The Needs Of The Few Outweigh The Many: Opioid Sacklers Are Still Selling Rx Worldwide
The billionaire drug kingpins remain wealthy and free despite being found liable for 500,000 deaths and ordered to pay $6 billion in settlements for their addiction-based opioid business model.
Do you remember the Star Trek film where Spock sacrificed his own life to save the Enterprise, telling his best friend Kirk, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?”
We’re living in a world that’s the exact opposite.
Among us are people who amass massive fortunes and live lives that nearly all of Earth’s 8 billion people can’t comprehend. Their wealth and prestige all derive from the physical, psychological, and economic exploitation of millions of others and our very planet.
People talk about “capitalism.” There’s a level beyond pure financial exploitation, and its best-known practitioners are the opioid Sackler family.
In some cases, these billionaires have become incalculably wealthy and powerful through the exploitation, destruction of life, and ultimate death of hundreds of thousands of people.
I’ve been thinking for several months how to phrase the concept. Our society seems able to understand and has developed laws to punish and systems to incarcerate people who kill others on a direct, individual basis. We see many television dramas and films about the hunt for and capture of serial killers. It’s an entire literary genre (true crime).
A few deluded individuals worship serial killers. But overall, nearly all people regard a serial killer as someone who should be ostracized, cut off from society, and in cultures that believe in capital punishment, put to death in legal processes.
The worst U.S. serial killer is generally regarded as Samuel Little, who confessed to murdering 93 women over five decades. When he was finally arrested, many people wondered, “How could this man kill so many people without being apprehended for so many years?”
Most news articles concluded that Little was able to operate freely until he was an elderly man because he targeted poor and homeless women, prostitutes, and drug addicts.
Society’s “throwaways.”
There are still some individuals who blame Little’s victims for their plight.
Has anyone referred to the Opioid Sacklers as mass killers for profit? This is the way most news reports refer to drug cartel leaders.
El Chapo may be infamous. He’s also serving life in ADX Florence Super Max prison in Colorado.
In contrast, the Sackler family are likely to have killed many more people and destroyed the lives of ten times this number. They are all still free and all still billionaires.
In 2019, as an outgrowth of books I wrote on the opioid epidemic, fentanyl, and drug treatment, I wrote a series of articles about the Sackler family and their business model of profit from addiction and a slow, agonizing death from opioid dependency.
At that time, U.S. states, cities, counties, and Native American tribes had sued the Sackler family in a series of lawsuits which revealed the truth about Purdue Pharma (just one of the multi-billionaire family’s pharmaceutical companies) and the Sackler “business” practices which had created such wealth for them.
In 2019, the official U.S. death toll from opioid overdose was estimated at 200,000 since 1999. It is now four years later and the CDC estimates the opioid overdose has reached 645,000. I can calculate just as you can: the death toll has tripled in the past four years.
The Sacklers are cold-blooded mass predators. All of this company’s founders were physicians who understood the body’s natural opioid system better than any of the physicians who prescribed their drugs. They formulated their drugs like OxyContin for the maximum dependency and maximum addiction potential.
The greater the level of dependency, the more OxyContin pain patients needed to take, and the more they or their insurance companies would have to pay.
In recent years, restrictions on home prescriptions of OxyContin and similar drugs forced people who were already in severe pain and already dependent on the medication to turn to less-expensive street drugs.
This was convenient for the Sacklers, who sought to demonize anyone taking street drugs or who had a dependency problem as a “criminal addict.” Recorded depositions of Richard Sackler, and his instructions to the company’s large, well-funded salesforce show the purely-profit motivated approach of Purdue Pharma which included pay-to-play for “super prescribers,” demonization of anyone dependent upon or addicted to their medication, and targeting of patients who did not require the medication but who were more likely to become dependent and addicted: the elderly and veterans. It’s why the Sacklers were ordered to pay $6 billion in civil penalties to U.S. states, counties, cities, and Native American tribes: money they’ll probably never pay—they’ve filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying, and also want to avoid any future prosecution of any type.
Imagine if serial killer Samuel Little could have done that—he’d still be free!
note: Little died in prison in 2020
It’s time to talk about self-protection. As a society, we have been unable to socially or group-protect ourselves against Sackler-type mass predators. Of course individuals who know they have a tendency to become dependent upon (dependency doesn’t mean you’re an “addict” it means you require more and more of a drug dose to achieve the same effect—your body “gets used to” a medication) certain drugs know they shouldn’t start taking drugs like OxyContin in the first place.
