It's a ing drug the Sacklers lied about being safe when pushing onto doctors, and now we're down half a million in America thanks to those gangsters. Should just federally legalize weed so people can get high safely.
It was safe if taken according to the directions and warnings. It was all there in B&W and the doctors dispensing it always told me the goods. But, there is a significant portion of this populace (and growing) who abuse anything good for bad purposes.
And they'd the (legal weed up) just like they ed the Oxy up.
yep. maybe SCOTUS will remove the shield of bankruptcy.
You're mad because you let RBG go to waste. You're usually on something like that with 100% accuracy and wily gusto. Not that time, thank Christ.
Now, you're coming at Thomas for the 2nd time, 1st time didn't work as he told ya's to go back and your mothers some more. Where ya's really ed up though was going after Bork like that. That got our attention and taught us how to do ya's likewise and we ain't let go yet.
Supreme Court temporarily blocks $6 billion Purdue Pharma-Sackler bankruptcy
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/10/11933...ptcy-oxycontin
He's already got a few billion hid with the children, all in $20 bills.
"Problematic" use of opioid settlement money opposed by coalition of public health organizations
Public health groups criticize spending opioid settlement funds on police, criminalization and incarceration
https://www.salon.com/2023/08/16/pro...organizations/
Painkiller 8/10 Netflix.
Solid movie reminding everyone once again what big pharma gets away with in this country
It was/is a wonder drug but the s element in this country all over it, wrecking it for the good people, who, if they didn't stash a supply when they had the chance now have nary alternative except over the counter meds. Those are the people I feel sorry for, Blake.
TOPSIDE!!!
population scale drug peddlers get a slap on the wrist
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ad-fir...on-2024-02-01/Publicis Health, a subsidiary of Publicis Groupe, agreed to pay $350 million to resolve claims by all U.S. states and territories that it helped OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma devise marketing strategies to boost sales of its prescription opioid painkiller.
Massachusetts, which sued Publicis in 2021 alleging it collected more than $50 million to help Purdue get doctors to prescribe its opioids to more patients, for longer periods of time, and at higher doses, served on the executive committee of states investigating the company.
Arizona trying to divert the opioid settlement to whatever whatever
https://x.com/brahmresnik/status/1803900405845492072
McKinsey with nothing to say to the press is a new one
(McKinsey isn't a drug company, it's a corporate management consultant)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/comp...rk/ar-AA1vOn5BMcKinsey & Company consulting firm has agreed to pay $650 million to settle a federal investigation into its work for opioids manufacturer Purdue Pharma, according to court papers filed in Virginia on Friday.
McKinsey has also entered into a deferred prosecution agreement to resolve criminal charges, including that it conspired with Purdue Pharma to aid in the misbranding of prescription drugs.
A former McKinsey senior partner has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges, according to the court papers.
McKinsey representatives didn't immediately respond to phone and email messages on Friday.
Pharmacy Benefit Managers were in on it too
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/b...s-opioids.htmlFor years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.
The details of these backroom deals — laid out in hundreds of do ents, some previously confidential, reviewed by The Times — expose a mostly untold chapter of the opioid epidemic and provide a rare look at the modus operandi of the companies at the heart of the prescription drug supply chain.
The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list.
The P.B.M.s are hired by insurers and employers to control their drug costs by negotiating discounts with pharmaceutical manufacturers. But a Times investigation this year found that they often pursue their own financial interests in ways that increase costs for patients, employers and government programs, while driving independent pharmacies out of business. Regulators have accused the largest P.B.M.s of anticompe ive practices.
The middlemen’s dealings with opioid makers reveal a lesser-known consequence of this pay-to-play system: Seemingly everything — including measures meant to protect patients and curtail abuse — can be up for negotiation.
self-dealing seems to have been a factor
The P.B.M.s’ power lies in their role as gatekeepers. They largely control the lists of drugs that insurance plans will cover, and drugmakers compete for position on those lists by offering rebates. The middlemen typically pass along most of these rebates to their clients, but they also keep a portion for themselves.
The drug lists, known as formularies, frequently include restrictions meant to save money by steering patients to cheaper drugs. But for some drugs, such as opioids, restrictions can serve a medical purpose — minimizing the risk of overdose and addiction and limiting the number of pills that could be diverted to the illicit market.
Yet time and again, do ents show, the P.B.M.s bargained away safeguards in exchange for rebates.
Purdue’s strategy to ensure broad access to its blockbuster painkiller OxyContin was explicit: “Offer rebates to remove payer restriction,” according to an internal presentation. The company didn’t want doctors to have to provide additional justification for prescribing a powerful narcotic, and it didn’t want strict limits on the number of pills that could be dispensed.
The approach worked. Purdue repeatedly boasted in internal reports that prescribers and patients faced few or no restrictions on access to the drug.
How Opioid Giant Endo Escaped a $7 Billion Federal Penalty — ProPublicaThis spring, the Justice Department announced a major victory against a drug firm that manufactured billions of opioid painkillers. Endo Health Solutions, the agency said, would face $1.5 billion in fines and forfeitures and plead guilty to a corporate criminal charge.
Prosecutors said the massive fine would hold accountable a suburban Philadelphia company that profited by “misrepresenting the safety of their opioid products and using reckless marketing tactics to increase sales.”
But in the end, federal prosecutors offered far friendlier terms than those trumpeted by the agency.
Endo would not have to pay the $1.5 billion in criminal penalties, which was already a deep discount from the billions federal officials said Endo owed for dodging taxes and driving up Medicare costs.
