#Purdue Pharma

[justplainsimon]

Mike Flanagan's house of usher is basically willy wonka, if willy wonka distributed oxycontin inside of chocolate

#mike flanagan #the fall of the house of usher #willy wonka #purdue pharma

[szepkerekkocka]

#holdblog #ópiátkrízis #matthew perry #jóbarátok #purdue pharma #oxycontin #fda #sackler #fentanil #janssen #johnson and johnson #duragesic #usa #kanada #good samarita overdose act #curtis wright #mckesson #cardinal health #amerisource bergen #walgreens #cws #insys therapeutics #john kapoor

[reelvibes91]

'Painkiller' vs. 'Dopesick': Which Series Tackles the Opioid Crisis Better?"

Painkiller is a show with a story that we have all heard before. Perhaps we have not heard the exact story of Purdue Pharma but we have heard about opiod addiction and those responsible for it.

Painkiller is the second attempt at this story. Dopesick did it first and frankly did it better. That does not make Painkiller a bad show. It is very informative, and the cast is very good, but Dopesick got to these dramatic beats first and handled them in a more resonating way.

Both series feature the Sackler family as they were the real-life family at the center of the crisis. Richard Sackler, to be precise, was the president of Purdue Pharma and the main push behind OxyContin. Played in Painkiller by Matthew Broderick and in Dopesick by Michael Stuhlbarg. It is Broderick who gets that edge simply because they explored the more sublte nuances, and the visions of his egomaniac uncle Arthur, played by Clark Gregg, helped heigten the performance.

As far as the rest of the story, Dopesick handled that better. In Dopesick, you have a young girl who receives an injury at a mine. Kaitlyn Dever is phenomenal in that role, and Michael Keaton starred as a doctor who himself got addicted to OxyContin. Keaton as Dr. Finnix had much more of a plot than any one doctor did in Painkiller. In Painkiller, they presented the doctors as easy to manipulate by the seduction and enticing of the beautiful young women who made up Purdue's sales force.

Both featured real-life prosecutor storylines, and Dopesick handled that much better as well. Dopesick was much better thought out as an individual story while tackling the larger issue with the Sacklers. Painkiller tried to rely on more striking visuals and less development pertaining to the characters that made up the overall narrative. The Sackler family is one component of the story. While Broderick turned in a great and memorable performance, the rest of the cast of Painkiller felt forgotten, and that is due in large part to Dopesick telling this story so well.

The real tragedy here was and still remains the staggering number of people who are addicted to prescription painkiller medicines. Purdue Pharma is one instance of big pharma greed, but we need more education on addiction itself. Both shows were not afraid to show you how bad it was on the streets and just how addictive OxyContin is. As it is referred to in the series, it was like selling "Heroine in a pill form" and the real sadness stems from the fact so many deaths went ignored so one family could line their pockets.

#painkiller #Netflix #Dopesick #Hulu #matthew broderick #michael stuhlbarg #michael keaton #kaitlyn dever #richard sackler #purdue pharma

[madeupfromglue]

organs

#furry #furry art #gore #coyote #coyote furry #purdue pharma #USA #gorepup #blue #NSA

[paxlovid]

source

#data sheets #uploads #hydromorphone #medcore #medicalcore #medicine #medicore #pharma #pharmacology #pharmacore #pharmacy #pharmcore #pharmacycore #capsules #drugs #pills #analgesics #opioids #purdue pharma

[follow-up-news]

A federal appeals court cleared the way for the maker of OxyContin to settle thousands of legal claims tied to the opioid epidemic while shielding the wealthy owners of Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, from future lawsuits.

Under the plan approved Tuesday by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, members of the wealthy Sackler family would give up ownership of Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue, which would become a new company known as Knoa, with its profits being sent to a fund to prevent and treat addiction.

Family members would also contribute $5.5 billion to $6 billion in cash over time, or around half of what the court found to be their collective fortune, much of it held offshore. A chunk of that money — at least $750 million — is to go to individual victims of the opioid crisis and their survivors. Payments are expected to range from about $3,500 to $48,000.

Tuesday’s decision also protects members of the Sackler family from lawsuits over the toll of opioids, even though they did not file for bankruptcy.

