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May God Curse the Sackler Family
Still disgustingly wealthy, the Sacklers just don’t get how many lives were ruined in our country by OxyContin
There have been millions of them. Most of them are unknown to us. I know one quite well, though — my brother Colin. The rest of them are unknown to me because the grief we feel over Colin’s loss blinds us to those countless other stories.
Those other lost family members, friends, wives and husbands, children, colleagues, and parents died also thanks to the greed of one family: the Sackler family.
The Sacklers are the owners of Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactured Oxycontin. Aware almost immediately thanks to their own internal investigations that the opioid was as addictive as breathing is to all living things, Purdue marketers pushed the pill relentlessly into our nation’s communities.
There is a very good chance that many of you seeing these words have lost someone to this tragedy. It is a very typical American one, pax Americana run amok. It is the tale where profit is king and those of us, the reasons for that profit, become the suckers.
In the world of the Sacklers that is exactly what we are, suckers. We are whining little inconveniences to their posh family holidays; to their vast banquets with gold-trimmed plates overflowing with black caviar. The billions that this one family has made at the cost of millions upon millions of ruined lives means that somehow they are better than us.
It means that our system is so askew that even though president after president and elected official after official knew that OxyContin was wrecking our nation, no one did much about it — because the money always flowed to the right coffers and the problem was punted.
The scum of the earth
I hope that every single victim’s face haunts your every waking moment and your sleeping ones, too (Opioid Victims Confront the Sackler Family).
These words were spoken by Ryan Hampton of Las Vegas. He had knee payin and his doctor prescribed him “oxy.” First of all, prescribing a drug as powerful as Oxycontin to treat knee pain is like cutting out your eyes on a sunny day because you forgot…
