Op-Ed: Who is responsible for the opioid crisis, and who ultimately pays? (via latimesopinion)
In 2013, I was researching a book about the opioid epidemic and found myself with a lawyer touring a neighborhood known as the Bottoms in the town of Lucasville in southern Ohio.
Meanwhile, few families anywhere, of any economic class, wanted to speak about their loved ones’ addictions, their repeated treatments, their street lives and overdose deaths. They were ashamed and they hid, certain that they were alone.So I remember walking the Bottoms convinced that the Sacklers were impervious to legal reproach. They were anonymous members of the American One Percent.
I remembered the Bottoms when I heard the recent resolution to lawsuits brought by 15 state attorneys general. Purdue, as we know it, would cease to exist. The family would put up $4.5 billion to those states for treatment and prevention. Many millions of internal documents from Purdue and its Sackler-dominated board would be made public online.
The Sacklers, meanwhile, took hundreds of millions of dollars from Purdue every year — some $4 billion in total — which the company could have used to fund R&D and diversify away from opioids. Yet no amount of cash seemed ever enough for the Sackler board members. They flogged their sales force to ever-greater effort.
The money Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family are putting up seems to me small potatoes given the incalculable damage. Opioid addiction, meanwhile, has morphed into an epidemic of addiction to synthetic drugs produced in Mexico.
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