The court’s ruling reversed a 2021 ruling that found bankruptcy court judges did not have the authority to approve a settlement that would offer bankruptcy protections for those who have not filed for bankruptcy.

Those protections are at the heart of the proposed deal that would end claims filed by thousands of state, local and Native American tribal governments and other entities. Sackler family members have been clear that without the protections, they won’t hold up their part of the deal.

#sackler family #purdue pharma #opioid epidemic

[kevrocksicehouse]

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

D: Laura Poitras (2022).

Addiction also drives Laura Poitras documentary portrait of photographer Nan Goldin, who ran away from a repressive dysfunctional family (after the suicide of her brilliant and beloved sister) and dove into the bohemian demimonde of Boston and New York chronicling the drug addicts, queers, drag queens, hookers, sex workers etc. of lower bohemia. As a photographer she smashed the difference between artist and subject showing the underground denizens as her makeshift family (and during the 80s and 90s AIDS crisis, the decimation of that family). The film tells her story but intercuts it with her current struggle against the drug corporation Purdue Pharma over their marketing of oxycontin which helped turn her into an opioid addict and nearly killed her. Her activism is focused on pressuring the most prestigious museums in the art world (many of which have hosted her work) to reject the endowments of the Sackler family, major art philanthropists who also control Purdue, as well as removing their names from museum exhibits. Poitras takes what could have been a messy mélange of themes and turns it into a strong depiction of an artist’s turn to activism. By the end when Goldin makes the Pharma board listen on Zoom to hours of testimony from victims of the opioid epidemic (you can see the blood drain from their face) the story seems to be one of a piece – the lifelong effort by the artist to make us look at the people who are supposed to be invisible and to see them.

#all the beauty and the bloodshed #laura poitras #nan goldin #sackler #purdue pharma #oxycontin #review #documentary #kevrock

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A proposed $150-million settlement with Purdue Pharma Canada covering all provinces and territories has been reached for the recovery of health-care costs related to the sale and marketing of opioid-based pain medication.

British Columbia Attorney General David Eby said Wednesday that it's the largest settlement of a governmental health-care cost claim in Canadian history.

"We know that no amount of money can bring back those who have died, but we are committed to holding corporations and others accountable for acts of alleged wrongdoing committed in the manufacturing and distribution of opioid products," Eby said in a statement Wednesday.

[...]

Officials claimed Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, downplayed the risks of its drugs when advertising them to physicians, especially when it comes to their addictive potential, contributing to the opioid crisis.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#Purdue Pharma #opiods crisis #Opioids #cdnpoli #canada #canadian news #canadian politics #canadian #Drugs #Addiction #British Columbia #BC NDP #OxyContin

[pendragonsclotpole]

i just finished watching dopesick, and i am so so heartbroken and aghast. the scene where the doctor asks to see billy again while in rehab and then tries to get pills from him made my mouth drop open. betsy’s family finding out about her death had me bawling. the actions of the sacklers and purdue pharma had me feeling like someone walked on my grace. not sure how much was real/embellished for the adaptation, but if even 1% of the purdue side of things was real, then fuck that company and that family and fuck the shitty regulations that allowed them to market such an addictive drug so easily. also fuck the way its made me wonder how much of the world around us is made up of shitty people willing to turn a blind eye for their own profit.

#dopesick #purdue #purdue pharma #sackler family #hulu #hulu dopesick

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Sacklers woulda gotten away with it if it wasn't for those darned meddling feds

The saga of the Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.

But there's an unexpected twist to this tale. After the Sacklers procured a sham bankruptcy that denied their victims the right to sue while leaving their fortune largely intact, the Supreme Court – yes, this Supreme Court – saw through the scam and froze the process, pending a full hearing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/us/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-opioid-settlement.html

The Sacklers basically invented modern, legal dope peddling. Arthur Sackler, the family's original crime-boss, revived the practice of direct-to-consumer drug marketing, dormant since the death of the medicine show, to peddle Valium. An aggressive and shrewd lobbyist, Arthur built the family fortune and, more importantly, its connections:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-sackler-family-built-a-pharma-dynasty-and-fueled-an-american-calamity/

A generation later, the family's business company created Oxycontin, and procured misleading and false research about the drug's safety kickstarting the opioid epidemic, whose American body-count is closing in on a million dead. Armed with inflated claims about opioid safety, the Sacklers' pharma reps bribed, cajoled and tricked doctors into writing millions of prescriptions for oxy.

