Over 200,000 people have died due to opioid addiction. The lead manufacturer of OxyContin is Purdue Pharmaceuticals in Connecticut. The company salespeople assured doctors and nurses that opioids were safe and effective.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maureen Healey is suing the company and members of its board of directors for the damage done by their drug. The mai owners of Purdue are the Sackler Family, whose net worth exceeds $14 billion.
AG Healey wants to hold them accountable.
One of the main “charities” of Jonathan Sackler is charter schools. He has financed them in Connecticut through his organization called CONNCan. He has also financed 50CAN, which aims to spread charters nationally. He serves on the boards of other charter groups.
Read AG Healey’s devastating account of the family’s and directors’ actions.
The Sacklers produced and marketed a drug that destroyed many lives. Now they use their fortune to endow museums and destroy public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Any money from the Sacklers is tainted. Accepting money from them is not much better than accepting money from El Chapo. In our world the Sacklers are “philanthropists,” and El Chapo is a murderer. It can also be said that they represent different side of the “opioid drug chain.” Lots of addicted people started out with misrepresented drugs from Purdue Pharmaceuticals wound up being at the mercy of the cartels.
Build a wall around Purdue Pharma.
A wall with no doors and no gates. A wall that is a hundred feet high. Inside the wall, is a compound that is designed to even keep helicopters out
Then make sure the entire Sackler family is inside when the last section of the wall is finished. No way in. No way out. If they can’t grow their own food, they will have to eat each other to see who survives the longest.
The pipe carrying water under the wall and into the compound will be the same toxic water that people in Detroit were supplied from the Flint River. Oh, and that pipe will be too small for anyone to escape through.
What about sewage. Keep all their waste inside the wall.
Instead of giving money to CONNCan and other organizations that seek to undermine public schools, the Sacklers should have to pay for the opioid addition of so many people that were duped by the non-addictive claims in the advertising of Purdue.
What little I’ve read about the discovery process in this trial and the Purdue documents that have emerged, this family and their company is in serious, serious, trouble.
And you know what? They deserve it.
Imagine, Mark, your garden variety serial killer, the kind they write novels about. Now, imagine that killer slips up. Imagine that his excuse is that “he didn’t really mean to hurt people, but he only did it so he could get their money’.
Can you imagine the resulting sentence?
Tell you what, that ain’t gonna happen to the Sacklers. As Americans, we need to ask why, and correct that massive defect.
Based on the results of the investigations into Purdue’s deceptive “marketing” scheme, the company and its executives are clearly accountable.
Answer: the SACKLERS!!! (AKA the SICKlers)
Lock them up & throw away the key…just as they have greedily thrown away the lives of so, so many.
Answer: the SACKLERS! (AKA the Sicklers).
Lock them up & throw away the key…just as they have greedily thrown away the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Sorry this was posted twice; thought it didn’t post.
If Oxycontin is as safe/ non-addictive as they claim, perhaps members of the Sackler family would be willing to demonstrate themselves?
Put theiir Oxy where their mouth is – and swallow.
Reminiscent of the movie where the tobacco industry’s PR guy was forced by vigilantes to wear hundreds of nicotine patches until he succumbed.
Where are the vigilantes when you need them?
The Sacklers wouldn’t swallow. They’d hide the capsule under their tongue. To make sure they swallowed, we’d have to strap them down and use a pump to pump the their drug into their stomachs.
In a just world…your outcome would be too good for people who bring death and misery to so many families. If the allegations against the Sacklers are true, I doubt the parents and the kids are a family as much as they are rats in search of pellets without capacity to feel anything for one another.
I wonder if anyone has done a TV series on a super-wealthy family that is all narcissistic psychopaths and they made their money by killing hundreds of thousands of people with their drug product and destroying the lives of even more people that didn’t die but became addicted to the drug they sell.
Too distressing to watch, except Bill and Melinda Gates and John and Laura Arnold might enjoy the entertainment.
Rev. Michael Phillips, on the Maryland State School Board with Chester Finn, is the Sacklers’s guy at 50Can. Phillips chairs the 50Can board (Campbell Brown is a board member) and, he leads Faith Leaders for Excellent Schools.
Worth a read- NonProfit Quarterly, 11/14/2017, “Sackler Applies Oxycontin Marketing to Charter School Movement”.
Thank God for the Pastors for Texas Children who have no connection to billionaires like the Sacklers.
Since (1) the NAACP, ACLU, and SPLC have shown the nation the negative reality of charter schools and, BLM has come out in support of public schools and (2) the Sacklers are under investigation related to oxycontin, it’s harder for the Sacklers and the people they buy to carry on as business as usual especially in the packaging and selling of privatized education
This comes from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. It is the largest research facility in the US.
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Opioid epidemic is increasing rates of some infectious diseases
Health, substance use professionals must work together to thwart public health crisis.
What
The United States faces a converging public health crisis as the nation’s opioid epidemic fuels growing rates of certain infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, heart infections, and skin and soft tissue infections. Infectious disease and substance use disorder professionals must work together to stem the mounting public health threat, according to a new commentary in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. The article was co-authored by officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Since 1999, nearly 400,000 people in the United States have fatally overdosed on opioid-containing drugs, with 47,600 deaths in 2017 alone. Many people with opioid use disorder (OUD), who initially were prescribed oral drugs to treat pain, now inject prescribed or illegal opioids. High-risk injection practices such as needle-sharing are causing a surge in infectious diseases. Additionally, risky sexual behaviors associated with injection drug use have contributed to the spread of sexually transmitted infections.
Infectious disease health professionals can play an important role in addressing the problem by not only treating a patient’s injection drug use-associated infection but also connecting the patient for treatment of their underlying OUD, the authors write. For example, coupling opioid agonist therapy, such as methadone, with treatment for HIV or hepatitis C, can prevent further transmission of those viruses and reduce opioid use. Comprehensive treatment will result in improved outcomes for both the infectious disease and the underlying OUD, according to the authors….