Yesterday I drank “loaded baked potato soup” through a straw for lunch. My love for all forms of baked potatoes are definitely the most Irish thing about me other than my crippling alcoholism.
A wise man once told me never to speak ill of the dead. I guess that’s why nobody has ever called me a wise man. When somebody dies, it depends on who they are. Some people it’s worth remembering all the awful things they did in their lives.
Jonathan Sackler, co-owner of OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma, died yesterday when cancer finally overwhelmed an unspecified vital organ.
I hope he died alone and in pain. Or, barring that, in pain while his family watched helpless from the sidelines while their family patriarch took his last breaths at the ripe age of 65.
It’s no less than that family deserves considering they orchestrated the opioid epidemic that started when I was in high school and continues to this day (I’m 33 years-old).
The Sackler Family pushed OxyContin as a non-addictive opiate, which anybody who has any experience with the drug can tell you is absolute horseshit. Purdue Pharma flooded places like West Virginia, Ohio and Florida with highly addictive painkillers that were available in all regions of the state.
Purdue Pharma’s middlemen even concocted their own parody song.
From Meryl Cornfield of washingtonpost.com:
As the opioid epidemic raged in 2011, employees of drug distributor AmerisourceBergen Corp., shared an email: a parody of the theme song for “The Beverly Hillbillies,” describing how “pillbillies” drove south to obtain drugs at Florida pill mills.
“Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed/ A poor mountaineer, barely kept his habit fed,” the song begins, chronicling how Jed goes to Florida, which is described as having a “lax attitude” about pills, or “Hillbilly Heroin.”
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“Sunny Florida is the place you ought to be/ So they loaded up the truck and drove speedily,” the lyrics read. “South, that is. Pain Clinics, cash ‘n carry. A Bevy of Pillbillies!” the email said.
Since 1999, more than 400,000 people in the United States have died of opioid overdoses. Nearly 16,000 people died of prescription opioid overdoses in 2011.
Nothing ever happened to this man other than his family’s signs being removed from fancy art exhibits us pill-billies could never afford to see.
A normal person’s conscience might force them to reckon with the destruction his company caused. Not ol’ Jon Sackler. His company used abandoned American tactics to continue the same scheme in China.
I’m not a religious man but I believe in Hell. Primarily because I’m at peace with heading there. And it better be real, because otherwise awful people like Sackler never get their comeuppance.
The lack of Hell means scumbags coast through life with material standards better than 99% of human history and never have to pay a tax for the human bodies they wrecked to obtain that fortune.
My ranting is somewhat ironic considering I digested 20 mg of oxycontin a day for a week in the hospital and another 20 mg a day back on Bellows Ave. It definitely did more for my pain than Tylenol and/or Advil.
But it was billed to me honestly: 10 years ago I would have left the hospital with enough Oxy to kill grizzly bear. This time they sent me home with 28 5mg pills, which basically isn’t even enough to get a child high these days. As if I wasn’t aware, the risk of addiction was explained to me by both nurses and doctors.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if they had received similar information and dosages. Instead Jon Sackler saw an opportunity at a fortune, and he pushed it no matter how many of his countrymen died.
Well, now his criminal family knows exactly how I felt attending the funerals of my class mates. If there were any justice in this world (there isn’t) then Sackler would have died in prison.
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THOSE WMDs. The right way to challenge somebody’s thinking… How to survive encounters with 40 wild animals… The only catfish native to western U.S. is running out of water… The cursed platoon… How police took over a global phone network for organized crime.