
U.S. states seek $2.2T from OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma - grecy
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purdue-pharma-investigations-opioids/u-s-states-seek-2-2-trillion-from-oxycontin-maker-purdue-pharma-filings-idUSKCN25D2EG
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trynumber9
>Purdue is only worth a bit more than $2 billion if liquidated. The company
values a proposal to settle litigation, which includes providing addiction
treatment and overdose-reversing drugs, at more than $10 billion. The Sacklers
would contribute $3 billion and cede control of Purdue, with the company
becoming a trust run on behalf of plaintiffs.

>Those financial realities underscore that Purdue does not have enough money
to satisfy the myriad claims against it.

~~~
milofeynman
The Sacklers knew this was coming and have been moving money around for years.
Here is just one example: [https://www.npr.org/2019/09/14/760794331/sackler-
family-tran...](https://www.npr.org/2019/09/14/760794331/sackler-family-
transferred-money-to-swiss-bank-accounts-new-york-ag-says) But I've read they
have been doing corporate shuffling as well.

~~~
defen
I thought they didn't make Swiss bank accounts like they used to? e.g. FATCA
means you can't really use Swiss bank accounts to hide assets any more (at
least not if that bank wants to participate in the international banking
system)

~~~
jraby3
There are other ways to hide money now. Fatca is one way, allowing the US to
get info but not forced to share it.

So the new way is to have a US company (from Nevada, Wyoming, etc.) with at
least one foreign partner.

If you’re interested in this I suggest reading Moneyland by Oliver Bullough.

~~~
blaser-waffle
I've heard a good one is to get a foreign company -- one you're in cahoots
with, obviously -- to sue you... and you lose. Judgements across borders
generally are hands off, and there are easy ways to keep that money out of the
IRS once settlements are involved.

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seigando
It's kind of amazing how much of our culture is predicated on consumer
exploitation. Justice and reparations seem like a pipe dream.

~~~
throwaway815190
Even if you were to get it, what would that change? The culture of consumer
exploitation would still be there. How do you change something that's been a
cultural cornerstone for over a century?

~~~
seigando
That's what justice and reparations means to me. Changing the culture.

~~~
Nasrudith
That implies punishing people but neither the crime nor the workable
alternatives have been clearly established.

"Exploitation" is a word so overused and often paired with many economic
fallacies including feudal ones that merchants had to be ripping people off to
make a profit because of the cost of transport plus a "universal fixed price"
assumption.

~~~
seigando
...I mean if someone is dependent on your service and there aren't viable
alternatives or a means of making a viable alternative, and your pricing is
exploitative and meant to siphon away customer's money so you can get rich at
their expense, maybe the issue is that you don't believe 'exploitation' exists
because of how much you love money over regular people.

------
ferros
Why even declare such an outlandish number?

What’s the difference between saying 2.2T or a gajillion bazillion?

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
What makes you think it's outlandish? It's certainly possible that it's a
approximate monetary evaluation of the harm caused.

~~~
loeg
It's more than 10% 2018 US entire GDP.

~~~
happytoexplain
In what way is that evidence that the harm caused can not sum to the number
given? You could also figure out how tall it would be as a stack of ones, but
it's supremely irrelevant.

~~~
lb1lf
-Just a tad shy of 150,000 miles tall, since you ask.

(A dollar bill is .0043in thick, so unless imperial unit-challenged me messed
up doing the conversions, it should be almost 2/3 of the way from Earth to The
Moon.)

This would be awfully inconvenient, though - if you use $100 bills instead,
you'd have a still very inconvenient, but more manageable stack of 1,500
miles.

More manageable still would be to just put the ones in a warehouse - they'd
require 88M cubic feet of space, or a cube with sides of 445ft. It should fit
nicely inside the Saturn V Vehicle Assembly Building.

------
dantheman
I wonder what would have happened if drugs were just legal, and anyone could
buy whatever they wanted.

~~~
colechristensen
Look into Portugal.

~~~
filoeleven
Portugal did not legalize the sale, possession, and use of drugs. For those
already addicted, they changed possession from a criminal to an administrative
offense. So it’s decriminalized in one aspect, but far from legal. Producing
and selling drugs is still illegal and still targeted.

Their system sounds a damn sight more beneficial to society than ours, but
it’s still a far cry from the “all drugs are legal” experiment being proposed
here.

My instinct says that “legalize and regulate” works better for the vast
majority of drugs, and “decriminalize possession but not sale or manufacture”
for the rest. There wouldn’t be much call for meth if MDMA or coca products
were cheap and legal. Opiates wouldn’t be spiked with fentanyl if they were
regulated. This is just my guess, and I wish I had data to point to. Maybe
something can be extrapolated from Portugal’s outcomes, but the situation is
not the same.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal)

------
donatj
Opiates in and of themselves are relatively safe, only slightly worse for you
than caffeine, although clearly (arguably?) more addictive. They have very few
long-term effects and the biggest negative health impact being constipation.

There's a madness in society right now, akin to the reefer madness of the
early 20th century. The negative of opiates themselves have been blown
ludicrously out of proportion.

I think we've cast far too negative light on opiates and too little light on
the damage that's actually caused by their prohibition and thus people seeking
street drugs.

We've gone so far in the wrong direction that people with actual pain are
being denied opiates. People are forced to suffer in order to avoid what,
constipation?

We should be both easing people off of opiates, and providing them to people
in genuine pain.