This scam had a natural best-before date. As ODs flooded America's ERs and bodies piled up in America's morgues, it became increasingly clear that something was rotten. The Sacklers pursued a multipronged campaign to keep the truth from coming to light, and to keep the billions flowing.

On the one hand, they hired McKinsey to find novel ways to encourage doctors to keep writing prescriptions and to convince pharmacists to turn a blind eye to abuse. McKinsey had all kinds of great ideas here, including paying pharma distributors cash bonuses for every overdose death in their territory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-opioids-settlement.html

When the issue of these deaths came up in public, the Sacklers blamed "criminal addicts" for their own misery, stigmatizing both people who desperately needed pain relief and the people who'd been deliberately hooked on the Sacklers' products. The legacy of this smear campaign is still with us, both in the contempt for people struggling with addiction and in the cruel barriers placed between people in unbearable agony and medical relief.

But mostly, the Sacklers kept their names out of it. They laundered their reputations by donating a homeopathic fraction of their vast drug fortune to art galleries and museums in a bid to make their names synonymous with good deeds.

The Sacklers didn't invent this trick. Think of the way that history's great monsters – Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Ford – are remembered today for the foundations and charities that bear their names, not for the untold misery they inflicted on their workers, their crimes against their customers, and the corruption of governments.

But the Sacklers made those Gilded Age barons seem like amateurs. They invented a modern elite philanthropy playbook that Anand Giridharadas documents in his must-read Winners Take All, about the charity-industrial complex that washes away an ocean of blood with a trickle of money:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

As part of this PR exercise, the individual Sacklers kept their names and images out of the public eye. For years, there were virtually no news-service photos of individual Sacklers. When journalists dared to criticize the family, they used vicious attack-lawyers to intimidate them into retractions and silence (I was threatened by the Sacklers' lawyers).

They also worked their media mogul pals, like Mike Bloomberg, who added their names to the "Friends of Mike" list that Bloomberg reporters were required to consult before writing negative coverage:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/29/friends-of-mike-enemies-of-the-people/#sacklerbergs

But Stein's Law says that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As lawsuits mounted, the Sacklers found themselves increasingly synonymous with death, not charitable works. But like any canny criminal, the Sacklers had a getaway plan.

First, they extracted vast sums from Purdue and shifted it into offshore financial secrecy havens:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

Even as this money was disappearing into legal black holes, the Sacklers demanded – and received – extraordinary protection from the courts, who aggressively sealed testimony and materials presented through discovery:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/

When this gambit finally failed, the Sacklers insisted that were down to their last $4 billion, and, with trillions in claims pending against them, they declared bankruptcy.

When a normal person declares bankruptcy, they are required to divest themselves of nearly everything of value they possess, and then still find themselves hounded by cruel arm-breakers who deluge them with threatening calls and letters:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

But for the richest people in America, bankruptcy is merely a way to cleanse one's balance sheet of liabilities for any atrocity you may have committed on the way, without giving up your fortune.

The Sacklers are a case-study in how a corrupt bankruptcy can be conducted.

Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.

First, they converted their victims' right to compensation into "property" that the Sacklers themselves owned. This transferred jurisdiction over these claims from the regular court system to the bankruptcy court. A bankruptcy judge – not a jury – would decide how much each of these claims was worth, and then what how much of that worth these victims (now recast as creditors) would be entitled to through the bankruptcy.

Thus tens of thousands of claims were nonconsensually settled without a trial, by an administrative judge with no criminal jurisdiction, not a federal judge who'd undergone Senate confirmation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

These "coercive restructuring techniques" are not available to everyday people who are drowning in student debt or credit-card bills – these are the exclusive purview of the wealthiest Americans, who enjoy a completely different bankruptcy system that is rigged in their favor.

Three judges – David Jones and Marvin Isgur of Houston and Bob Drain of New York – hear 96% of the country's large corporate bankruptcies:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html

These judges are unbelievably horny for corporations, embracing a legal theory "that casts the invention of the limited liability corporation alongside that of the steam engine as a paradigmatic development in the pursuit of prosperity":

https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

Now there are more than three bankruptcy judges in America, so how do the nation's biggest companies get their cases heard by these three enthusiastic Renfields for corporate vampirism?

