{"id":178284,"date":"2019-01-17T20:24:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T01:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/17\/they-should-spend-the-rest-of-their-lives-in-prison\/"},"modified":"2019-01-17T20:24:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-18T01:24:00","slug":"they-should-spend-the-rest-of-their-lives-in-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/17\/they-should-spend-the-rest-of-their-lives-in-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"They Should Spend the Rest of Their Lives in Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am referring, of course to the Sacklers, who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/15\/health\/sacklers-purdue-oxycontin-opioids.html\">aggressively misled the American public about the risks of Oxycontin<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously undisclosed documents contends.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,\u201d Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. \u201cThey are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is a criminal enterprise.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Go RICO on their asses and get a forfeiture order, because, as Billy Ray Valentine noted, &#8220;You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>See also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2019\/01\/15\/massachusetts-purdue-lawsuit-new-details\/\">here<\/a> .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am referring, of course to the Sacklers, who aggressively misled the American public about the risks of Oxycontin: Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously undisclosed documents &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,517,364,567],"class_list":["post-178284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-drugs","tag-evil","tag-pharma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}