The Sackler family. Synthetic opioids. OxyContin. Purdue Pharma.
“More than 81,000 people died from drug overdoses between June 2019 and May 2020 in the United States according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)”
“The leading factor in this rise in deaths has been attributed to the use of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. The number of synthetic opioid deaths rose by 38.4 percent from the 12-month period ending in May 2019 compared to the 12-month period ending in May 2020.”
Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, Empire of Pain, examines the “ – naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the word’s great fortunes.”
in 2019, in the US alone, there were 49,860 deaths/overdoses from opioid drugs. Hundreds of thousands have died from this “national emergency”.
The Sackler family has been the most tenacious pioneer & manufacturer of both synthetic opioids, and the synthetic opioid epidemic. They have also been the beneficiaries of the largest profits from synthetic opioids, the leading organizer & architect of the market around them ,& indeed it’s regulatory framework & public image.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from overdosing on synthetic opioids. Millions more have been obliterated, sickened, & reduced to chronic addiction & dependency.
The full cost of the “pandemic” in the US is estimated at over $2 trillion.
The Sacklers have always been big on philanthropy. Big donations & sponsorships – to museums, to art galleries, to universities etcetera – have been a staple of the Sackler strategy for decades.
It has worked very well for them & their public presentation.
Reputation laundering.
Like many other large, rich & persistent menacers – Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Charles & David Koch – the Sacklers have found themselves on the wrong side of the law & landed-up in court over the years. The first occasion for the Sacklers was for misselling, false marketing & dishonesty, where a ridiculously potent, immensely addictive & dangerous drug was being aggressively marketed & expanded as a mild, trap-all, easy cure for almost any pain.
As with Monsanto/Glyphosate (& so many others), they paid the fines/plaintiffs (a pittance compared to their profits) & just carried straight on killing.
Ask yourself this…… why are these guys never stopped at the first major offence? Or only once it reaches the Hitler stages?
It is as if “prevention” does not even exist.
After a combination of extraordinary amounts of activism, the persistent efforts of nemesis-prosecutors that relentlessly pursued justice & avoided the behind-the-curtains sabotage, along with the swelling body-count, wrecked communities, smashed families, junky colonies & trashed lives that became to desperate to downplay, the company once again found itself in court, staring down, literally, thousands of law suits.
It looked like the end, but the worst, & largest, offenders always seem to have a Houdini handy to disgrace justice. Delays, technicalities, hordes of lawyers & subterranean-back-room machinations aside, it appeared that the Sacklers were to get hammered with a “record fine” & cascade of settlements, but – walk free and – astonishingly, perversely – avoid jail, & get to remain in possession of billions of death profits by claiming “bankruptcy” & stashing profits off-shore & in foreign properties.
And then it got even scummier. Hidden away on pages 420-421, & strangely not included in the index, Patrick informs us that –
“As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietely negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believe to be a miscarriage of justice.”
yeah. The Tart of the Deal had taken a backhander to let the mass-murderers waltz-off with their bloody billions. Who’s surprised? Rudi Giuliani was touting pardons for a million dollars…what else would you expect from that sewer. & how ironic that the white working-class communities that have been so devastated by the opioid epidemic are the very same crux-component of Trump’s supporters. Then again, it was Steve Bannon that would defraud thousands of Trump supporters through the We Build the Wall scam, & Trump went on to pardon him too. With Rupert Murdoch there to instantly distract, misdirect, retard & smother every crime, calamity, falsity & act of corruption, whilst the online micro-targeting blizzard lashes already addled brains, it does not seem to matter.
Empire of Pain is an incredible account of how these demon-spawn rigged the entire regulatory process, subverted watchdogs, bought-off government departments, forged research results & confected official data whilst sterilizing the crime scene with philanthropy (two Sacklers have been given a knighthood by the verminous House of Windsor & one received France’s Légion d’honneur).
It shows us how obscenely impotent the law is for dealing with these monstrous mass-murdering corporate threats & that the odds remain stacked in their favour with justice & public safety completely on the back foot in the face of protective market sanctuary that benefit the wrongdoer.
Is it any wonder that their has been so much “hesitancy” over the fast-tracked, “emergency law” vaccine? If this is the rate of safety, the quality of justice, when the bastards are caught red-handed? & the results are hundreds of thousands dead, data falsified, no jail time & billions kept? This is the extent of the protection we are afforded.
Insanity. Travesty. Doom. Downfall.
“Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman [Mexican drug lord], who had recently been convicted in a New York federal court. “El Chapo got a life sentence, and he is going to forfeit $12 billion,” – “The Sackler family through Purdue has three felony convictions, but no one is going to jail, and it has its billions still.”
Patrick Radden Keefe, 2021, Picador, 441 pages.