This is true chutzpah.
Purdue Pharmaceuticals, manufacturer and marketer of opioids, has won a patent for treating opioid addiction.
The Sackler family became multibillionaires pushing opioids. They have their names on museums in many countries. Opioid addiction was responsible for 72,000 deaths last year. Altogether more than 300,000 people have died from opioid addiction.
Now they will make more millions or billions selling a treatment for the addiction they promoted.
Did you know that the Sackler family is one of the biggest donors to charter schools?
Jonathan Sackler founded CONNCan. Then 50CAN. His daughter Madeline Sackler made a fawning documentary about Eva Moskowitz called “The Lottery.”
The nefarious role of their company is described in a new book called DOPESICK: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. I am in the middle of reading it now. It’s shocking and maddening. Purdue encouraged doctors to prescribe Oxycontin as a painkiller with very little likelihood of addiction. They paid thousands of salesmen big bonuses to push the pills. The book tells the horrifying stories of the families destroyed by Purdue, seen the vantage point of from Appalachia.
Will families sue the Sacklers for their suffering and hold them accountable?
I wonder how it feels to know that your luxury, your homes and limousines and caviar, were purchased with so many deaths.
Do these people have no sense of shame. Do ghouls flit around their dinner tables and disturb their sleep?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And to make it worse, they will “develop” a medication at minimal cost to manufacture and jack the price 6000% so that it is unaffordable to most who need to use it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Purdue has been sitting on this “medication” for many years just waiting for the right moment to pull it out of their “magic hat”. The Sackler family are disgusting blobs of flesh…..I can’t call them human beings because human beings have heart and soul.
This is how you do business, doncha know?
You cover all the bases, to make sure you make money coming and going.
Like Goldman Sachs, which made money both selling/promoting and short selling the very same fraudulent subprime mortgage derivatives at the very same time.
They had to pay a fine for that.
The cost of doing business.
This is a particular example of a pervasive trend–create a problem through unbridled profit-seeking and then offer solutions that also provide an opportunity for profit-seeking. This is the foundation of the hot financial product called a social impact bond or a pay-for success contract. It is also the reasoning behind the largest every national debt engineerd by Republicans who for years whined and shouted about the national debt until they discovered that a huge debt was the perfect reason to cut social programs and seek profits from running prisons, schools, and so on.
This is an excellent article on the Sackler wealth, how it has been distributed as gifts, and the problems that gift-recievers are now facing given the source of the wealth.
https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/3/12/sackler-family-philanthropy-controversial-gifts
The OLIGARCHS again and again and again are destroying everything until the rest of us are either serfs or slaves.
Here are two more long, easily accessible, and excellent articles about Sackler and Oxycontin. Government litigation against Sackler ensued when the opioid crisis became large enough to notice, but it was not enough to stop it before hundreds of thousands of humans had lost their lives to addiction. What do we need? Better regulation, more criminal laws, more litigation and punishment? How does society protect us from the next assault on our health and lives by poorly regulated, unfettered capitalism? Is it the system or just ignorant, venal, and complicit policy makers and public officials. I don’t know the answer.
I am a liberal Democrat running for a county public office in a conservative city in Texas and consider myself a “one-cheer” capitalist (Irving Kristol wrote a book titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism” — even he knew it didn’t rate three cheers, but I think by now we all realize it deserves no more than one cheer. Many Democrats are now endorsing democratic socialism, but I am too old and skeptical to do that. The intense partisanship we experience today is the result of the tension between capitalism and socialism (and concomitantly between representative democracy and autocratic fascism) growing in a crescendo to an eventual climax. Cry, the Beloved Country.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
My wife just finished DOPESICK. For those who lack the wherewithal to make it all the way through (e.g., my wife’s husband), I recommend “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” in the October 30, 2017 New Yorker. This article is not currently behind a paywall.
The Sacklers are full-service opportunists. I am not surprised that they have the solution to the problem they helped create. It is the American way, sadly. Profit is king.
The same people who created and/or disregarded the conditions for the financial crisis caused by subprime mortgages and derivatives (Larry Summers, Tim Geithner Ben Bernanke et la) were hired to “solve” the problem, which they did by bailing out their Wall Street pals, buying up all the toxic waste that they and their pals had created and giving everyone involved in fraud a mere slap on the wrist (at best) for the frauds they had perpetrated on the public.
This has become the well established pattern.
It’s how to succeed in business these days.
Correct. And Congress has done nothing to remedy the problem. The slicing and dicing of bad loans and marketing of these now includes not just home mortgages but auto loans and credit card debt. No one wants to pay attention as long as the stock market is “exceeding expectations” even if another set of corrective actions is likely to be needed.
Here’s the other one.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
Thanks for the article. i think I read it a year ago but had no trouble reading the whole thing again.
This is an ed reform report on charters and public schools:
“Among the most frequently heard concerns around charter schools is that they drain money from traditional districts, potentially harming students who stay behind.”
