[roymurdock]

Keep your eye on the Sackler/Purdue Pharma case [1].

Purdue steered over $13B directly to the Sackler family by aggressively marketing opiates, misinforming doctors and the public about their dangers, and giving medical software companies kickbacks to push more addictive long-release versions of their opiates to doctors.

One company, Allscripts, was able to pay $145M to resolve criminal and civil kickback allegations [2].

They directly killed over 400,000 people between 1999 and 2017 and indirectly killed many more/caused unimaginable human suffering.

The family is proposing to pay $3B over 7 years and an additional $1.5B by selling off another company they own.

This is the real opiate crisis jackpot and the high-scale, high-powered, industrialized version of the crimes that are happening on the dark web.

I'm sure there are more large companies and high powered individuals involved and agree that the 200 arrests/$6M is an infinitely tiny drop in the bucket, but it's way easier to prove and stick than the larger operations.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy-...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purdue-pharma-investigati...

[codezero]

Yep - I agree, small wins are easier, and especially if you can use buzzwords like we do in tech. It also leaves more option for agent corruption to bring some of that cash home.

This possibly one reason why white collar crime is less punished (see: civil forfeiture - though more so that the likeliness of a successful court case is very low) - less money to take home because rich people will spend it all on lawyers if they have to, then use their connections to get right back on top.

[throwaway0a5e]

The pharma companies getting people addicted on opioids killed pretty much nobody. For the most part they just created a hell of a lot of functional addicts. Not great but not the end of the world. The feds cutting a bunch of junkies off from their safe and legal suppliers and forcing them to source their fix from the black market was what killed a lot of people.

Obviously the stuff the pharma companies did should be punished but blaming them for the body count and all the other bad things that happened once the feds cracked down is nothing more than a typical exercise in government being unwilling to hold itself accountable.

[codezero]

This isn't data so I'm not refuting you, but I have several EMT acquaintances and basically all their stories are about repeat opiate addicts getting revived again and again until they are dead a few months later.

Ignoring the deaths, the economic drain of having so many people addicted to drugs and being unemployed/working at low function likely has had massive effects that are very difficult to measure.