They cheat.

For example: when GM was facing bankruptcy, it argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem, and got in front of Judge Drain.

The Sacklers were – characteristically – even more brazen. They really wanted to get their case in front of Judge Drain, the nation's most enthusiastic supporter of "third party releases," through which bankrupt billionaires can wipe the slate clean, securing dismissals of all claims by the people they wronged.

Drain is also uniquely hostile to independent examiners, "an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate 'fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3851339

If you're the Sacklers, hoping to keep two thirds of your billions and extinguish all claims by your victims, there is no better helpmeet than Judge Robert Drain of the Southern District of New York.

So, 192 days before filing for bankruptcy, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, New York (a company may claim jurisdiction in a specific court once they've operated a business there for 180 days).

Then they filed a bankruptcy in which they altered the metadata on their casefile, inserting the code for a Westchester county hearing into the machine-readable, human-invisible parts of the documents they uploaded to the federal Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system (they also captioned the case with "RDD, for "Robert D Drain").

They chose their judge, and the judge obliged. UCLA Law's Lynn LoPucki is one of the leading scholars of these bankruptcy "megacases," and has written extensively on why these three judges are so deferential to corporate criminals seeking to flense themselves of culpability. She sees judges like Drain motivated by "personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase – very appealing to certain personalities."

Thus, these judges are "willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…"

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/02870w66d

This kind of judge-shopping goes beyond the Sacklers; the cases that Drain and co preside over make a mockery of the idea of America as a land of equal justice. "Prepack" and "drive-through" bankruptcies are reliable get-out-of-jail-free cards for capitalism's worst monsters: private equity firms.

Whether PE murdered your grandmother by buying her care-home and putting each worker in charge of 30 seniors:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/portopiccolo-nursing-homes-maryland/2020/12/21/a1ffb2a6-292b-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html

or poisoned your kids by filling your neighborhood with carcinogens:

https://www.webmd.com/special-reports/ethylene-oxide/20190719/residents-unaware-of-cancer-causing-toxin-in-air

limited liability wipes the slate clean.

30% of America's bankruptcies are private equity companies using the bankruptcy system to wipe away claims for their misdeeds, while keeping a fortune, thanks to the shield of limited liability.

Take Millennium Health, JamesS lattery's fake drug-testing company, which promised to help nursing homes figure out whether seniors were abusing (or selling) their meds by testing their piss for angel dust and other drugs. Slattery defrauded Medicare and Medicaid for millions, borrowed $1.8 billion (Slattery got $1.3 billion of that). He eventually walked away from this fraud after paying a mere $256m to settle all claims, and kept a fortune in assets, including the 40 vintage planes his private company ("Pissed Away LLC" – I am not making this up) owned:

https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

For the wealthy, bankruptcy is the sport of kings, a way to skip out on consequences. For the poor, bankruptcy is an anchor – or a noose. This is by design: judges who preside over elite bankruptcies speak of their protagonists as heroic "risk takers" and tiptoe around any consequences, lest these titans be chained to a mortal's fate, costing us all the benefits of their entrepreneurial genius.

PE companies helped the Sacklers design their own bankruptcy strategy, and it was a standout, even by the standards of Bob Drain and his kangaroo bankruptcy court. But now, the Supreme Court has pumped the brakes on the whole enterprise.

The judges ruled that the exceptions the Sacklers took advantage of were intended for bankrupts in "financial distress" – not billionaires with vast fortunes hidden overseas. In so doing, the court threatens all manner of corrupt arrangements, from "the Boy Scouts, wildfires and allegations of sexual abuse in the church diocese — where third parties get a benefit from a bankruptcy they themselves aren’t going through.”

The case was brought by the DoJ's US Trustee Program, which lost in the Second Circuit when it tried to halt the Purdue bankruptcy and argued that the Sacklers themselves had to declare bankruptcy to discharge the claims against them.

Now the Supremes have hit pause on the bankruptcy the Second Circuit approved, and will hear the case themselves. It's only one step on a long road, but it's an unprecedented one. Some of the country's filthiest fortunes are riding on the outcome.

