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liberalsarecool · 5 months

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Republicans spread trauma.

#suicide prevention #mental health #opioid epidemic #death penalty #poverty

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feminismisstillahatemovement · 1 month

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#opioid epidemic #racism

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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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

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tcfkag · 8 months

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With Netflix's Painkiller coming out, consider this your friendly reminder from your neighborhood chronic pain patient:

(a) we deserve to be seen,

(b) we deserve to have our pain treated, and

(c) we deserve to be treated with respect instead of suspicion or outright hostility in medical settings and in society as well. While I will not and never have trivialized the consequences of the opioid epidemic, the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that chronically ill and disabled people are paying for the mistakes that regulators and the medical field made two or three decades ago. Our pain is dismissed and our treatment options are taken away or limited in more and more arbitrary ways because if regulators can't stop illicit fentanyl, by God they need to look like they're doing something. So that something is ever stricter limits and regulations on the medical treatments that chronic pain patients need. Just something to keep in mind; there are many faces to the opioid epidemic and not all of us are just one pain pill away from inevitable addiction and overdose.

#chronic pain #spoonie #chronic illness #opioid epidemic #pain management #painkiller #chronic pain is a bitch

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follow-up-news · 4 months

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Consulting firm McKinsey & Co has agreed to pay $78 million to resolve claims by U.S. health insurers and benefit plans that it fueled an epidemic of opioid addiction through its work for drug companies including OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma. The settlement was disclosed in papers filed on Friday in federal court in San Francisco. It marked the last in a series of settlements McKinsey has reached resolving lawsuits over the U.S. opioid epidemic. Plaintiffs accused McKinsey, one of the leading global consulting firms, of contributing to the deadly drug crisis by helping drug manufacturers including Purdue Pharma design deceptive marketing plans and boost sales of painkillers. McKinsey previously paid $641.5 million to resolve claims by state attorneys general and another $230 million to resolve claims by local governments. It has also settled cases by Native American tribes. Friday’s class action settlement, which requires a judge’s approval, resolves claims by so-called third-party payers like insurers that provide health and welfare benefits.

#mckinsey #opioid epidemic

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slayerchick303 · 11 months

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Now that the FDA has FINALLY lifted the ban on men who have sex with men from donating blood, I think it's fitting to revisit this infuriating and heartbreaking scene from Queer as Folk from 2005.

I would be remiss if I did not also mention that since 2022, cishet people have been contracting HIV at greater rates than queer and/or trans people.

I know LGBTQ+ people who credit the US Queer as Folk with teaching them safe-sex practices and the importance of them. That's horrible and an indictment of society, but at least some queer and/or trans people who were isolated from the LGBTQ+ community could find Queer as Folk, and learn things men who had sex with men were already aware of in an accurate way.

Unfortunately, the failure of education LGBTQ+ people experience from society is becoming more and more prevalent with cishet young people now, as sex education classes are slashed or limited to abstinence-only all across the US. Sexual health centers, such as Planned Parenthood, are being closed, and crisis pregnancy centers that spread actual misinformation about STIs and abortion are taking their place. They harm people (cishet and LGBTQ+ alike) by pretending to offer sex education information, safe-sex tools, STI screenings, and abortions but they do not actually do so. Not to mention, many young people are taught, if not directly by family/peers, then indirectly by society, that only men who have sex with men can contract HIV.

Many cishet people don't even know the risk that needle sharing poses because they were given little to no education on HIV prevention because they weren't considered to be "at-risk." This is particularly harmful because the opioid epidemic has led to a surge in needle sharing. Queer and/or trans people spread all the knowledge about contracting HIV that we could amongst ourselves, and made sure that knowledge endured to future generations, because we watched our community die while cishet people didn't care or celebrated our deaths. We LGBTQ+ people want to protect each other and ourselves, and we'll continue to do so. We're teaching young LGBTQ+ people about the importance of PreP, getting tested, lubricants, dental dams, using condoms, and not sharing recreational drugs (along with the many dangers in taking certain recreational drugs).

The ban on men who have sex with men giving blood was horribly unjust, and it's well past time it was repealed. Now, we need to make sure that the education we were denied and still have to largely perpetuate in the community ourselves spreads to cishet people because their own leaders are hurting their health.

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potuzzz · 7 months

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Tysm for the essay you wrote that person who asked if/why America is fascist. It was really validating. Sometimes I feel so crazy because I know I live in a literal fascist country but everyone thinks I'm overreacting. The pain of that gaslighting is something I don't know what to do with. It's so personal. I've considered moving to another country just to get away from the hatred I feel.

Yes, it seeps into every facet of our life here. It is crazy-making. Not to say it is impossible to be at peace with an enjoy a life living in America, but it is in spite of the fundamental fascism that has been cooking and cooking and cooking for hundreds of years to this day.

I think the true genius of American fascism is how invisible it is to most. USA saw the Nazis, and said, "nice try, kiddo, but really, be a little more subtle about it next time, okay?" Even we kill people on an industrial scale--endless wars, supporting fascist violence at home and abroad against all vulnerable peoples, suicide, drug epidemic, overstress from work, police, homelessness, border camps, poverty violence/crime, slave prisons, chemicals lacing our food and water and air, not to mention the climate change America disproportionately caused--but our hundreds of millions of dead are not tallied the same way Holocaust victims were. America took the recipe for evil and perfected it by giving it a sugary face.

Unfortunately things will get much worse before they get better, so for people who have nothing tying them here, or who don't want to die as partisans, moving to another country is not a bad idea. I myself have flirted with the idea of leaving the West but realistically I will probably be staying here.

Thank YOU so much for the kind words, I'm used to my ask box just being lazy demands for me to kill myself. Best wishes, stay sane!

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memenewsdotcom · 11 months

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Sackler family granted immunity

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#America #drugs #health #meme #memes #news #opioid #opioid epidemic #overdose #OxyContin #pharmaceutical #sackler #united states

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pregnant-and-addicted · 7 months

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I screwed up and didn't make it to the Methadone clinic on Saturday, which means I didn't have a take home dose for today, Sunday, because they're closed... Which means I had no choice but to spend $50 bucks on a sack of Fentanyl to get me through the weekend because going into withdrawal is said to either cause fetal demise or pre-term labor and all my doctors have advised against cold turkey withdrawal as the absolute worst thing and most damaging thing that an addicted mom can do... Ironic, isn't it? It's the first time I've ever encountered medical professionals telling me not to get clean... I certainly doubt that it's something that too many people in the public are familiar with and likely wouldn't be able to wrap their heads around because on first thought it seems to defy all sense of basic logic and common sense but alas, it is the current accepted medical opinion in the USA regarding pregnant women with opioid tolerance, opioid dependence and opioid addiction... I still feel guilty about the situation though even though it wasn't exactly entirely my fault that I missed the clinic. It's a hard thing to stick with and have perfect attendance though with no exceptions for illness or family emergencies or anything else though. I will absolutely NOT miss getting there tomorrow, Monday, and me and the baby's dad will do everything in our power to not miss any days this coming week!

*fingers crossed*