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it is. The victims had a settlement agreement worth billions of dollars, which the Sackler family was going to willingly provide in exchange for legal protections. Now that legal protections are off the table, it is very unlikely that any new settlement will be as generous, and in fact quite unlikely that any settlement will be achieved at all.

But also very likely that the case will go to court and the damages will be substantially higher.

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.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#260

Post by legitster »

7thaccount wrote: post #245
legitster wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sacklers were absolved of financial liability, not criminal. A DA that thought there was a strong enough case could have brought charges this whole time irrespective of the settlement agreement. > Their foundation should be dismantled and used to fund damage and mental health services for addicts of the opioid crisis that they went on to create. Part of the settlement agreement was that they were going to turn Pu…

Last time I looked into things, the fines they were going to pay is a tiny slap on the wrist compared to the obscene money they made. They can put the billions in an account and use just some of the interest for the fines. The biggest hit to them so far was having their name removed from some museums. Let that sink in. They've lost some slight prestige with other wealthy folks.

They took in something like $11 billion and were going to fund something like $6 billion.

As far as purely pragmatic solutions go this was not a bad deal for victims. There are a lot of members of the Sackler family and a lot of them have a lot of money despite personally not being connected to the Purdue business in any way.

Even if they could all be connected to wrongdoing actually getting money from, like, the second step-grand-nephew who lives in Copenhagen is going to be really, really hard.

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