We have all been brought up to trust authority figures: physicians, attorneys, law enforcement officers, elected officials, CEOs, priests and pastors.
While not every drug maker has the murderous intent that was baked into the Sackler’s Purdue Pharma and their generic drug making subsidiaries, other companies like Johnson & Johnson (J & J) have received hundreds of thousands of personal injury lawsuits based on products like baby powder, breast implants, hip implants, and Tylenol. Johnson & Johnson bought the Belgian company Janssen Pharmaceuticals in 1961, about a year after the company invented a powerful opioid to relieve post-surgery pain in the hospital. Maybe you’ve heard of this drug. It’s called fentanyl.
Does Johnson & Johnson have the same malevolent attitude toward the public that reeks from every statement of Richard Sackler, and is found in their board meeting minutes?
I don’t know. But they have many products which have caused untold harm. They are also more than 70% owned by “institutional investors,” i.e. investment banks and funds. The Sacklers were probably able to be sued more successfully than other companies like J & J because Purdue Pharma remains privately-held, a “family-owned” company.
In order to engage in any recovery or health process, it’s important to understand the true situation.
Let’s take a widely-known and trusted medication: Tylenol (Johnson & Johnson).
Did you know there are hundreds of lawsuits against J & J right now that allege that Tylenol, prescribed to pregnant women, caused autism, ADHD, or other similar cognitive problems in their babies?
Should pregnant women take Tylenol as they were practically ordered to do in previous years? Probably not: especially not on a daily basis.
None of us should take any medication every day unless we absolutely have to. One self-protection measure should be to try to follow good personal health practices that help us avoid the need for daily over-the-counter or prescribed medications. If we are prescribed any medication, it’s up to us to learn as much as possible about it and to do our best to either use it to our best benefit, or discontinue it if it has more negative than positive effects.
We cannot trust any prescription drug company to tell us the truth or to make a safe medication. The last time the U.S. FDA did anything to directly protect U.S. people against a dangerous medication was 1961 when Frances Oldham Kelsey refused to approve the sale and use of thalidomide in the U.S.
Let me put it to you this way: Johnson & Johnson knew that there was asbestos in their baby powder since the 1950s. They kept making it. They kept selling it. They are still selling it.
Or let me put it to you another way: Sackler Purdue Pharma employees wrote the report that FDA officials put their names on for the approval of OxyContin in 1996. That was uncovered in the 2007 Federal prosecution of the company that ordered Purdue Pharma to stop marketing the drug under false and illegal pretenses.
What year is it again, and how many billions have the Sacklers been ordered to pay that they have not yet paid? $6 billion. They withdrew $11 billion from their company in 2020. Maybe they have spent it all, like El Chapo did before he went to Federal prison.
Bruce was given Oxycodone in the hospital following his spine surgery. One nurse was particularly fond of it and wanted to advocate for giving him more.
“That’s OxyContin,” I told him. He’d started to ask for it even when he wasn’t in much pain.
Fortunately, he stopped taking it.
Yes, they are still selling OxyContin.
If you are receiving any prescription medication at all, you can help to protect yourself by doing whatever you can to stop needing to take it, whether this includes losing weight, becoming more fit, or seeking alternatives to pills for depression and anxiety.
If you have funds invested in this type of company, you can also withdraw them and invest them in some other company or industry that at least is not making profit off slow, insidious death and addiction.
I get why people feel anxious and depressed.
Whether we know it explicitly as I do, or merely have a “feeling” or “instinct,” deadly, vicious serial killers are stalking each and every one of us for their own personal financial benefit. They just kill more slowly and insidiously than lone stranglers and rapists like Samuel Little.
And just like Little, they blame every victim for their plight. They also lure victims similarly to Little, with false promises of money or other desirable things—the Sacklers promised a pain-free life.
And delivered something very different.
The Sacklers could get away with what they did for so long chiefly because they were wealthy enough to buy off public officials to look the other way. The $6 billion settlement is probably just pocket change to them.
In contrast, Little did not have the financial resources to do the same, which is why he ended up in jail and they still aren't there yet.
It's been said that democracy has no defense against money. It certainly doesn't have any against the unmitigated purist capitalism that's been slowly absorbing everything since I was a kid.
The only justice the Sacklers will ever see, if any, will be vigilante. Everybody and everything else is too in thrall of, or dependent upon, their money.