Put the Sackler Family in Chains

Blood money can no longer be a get-out-of-jail free card.

If I were to get high on drugs and knock over one of the three local corner stores for a princely sum of $60, I would be thrown in prison as a violent criminal for three to five years — even if I don’t kill a single soul in the process.

The beauty about America is that crime becomes legal once you get to a certain point of “rich.”

Consider the Sackler Family of Purdue Pharma. You might not know them, though I guarantee at least one of your loved one’s knows their product.

From Jan Hoffman and Katie Brenner of nytimes.com:

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges related to its marketing of the addictive painkiller, and faces penalties of roughly $8.3 billion, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The settlement could pave the way for a resolution of thousands of lawsuits brought against the company for its role in a public health crisis that has killed more than 450,000 Americans since 1999.

The company’s owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, have agreed to pay $225 million in civil penalties. Prosecutors said the agreement did not preclude the filing of criminal charges against Purdue executives or individual Sacklers.

The federal settlement does not end all of the extensive litigation against Purdue, but it does represent a significant advance in the long legal march by states, tribes, cities and counties to hold the most prominent opioid maker accountable.

America loves to consider itself a pro-life country. Namely what that means to us is there are two lives above all others: A clump of cell’s in a poor woman’s uterus and those slaughtered by brown terrorists that can be cashed in for propaganda capital by the military-industrial complex.

Otherwise, as long as you’re rich enough, you can slaughter nearly half a million Americans and be accepted by elite society to the point all you have to do is write an $8.3 billion check like it’s not pennies on every blood dollar your greedy family made.

After the rest of America finally got wise to these crooks dumping legalized heroin into our communities, they went and ran the same scam on the Chinese.

From Erica Kanitz of apnews.org:

SHANGHAI (AP) — Thousands of lawsuits across the United States have accused a drug company owned by the billionaire Sackler family of using false claims to push highly addictive opioids on an unsuspecting nation, fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history.

Yet, even as its U.S. drugmaker collapses under the charges, another company owned by the family has used the same tactics to peddle its signature painkiller, OxyContin, in China, according to interviews with current and former employees and documents obtained by the Associated Press.

The documents and interviews indicate that representatives from the Sacklers’ Chinese affiliate, Mundipharma, tell doctors that time-release painkillers like OxyContin are less addictive than other opioids—the same pitch that Purdue Pharma, the U.S. company owned by the family, admitted was false in court more than a decade ago.

My biggest criticism with unrepentant capitalism is it has a knack for rewarding the most psychopathic members of the virus that is mankind.

The Sackler Family made enough money to feel like $225 million was a worthwhile bribe in an effort to avoid prison. Killing hundreds and thousands of your countrymen in exchange for billions of dollars would be an equation that most Americans would gleefully run if they had that option. I’m not naive enough to think otherwise.

But to not be satisfied by mountains of blood money? To go out to another country, and inflict another epidemic of addiction and death on an unsuspecting people? That is a bridge too far for me.

If we are going to have a brutal carceral system, then let’s stop wasting our time on petty crooks and folks struggling with substance abuse disorders.

Let’s focus on the true vampires that walk among us. The kind that simply shrug at hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I realize the plea deal “did not preclude the filing of criminal charges against Purdue executives or individual Sacklers,” but let’s be real, how many times in modern American history have we seen wealthy executives frog-marched out of their glass-laden headquarters? I’m 33 and only example I can think of is the Enron CEO who did a whopping 12 months in prison for one of the biggest corporate fraud cases in American history.

Not to mention… where do you suppose this $8.3 billion will be spent? We’ve already seen Governor Mike DeWine and Attorney General Dave Yost pretend they would know how best to spend money for local communities.

What I can almost guarantee is that nary a single cent will go to anyone who lost a loved one in the pandemic. Nothing will be spent on schools or infrastructure or anything that might be able to prevent somebody from chasing the opiate dragon in the first place.

I don’t want their blood money. I have friends that paid with their lives to make that happen. What I want is for the Sackler family to feel even half as much pain as my friend’s grandma when she found him overdosed on her bathroom floor this Christmas Eve.

Somehow I don’t think writing checks or taking their name off fancy museum displays is going to cut it.