That’s how they see your kid if your kid is in a public school- as a student who “stays behind”
It permeates everything they do, this complete and utter disregard for public school students, and it’s such an echo chamber none of them see it.
They don’t even feel they have to OFFER public school families anything. They will grudgingly allow that public schools may continue to exist, but they offer absolutely nothing of value to them. If you’re electing one of these folks this is what you’re electing. Don’t expect anything from them. The BEST you can hope for is they don’t actively damage your kid’s school. These are the people who control policy for public schools! People who see public school students as a relic of a system they have already discarded and rejected.
No public school family should put up with it. We can do better.
https://edexcellence.net/articles/charter-school-effects-on-district-spending-and-achievement
Today is the RI primary and I hope in 7 hours the current “out of touch destructive to the people of the state of RI,” gina raimondo who has caused havoc to UHIP victims some still not getting their SNAP or food assistance entitlement, and/or heating assistance and who has hurt 63,000 pensioners, 23000 of them retirees by taking the COLA/pension away based on erroneous and flawed rhetoric and has put the RI taxpayers in billions of dollars in debt with her schemes is finally gone from RI poliics. She also has a very strong link to the Sackler family—the “Family That Built an Empire of Pain” is a major raimondo donor.
And she continually refuses to return thousands of donations from Jonathan Sackler.
A top executive of this notorious company — the company who invented oxycontin — has donated repeatedly to Gov Raimondo and she is not returning any of the donations.
The company, Purdue Pharma, has been the focus of a number of exposés, including a major New Yorker investigation entitled, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,
Jonathan Sackler, the Purdue Pharma scion, has donated seven $1,000 contributions to Raimondo. And, Raimondo’s political action committee, Gina PAC, collected another $1,000 from Sackler. She must be defeated in today’s primary. $$$ is raimondo’s drug of choice.
She is a DINO
The much broader question is why we engage in totally anti-competitive practices that are pushed by the free marketeers. When almost half the funding for drug research (30 billion) is provided by NIH. When just about every compound that was eventually turned into a life-saving drug in the last decade came from labs receiving Government funding from NIH. When the facilities like major Medical centers and Research Universities would be far smaller without Government funds… Why do we provide patents for research that are the equivalent of a massive tax on the American consumer? Making the cost of life-saving drugs sometimes 100s of times more than their cost to produce. Encouraging big Pharma to hide the deleterious effects of the drugs they are invested in. Costing the American people almost 400 billion more than their cost as generics would be.
To show the absurdity: The NIH and Defense Department fully funded the research by Sanofi on a Zika virus vaccine. Then Sanofi insisted on a patent for the vaccine. and withdrew. Compare that to Jonas Salk who when asked about the Polio vaccine patent by Edward R Murrow said: “can you patent the sun”.
What’s worse than an average psychopath? A conservative, super-wealthy psychopath.
Can’t get past the Financial Times paywall? Try these links:
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/7/17831710/richard-sackler-opioid-epidemic-buprenorphine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/09/08/the-man-who-made-billions-of-dollars-from-oxycontin-is-pushing-a-drug-to-wean-addicts-off-opioids/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/oxycontin-purdue-pharma-patent-opioid-addiction-treatment-722646/
http://fortune.com/2018/09/07/oxycontin-opioid-addiction-treatment-patent-richard-sackler-purdue-pharma/
In 1980, a letter was sent to NEJM which I will post one sentence from it. “We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.” Drs. Jick and Porter, Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program,
This brief letter was cited over 608 times by various people. 72% of the commentary stated evidence that addiction was rare in patients treated with opioids as taken from this letter. 80% of those positive citations never mentioned the opioids were administered in a hospital setting. The free for all was on for opioids such as oxycodone. One comment:
“In reality, medical opioid addiction is very rare. ln Porter and Jick’s study on patients treated with narcotics, only four of the 11,882 cases showed psychological dependency.”
In 1995 with the introduction of the slow release OxyContin, the numbers of citations of this letter doubled as Purdue was out hawking its new formulation which was easily ground up and used in a more potent form.
In 2007, three execs of Purdue Pharma plead guilty to federal criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors, and patients about the risk of addiction associated with OxyContin.
In June of 2017, another study was reported on and its findings about the use of this letter were sent to the editor of the NEJM. The stats I cited are from this study. In 1970, I believe it was Nixon who declared a war on drugs. With the abuse of the Jick and Porter letter by various commercial interests and medicine in promoting opioids as being nonaddictive. it was similar to pouring gasoline on a fire as evidenced by the number of people addicted and dying yearly from all forms of opioids and drugs as cited by the recent CDC report. The use of the Jick and Porter letter in a positive citation died in 2017. 37 years later.
Purdue should be paying for the treatment of the addiction they helped to create.
I can guide you to the links I cited from in this brief commentary. I hesitate to put links up on someone else’s site.
The damning evidence about Purdue’s misleading promotion of OxyContin is documented in DOPESICK