Hacker News Reader

Comment by shrewduser | Hacker News Reader

This is disgusting. Basically outright admitting that there are a class of people who are above the law. I wish i were surprised.

Knowingly peddle highly addictive substances, lie about their nature, kill millions, destroy countless lives, and get to keep billions of dollars. it is just hard to fathom.

America will be suffering the consequences of these actions for a generation.

View on HN

Not just a generation. Habitual drug use is a cultural aspect of america now. Everyone uses drugs, everyone. We can exclude alcohol and tobacco since they're older versions of basically the same cultural phenomenon, everyone smokes weed or uses opioids or meth or xanax or something now, from a doctor or otherwise. Americans abuse drugs, that can be stated almost unequivocally at this point.

I think many people use but it's actually less a cultural pressure than in the past. In generations past it was always expectation that somebody drinks, go back a bit further and smokes too. It's normalized to use most drugs to an extent, especially weed and party drugs, but it's also more okay to not even drink.

I mean, the Opium Wars were most definitely a thing because other entire countries unequivocally abused drugs at points in their history.

I never said this was unique to Americans.

There are people in prison who were sentenced to life without parole for selling drugs, and there are some who got life without parole for merely possessing drugs.

The Sacklers get to walk free, though.

There's a guy in jail for life because he stole a pair of hedge clippers. He didn't ruin someone's life, he inconvenienced a gardener.

> This is disgusting. Basically outright admitting that there are a class of people who are above the law. I wish i were surprised.

>Knowingly peddle highly addictive substances, lie about their nature, kill millions, destroy countless lives, and get to keep billions of dollars. it is just hard to fathom.

AFAIK the problem isn't that Sacklers is "above the law", it's that what the Sacklers wasn't (probably couldn't be) convicted under the law. If they actually were convicted of wrongdoing, going after the money would be easy.

It’s very easy to not be convicted under the law when you cut a deal with one court where no other court can even attempt to convict you.

94% of federal criminal cases end in a plea bargain. It's not at all unusual.

Most of those are because the defendant is in a position of weakness and the courts are busy, not because the defendant is able to cut a deal that lets them live out the rest of their lives outside of prison and with billions in the bank.

a plea bargain is by rule a conviction. It is simply an alternative route to one.

A plea bargain is where a bargain is struck between some prosecuting authority and the accused wherein the accused pleads guilty in exchange for some nominally lesser punishment.

WHat happened here is one plea bargain that included (but should not have included by any rational definition of justice) a global bar on the accused being prosecuted for any other crimes. See if you can find an example of that logic being applied to a low level drug dealer or non-rich person.

You can't convict someone if you never build a case to begin with. Prosecutors have a very large amount of tools and wide latitude to deploy them; where are the house searches? The wiretaps? The seizures? The hundreds of criminal charges meant to coerce a settlement? The parallel construction?

These are all widely used tools for the lower rungs of the drug trade. Why is everything with these guys some kind of civil lawsuit tit for tat? I'm sure there are other dealers out there with a LLC, but they don't get this treatment.

>where are the house searches?

>The seizures?

All the good stuff is probably in their lawyers' offices or offshore. Moreover, I doubt you'll find the smoking gun email that's like "plz transfer money I don't want our creditors to get it".

>The wiretaps?

>The parallel construction?

and what, hope that they catch them in the act of admitting that they made such transfers with the intent of hiding them from creditors? Besides, I suspect most of the illegal stuff (eg. getting it approved, hiding the results) were done before the public/government was aware, so wiretapping after fact wouldn't do much.

>The hundreds of criminal charges meant to coerce a settlement?

They can afford the lawyers.

> Moreover, I doubt you'll find the smoking gun email that's like "plz transfer money I don't want our creditors to get it".

"[W]hat do you think is going on in all of these courtrooms right now? We’re rich? For how long? Until which suits get through to the family? I think [the investment banker’s] advice was just violated in a Virginia courtroom. My thought is to lever up where we can, and try to generate some additional income. We may well need it. . . . Even if we have to keep it in cash, it’s better to have the leverage now while we can get it than thinking it will be there for us when we get sued."[1]

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1329736/downl...

The worst part of it all is that the Sacklers/Purdue were just one of many predatory actors behind the opioid crisis, the vast majority of whom are escaping public outrage completely by offering up the Sacklers as (somewhat) sacrificial lambs.

I'm sure there were others, but it does seem that the products from the sacklers were the main ones responsible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com