In what amounted to a liability fire sale by the Justice Department, the company’s woes with the federal government would all be resolved by a $200 million payment.
In sentencing Endo in federal court in May, Judge Linda Parker wondered how the amount paid to the U.S. could be so low.
“I don’t understand. I really don’t understand,” Parker said. “I just don’t understand how it went from $1 billion to $200 million.”
Federal prosecutor Benjamin Cornfeld explained: Endo was broke.
“The reality is that there are limited funds available because the debtors were in bankruptcy,” Cornfeld said.
But a fuller explanation, drawn from corporate filings, interviews, and criminal court and bankruptcy records, shows how the DOJ, after years of aggressively prosecuting opioid companies, delayed for a decade a winning criminal case against Endo. In the intervening years, Endo vastly expanded its narcotic-pill empire before executing a corporate escape plan.
Codenamed Project Zed, the plan allowed Endo to restructure its debt to retain control of the company and hand out $95 million in executive bonuses before seeking protection in bankruptcy. The result for U.S. taxpayers: Endo paid a tiny fraction — three pennies on the dollar — of the $7 billion that officials said it owed the U.S. government, including $4 billion in taxes.
"but the problem is really a bunch of pillbillies with no self control"
- Delayed Justice: After a whistleblower exposed the criminal behavior of Endo, a drug manufacturer, the Justice Department waited more than a decade to bring charges against the company.
- A Steep Discount: Federal agencies said Endo owed up to $7 billion in criminal fines, back taxes and other charges. The government settled this year for just $200 million.
- Winners and Losers: Endo is still selling narcotics. Lawyers made $350 million. A few executives shared $95 million in bonuses. Thousands of opioid victims are to share $40 million.
OD fatality trend is currently downward
https://matternews.org/community/ove...ationwide-why/“Overdoses started declining in 2022 at a state level, and accelerated through 2023,” Dasgupta said. “By early 2024, every state was declining in overdose deaths. … That’s a really different narrative than we have come to appreciate. The conventional wisdom is things have been getting worse and worse and worse for 30+ years, and nothing has been working. But it turns out that things have been working and we haven’t been paying attention.”
But Dasgupta said no one is totally sure why overdose deaths have decreased.
“We have like 20 possibilities that we are thinking about. Whatever is happening isn’t linear, and it’s probably not just one thing,” he explained. “The only people who I hear consistently saying they know what caused the decline is the DEA.”
Hypothesis: diplomacy and regulatory pressure influenced China to restrict the supply of fentanyl to North America, drug purity declined and so did ODs
The data revealed a distinct pattern. The average purity of fentanyl powder seized by authorities rose throughout 2022 and peaked at roughly 25 percent in early 2023. Following that peak, purity levels plummeted. By the end of 2024, the average purity of seized powder had fallen to approximately 11 percent.
This decline in product quality occurred almost simultaneously with the drop in overdose deaths. The researchers found a strong correlation between the purity of fentanyl pills and the rate of fatal overdoses. As the drugs became less potent due to apparent shortages, fewer people died from using them.
The team also reviewed the number of drug seizures reported by the National Forensic Laboratory Information System. Seizures of fentanyl peaked in the first half of 2023. By the second half of 2024, those numbers had fallen by 37 percent. While fewer seizures could theoretically result from reduced police activity, the high political profile of the fentanyl crisis suggests that enforcement remained a priority. This makes a reduction in actual drug volume the most likely explanation.https://www.psypost.org/sudden-drop-...-supply-shock/Canada also suffers from a fentanyl crisis, but its supply chain is distinct. While the United States receives finished fentanyl trafficked from Mexico, Canadian traffickers largely import precursor chemicals and manufacture the drug domestically. Despite these different production methods, both countries rely on chemical precursors that originate in China.
If the supply shock were caused by law enforcement actions at the US-Mexico border or conflicts between Mexican cartels, the Canadian market should have remained relatively stable. However, the data showed that Canada experienced a similar disruption. Opioid-related deaths in Canada began to decline in the third quarter of 2023.
Canadian health data mirrored the trends seen in the United States. Emergency medical services reported fewer responses to suspected opioid poisonings. Hospitalizations related to opioids also fell. Additionally, Canadian lab data showed a shift where dealers began subs uting fentanyl with fentanyl analogs, a behavior often seen when the primary drug is scarce.
The synchronized downturn in both nations points to a bottleneck at the source of the chemicals they share. The researchers suggest that actions taken by the Chinese government are the most plausible explanation. This shift aligned with a pivotal meeting between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in November 2023. The summit resulted in an agreement to increase cooperation on drug enforcement between the two nations.
Following this diplomatic breakthrough, China tightened regulations on the production and export of chemicals used to make synthetic opioids. These regulatory actions included the removal of online advertisements for precursor chemicals and the shutdown of various marketplaces. The Chinese government also issued notices warning chemical companies against selling substances that could be used for illicit drug production.
The Drug Enforcement Administration noted in a 2025 assessment that Chinese suppliers had become “wary” of selling these chemicals to international buyers. The assessment indicated that suppliers were aware of the increased scrutiny resulting from the government’s compliance with updated United Nations counter-narcotics treaties. The timeline of these enforcement actions in China closely matches the drop in purity and deaths seen in North America.
The study implies that diplomatic pressure and international cooperation can yield tangible public health benefits. The reduction in the flow of raw materials appears to have achieved what domestic law enforcement struggles to accomplish. Arresting street-level dealers rarely impacts the overall availability of drugs, but choking off the supply of essential chemicals affects the entire market.
(I guess we inhabit a post-diplomatic space right now0
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