~~~
obmelvin
You make it sound like there's a problem with the people getting addicted, not
the systemic overprescription of addictive drugs to unwitting patients who
followed the authority of naive, at best, or even malicious medical
professionals.

~~~
donatj
The doctors and drug companies make easy scapegoats, but if a person came to
you in genuine pain, living an absolutely miserable life, and you __knew
__without a doubt you could stop it, could you in good moral standing with
yourself choose to keep this human being in pain?

I certainly could not, I am not so heartless, and I certainly hope the same of
my own doctors.

I think we forgot that by and large near all these people were in genuine
pain. It’s easy to disparage them from the sidelines, but walk a mile in their
shoes.

~~~
rbranson
The whole point of having the prescription drug system is so that patients can
be provided with safe, monitored access to potentially dangerous drugs. The
entire purpose of a doctor being involved in the system is to prevent the
outcome we are experiencing, otherwise they'd just sell these things over the
counter.

------
bobobob420
We need criminal indictments, where are the prosecutors

~~~
colechristensen
They’re chickenshits driven by win rates and overburdened courts so they don’t
prosecute anything that isn’t certainly won before it’s even started... while
also avoiding prosecutions that might threaten jobs.

~~~
bobobob420
I agree. It is a shame things are this way. I wonder what the solution could
be? Maybe developing an extremely educated society will help in the future
mitigate this as people will have higher standards. I cannot think of anything
else that will allow for natural change of this and I doubt we will see forced
change by anyone.

------
asldkjaslkdj
The Sackler family should be completely liquidated. They acted with complete
disregard and caused an unbelievable amount of pain. To think, there are
people in prison for marijuana charges and these people still walk free. It's
an absurd injustice.

~~~
Mizza
> The Sackler family should be completely liquidated.

This, but literally.

~~~
metiscus
Let's not do this here. We're better than this.

~~~
throwaway8941
Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one)
that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes
perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support
against death penalty would be close to nil.

~~~
cm2012
Plenty of people deserve to die. Problem is we are awful at accurately knowing
who those people are.

------
dirtnugget
Well if this goes through they are definitely bankrupt.

~~~
Supermancho
Purdue is, the Sacklers (ostensible owners) are not.

~~~
cmehdy
"Companies are not people" is the best way the world has been swindled into
this sort of chaos. If people profit from the company, the company is people.
Purdue could entirely go down or not, but I'd much rather see the people who
most benefited from it being the ones actually going down.

Companies aren't evil, they're just things. We don't jail guns for killing
people, we jail people for killing people. Why in hell should this be any
different when money is involved ?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Companies aren't evil, they're just things. We don't jail guns for killing
> people, we jail people for killing people. Why in hell should this be any
> different when money is involved ?

The general idea goes like this. Suppose you take out a car loan from the
bank, then you drive recklessly and cause more damage than you have assets or
insurance. Should the victims be able to go after the bank? Only if you don't
want anybody to be able to get a car loan.

And it's the same thing with corporations. Do you want your retirement account
to be able to hold index funds? With unlimited liability you can forget about
it, because you'd end up being a minority shareholder in everything including
whatever the next company to blow up the world economy is, and thereby get
wiped out.

So that's the idea. You should be able to invest in something and limit your
exposure to the amount invested.

And that's not even the problem here. What we're wanting to happen here isn't
to wipe out some grandma who happened to own two shares of Purdue Pharma, it's
to get after the people actually responsible for doing the deed, i.e. the
managers of the company who actually made the decisions rather than the non-
manager shareholders. But that is, in principle, already possible. If you
incorporate a murder for hire company and then try to assert corporate limited
liability when they come for you, good luck with that.

The real problem is that once a company has figured out that it's going down,
it can engage in a lot of complicated restructuring that makes it hard to suss
out where the money has gone by the time you get around to actually pinning
the liability to them. But they'd be able to do the same thing with contracts
and such regardless of limited liability. It's a hard problem, and the
hardness isn't where you think it is.

~~~
cmehdy
I should be responsible for where I put my money, and to the extent of the
support I brought to whatever entity committed something illegal I should be
paying for it. Isn't the market supposedly full of rational actors? Those
people surely know where not to put their money then, and the others can pay
for the mistake. Does that mean a lot less "safe" options are available to
people wanting to put their money somewhere? Yes it does, and I would argue
that's a benefit to everyone.

The difference between the loan and the investment is that I took a loan
because I couldn't afford paying for it cash, otherwise there's no reason I
would augment my costs and risks (although you're going to tell me that there
are ways to restructure financing to come out on top, which is exactly back to
my initial point). I'm basically making a sub-optimal choice that, for a
rational actor, implies coercion (i.e. I have to do it in order to get to my
job, for example).

Investment is money that I say I have and consciously decide to put into the
system in order to make a profit, so the comparison falls flat. Why is it that
we should be for example "eco-conscious" when it comes to our consumption
(what you eat, what you buy, and so on) and not our investments?

The real bullshit in this system is that we've added layers where we bet on
the lack of rationality of the actors while designing systems that have that
(broken) assumption baked into it.

The problem is hard because we're being wilfully ignorant, not because it's
magically beyond human beings.

------
innagadadavida
Given the seriousness of this issue, why ain’t the congress probing these guys
instead of going after a bunch of tech companies? The priorities seem to
skewed here.

~~~
eggsmediumrare
They can, and should, do both.

------
0xy
The Sacklers paying $3 billion is a joke. They have a net worth of $13
billion, most of which is proceeds from ostensibly an illegal drug trafficking
operation targeting poor communities.

There's enough evidence of criminal behaviour by the Sackler family personally
to warrant piercing the corporate veil and going after Sackler family assets.

They should be in jail. They have killed substantially more people than COVID.

