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The EPA values one human life at $10M. A conservative estimate of the number of people killed by the Sackler family's companies (testified in court) was ~~245,000~~ Edit: probably at least 100,000, see below. So if opiates were environmental pollutants, the Sacklers would be on the hook for $1T in damages. Their immediate settlement was $6B.

Roughly three orders of magnitude too small.




Attributing every single opioid overdose to solely the Sackler family is so laughably ludicrous it's hard to take this comment seriously.


The number of opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2021 was 645,000, according to CDC. Purdue Pharma brought in $35B in OxyContin revenue from 1995 to 2017. OxyContin was prescribed to 6.2 million people in 2002.

I'll edit the number above to ~100,000 as an estimate of the number of victims, since it looks like I misremembered 645,000 as the number of Purdue-related deaths. Still, that's assuming only 1.6% of those 6.2 million people taking OxyContin in 2002 developed an addiction, which seems low.


ok, so now you are just arguing percentages. What is an appropriate amount of the harm to be apportioned to the Sackler family?




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