Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/24/purdue-pharma-oxycontin-maker-pleads-guilty-on-criminal-charges.html
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It is, as ever, enlightening to see that a corporation can apparently commit crimes of which none of its officers are guilty; while a cartel is little more than a collection of guilty officers.
Seems legit.
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Anti-kickback law, fraud. And now who is getting charged with 10,000+ counts of negligence causing death? (If it’s not first degree murder)
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Sackler family members have said they acted ethically and responsibly while serving on Purdue’s board and were assured the company’s sales and marketing practices complied with legal and regulatory requirements.
I suppose there’s some small consolation that they recognize they could in no way have considered the ethical requirements. When you read how obvious it was this would be an addiction-forming formula, and how they intentionally strung their victims into ever-increasing dosages… it’s frankly quite nauseating.
When doctors told their reps that their patients’ pain returned in much less than 12 hours, the reps — and the company’s chief doctor — urged them to increase the dose of Oxycontin (and thus the company’s profits), rather than calling for an increased frequency (or another drug). The result was that pain patients took ever-greater doses of a highly addictive drug, but at long intervals that guaranteed excruciating withdrawal symptoms for hours before they were supposed to take another pill.
known as “The Pitbull of Public Relations,” whose previous client roster includes Enron CEO: Jeff Skilling, Exxon and other “beleaguered corporations,” who masterminded a “blame the victim” strategy that apportioned responsibility for Oxycontin’s mounting death toll on the people who became addicted to it — not the Sacklers and Purdue, who falsified science, bribed doctors, and made billions from an epidemic that has now claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War.
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Multi-million dollar civil penalties and fines; has that ever really worked? Prison time is what’s required along with the fines.
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Pretty repulsive how one Sackler family can hide behind the “Purdue Family”.
So who goes to jail?
If no one can serve time, considering the crimes are so egregious, the court and/or the state in which the corporation is chartered can seize the corporation itself. Maybe have all that machinery crank out some covid vaccines.
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It’s true. What do we do to individuals who commit murder? We take away their freedom. It’s part punishment, part protection of the population. The population needs to be protected from Purdue. The government should take away the corporation’s freedom.
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The corporation figured out long ago that as long as they controlled the government, they could ensure that nothing like that could ever happen.
I had learned about corporations having revocable charters and brought it to the late Professor Robert Benson at Loyola Law School who had already been thinking about it and we both agreed that Unocal would be a good target here in California. His student Elizabeth Flynn wrote the petition and they co-wrote a book on how to do it. Ultimately attorney general Bill Lockyear told Benson that he recognized the legal option of revoking a corporate charter, “just not with Unocal.” If we had approached with a messed up company that is less of a political heavyweight he would have considered it. Instead, the official response didn’t even bother going over the allegations and there were like 50 issues in there including entering business partnerships with known torturers who had done all kinds of human rights abuses to clear the way for a gas pipeline.
The idea has come up more recently with respect to ExxonMobil. I’ve seen the phrase “Corporate Death Penalty.”
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Too bad that the Sacklers (and all others of their ilk) aren’t reduced to begging on the streets for sustenance & living in a cardboard box under a bridge as penance for their crimes.
Which is exactly why these scumbags need to be RICO’d into oblivion; this includes the puppets they have bought & paid for. It also includes those on the SCOTUS that have enabled this behavior.
I don’t know if any of this can be fixed. I suspect it has been jiggered so that it can’t be fixed.
Not by following The Rules, anyway, so it remains to be seen if the incoming administration has either the imagination or gall to take an axe to that which needs to be chopped.
I hope to be surprised.
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