Oh, I definitely get it. I understand the sentiment as well as many/most. As I mentioned upthread, we lost my stepson to opiates a couple years back. Started with too many tabs prescribed for a relatively simple broken bone.
But if I were a soulless sociopath (in the way I figure the Sacklers must necessarily be), you’d have a very difficult time getting any more money from me than I was willing to give.
Because it would be buried in honey pots all around the world – in all the usual offshore banking meccas, tax havens, and a few places you couldn’t even find on a map.
And it would be very easy to tie you up in litigation for decades with no promise of getting anything at the end.
I’m a billion miles from being close enough to the situation to understand how much leverage The Decent People of the United States actually have. I have to hope the AGs and Prosecutors have significant visibility into these issues and know how to play serious poker.
Under the proposals, the two branches of the Sackler family that own Purdue Pharma would settle more than 3,000 lawsuits against the company by paying $4.3bn. But the Sacklers would keep about $7bn which would be personally protected from legal action over the part played by some family members in the illegal drive to mass market OxyContin for which Purdue has been twice convicted of criminal charges, in 2007 and last year.
State attorney generals called the proposed settlement “unjust” in a brief to the court, because it is intended to sidestep individual accountability, and questioned its legality.
“Please. Can’t we just keep a few billion – just for groceries, and to pay a few bills ?”
Dammit, when your money vault is less than 12 feet deep with gold coins it’s too shallow to safely dive into. If you take away too much of their wealth you might as well be breaking their necks yourself. We need to take into account their personal safety when putting sanctions on them.
For those who’ve been following this story, may I recommend John Oliver’s truly excellent (24 minute) take on the proposed settlement with the Sackless family:
As noted in the video, the Sacklers themselves have their own website judgeforyourselves.info - Oliver mocks them for cheaping out and going for the .info instead of the .com, which his show promptly bought.
Is there a reason doctors are not being busted for this? I mean, no one buys this stuff without a prescription. ISTM your doctor is the one who should be assessing what is good for you. Why are they seemingly left off the hook? Were they oblivious to what was happening?
This is an article by a physician that talks about the blame for doctors, and I found it pretty compelling. It doesn’t say doctors don’t bear any responsibility, but for the most part they’re just trying to treat patients and are caught in the middle.
First, in all fairness, I will start with physicians. We overprescribe opioids, just as we overprescribe antibiotics. But it is generally well meaning; we don’t want our patients to experience pain. But then we prescribe 30 or 60 pills when 5 or 20 would have been adequate. We do that because we are used to prescribing in multiples of 30; 30 days for a month supply of a once a day medication, 90 days for a mail-order prescription. Prescribing 6 or 10 pills will undoubtedly result in a phone call from a pharmacist asking for a round number of pills, taking up time better spent entering meaningless information into our electronic health record systems. It is the leftover pills that sit forgotten in the medicine cabinet which often lead to trouble, stolen by a relative or visitor and abused. But sometimes it is that prescription that was provided for true pain that leads rapidly to tolerance and addiction. Healthy Living magazine recently published a heart wrenching story of a woman whose life was nearly destroyed by two weeks of oxycodone prescribed by a well-meaning physician for arthritis.
The role of these physicians can best be described as innocent bystander. We were truly trying to help the patient. But there are also what are known as “pill mill” doctors who set up shop, accept cash as the only payment and are willing to prescribe to anyone for any ailment, real or feigned. One physician in my area was so bold as to meet his “patients” in a local coffee shop to exchange prescriptions for cash. Needless to say he is no longer licensed to practice medicine. Doctors such as these are criminals and need to be stopped. They cast a long shadow on the work of every other physician trying to help patients.
It seems to me that the vast majority of physicians don’t have any liability here, and those that do can and are prosecuted. (Not every time, of course, but that’s the case with everything; there are always people that manage to get away with it.)
In its infinite wisdom, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with two physicians sentenced to long prison terms for their role in running opioid pill mills, ruling that prosecutors failed to consider the docs’ state of mind. Did they know they were acted in an unathorized manner? So hard to tell in this case:
“Shakeel Kahn purported to be a pain management physician. He targeted vulnerable addicts as customers. They received prescriptions for highly addictive opioids at rapidly escalating volume and in potentially deadly combination with other drugs. It was not uncommon for customers to pay as much as $4,000 per month to Kahn in exchange for the prescription opioids. The patients who received the medications often had no visible source of income that would allow them to afford the prescriptions – other than what they were earning re-selling the drugs on the street. Tragically, at least one patient, Jessica Burch, died as a result of an overdose of medications received from Shakeel Kahn’s practice.”
According to prosecutors, this physician prescribed about 2.2 million pills, nearly half of which were oxycodone, over a five-year period with scant or no patient exams. But gee, maybe he actually thought that was good medical practice. Conviction tossed.
The appeals court threw out the conviction based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
“On June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that doctors who act in subjective good faith in prescribing controlled substances to their patients cannot be convicted under the federal Controlled Substance Act (CSA).”
And in all honesty, I have no problem with that Supreme Court ruling as it’s written.
On the other hand, a pill mill doctor is not acting in good faith. That seems like a bullshit argument.
Then again, it’s possible the prosecution just failed to make their case properly. Sometimes prosecution and/or law enforcement fucks up. Just look at the OJ trial.