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” tomorrow (Aug 12) at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Image: Edwardx (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpentine_Sackler_Gallery,_June_2016_05.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#scotus #us trustee program #drive-through bankruptcy #coercive restructuring techniques #blood money #opioids #opioid epidemic #oxycontin #purdue pharma #elite philanthropy #reputation laundering #elite impunity #sacklers #judge drain #sdny #bankruptcy #bankruptcy shopping #friends of mike #pluralistic #debt #mckinsey

[jbfly46]

Purdue Pharma knew exactly how lawmakers would react to the opioid crisis they purposely manufactured. They have their hands in the oxycodone pot, the fentanyl pot, and the suboxone pot. They also knew suboxone wouldn’t work for fentanyl addicts. This was all planned. They want poor Americans suffering and in pain, and to them, poor is anyone with less than a few billion dollars of spendable cash.

#Purdue Pharma #oxycodone #fentanyl #pain #suffering #poverty #OxyContin #opioid crisis

[gwydionmisha]

#Purdue Pharma #Opioids #Canada #British Columbia #News

[asrarblog]

Opioid Crisis and Pharma Industry – Part 2 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #722

Opioid Crisis and Pharma Industry – Part 2 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #722

View On WordPress

#Asrar Qureshi #Blogpost722 #International Pharma Business #Mallinckrodt #Opioid Crisis #Opioids #Oxycodone #OxyContin #Pharma Industry #Pharma Marketing #Pharma Veterans #Purdue Pharma

[toxikose]

Autounfälle? Schießereien? Nein: Die häufigste vermeidbare Todesursache bei Amerikanern unter 50 sind Drogenüberdosen. Zwischen April 2020 und April 2021 starben daran erstmals mehr als 100 000 Menschen innerhalb eines Jahres - über 270 am Tag. Das ist die vernichtende Bilanz der sogenannten Opioid-Epidemie, die seit zwei Jahrzehnten in den USA grassiert. Wie ihr Name verrät, zeichnen dem Opium verwandte Substanzen für drei von vier der tödlichen Überdosen verantwortlich, neben Heroin zuletzt vor allem das bis zu fünfzigmal stärkere Fentanyl.

Doch die Krise ist nicht in erster Linie das Kind von Schwarzmärkten und dubiosen Drogendealern. Ausgelöst hat sie der Pharmakonzern Purdue mit einem verschreibungspflichtigen Schmerzmittel namens OxyContin - und mit Methoden, die weniger an Medizin erinnern als vielmehr an die Mafia. In seinem Buch "Empire of Pain" enthüllt der investigative Journalist und Schriftsteller Patrick Radden Keefe in bislang unbekanntem Ausmaß, wie die renommierte Inhaberfamilie Sackler hunderttausende Amerikaner in die Drogensucht stürzte und sich daran unbehelligt bereicherte.

#Purdue #Purdue Pharma #Opioidkrise #Opioide #Schmerzmittel #Valium

[haute-lifestyle-com]

Jeremy Renner Set to Star As Investigative Journalist who Broke the Perdue Pharma Story #janetwalker #hautelifestylecom #theentertainmeentzonecom #jeremyrenner #filmmaking #sacklerfamily #opioidcrisis

#janet walker #haute-lifestyle.com #the-entertainment-zone.com #jeremy renner #david armstrong #pulitzer prize #purdue pharma

[follow-up-news]

The Supreme Court on Thursday temporarily blocked a nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that would shield members of the Sackler family who own the company from civil lawsuits over the toll of opioids. The justices agreed to a request from the Biden administration to put the brakes on an agreement reached last year with state and local governments. In addition, the high court will hear arguments before the end of the year over whether the settlement can proceed. The deal would allow the company to emerge from bankruptcy as a different entity, with its profits used to fight the opioid epidemic. Members of the Sackler family would contribute up to $6 billion. But a key component of the agreement would shield family members, who are not seeking bankruptcy protection as individuals, from lawsuits. The U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee, represented by the Justice Department, opposes releasing the Sackler family from legal liability. The justices directed the parties to address whether bankruptcy law authorizes a blanket shield from lawsuits filed by all opioid victims.

#supreme court #purdue pharma #opioid epidemic #sackler family