shihching

The Huffington Post article is written by an anti-corporate former heroin addict who, yes, clearly holds animus against those who profited off of opiates.

> By convincing doctors that OxyContin was “safer,” offering financial support and special perks to family physicians who were willing to push the drug, and investing millions in a marketing campaign that claimed OxyContin was not only harmless but beneficial, Purdue Pharma cornered the pain pill market. By 2003, Purdue was selling $1.6 billion of the pill annually.

The crux of his condemnation is the incentivization of doctors to prescribe -- which one could call bribery. Also, the misrepresentation of known addictive and deleterious long term health effects, which I believe could likely be demonstrated through internal company documents.

Wealth allows the purchase of goodwill at a discount price -- the ultimate destination of Mr. Sackler hinges on both the wilfulness and premeditation of his capitalist technique and the breadth and compassion of his philanthropy.

Collecting and displaying Oriental artwork appears to be at the center of his humanism -- the other side of which is biomedical research. I have not scrutinized the publications emerging from the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv, but for the sake of his soul and millions of prescription opiate addicts, I hope the papers reveal cures proportionate to his profits.

Perverse, plentiful incentives to addict and sell -- or invest in the manufacturer who does so -- act quicker than panels of doctors, and dodge responsibility too easily.

Living long lives as a beacons of philanthropic humanism on top of your legal drug empire (or profits gained through accompanying ownership) counteracts much stigma accrued from the deaths of your customers.

> On Tuesday [July 17, 2017], OxyContin manufacturer Raymond Sackler died at the age of 97. The same day, 91 other Americans died due to lethal overdoses of the pill that made Sackler a billionaire. Sackler died in comfort, in a hospital bed, with the best possible medical care, “following a brief illness."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/raymond-sackler-oxyconti...

I am glad to see a complete edition is now easily available online. Still only 9% transcribed.

http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com

Only a few years ago, the only trace on free scanned sources was a misleading 'improved' (mangled) edition re-published decades after Dr. Johnson's death.

There was an academic CD-ROM version made, which I recall had aspirations to publish online, but I believe copyright profit-seeking obstructed this then.

The first edition is a massive almost 2x1ft, 22lbs, 2 volumes. And the most extraordinary part, for those unacquainted, are the illustrative quotations accompanying the definitions, which Johnson culled and compiled by his lonesome.

He quoted Macrobius in his interview for prep school as a young child, ensuring him a spot. We learn this from Boswell's Life of Johnson, one of the first sources in English of extensive transcriptions of direct speech.

I had a wonderful, now gone, Modern European History teacher in high school, Mr Kurtz, who wrote and performed a one act play on Johnson's life.

Paternalist liberal arguments versus beverage lobbies and PR firms will indeed ring hollow and have failed. Rather than merely advocate for curbs, and lose, I would like to see the Nestle type companies prosecuted for responsibility for the negative health outcomes, and then we adjudicate the relative responsibility of 'free' consumers purchasing products known to be toxic (as will likely be surfaced during discovery of internal lab tests alongside public health studies) compared to the selling corporations. As is, the Nestles, and their ownership entities, corner both cheap unhealthy and more costly healthier foods -- effectively playing the spread of the income and wit of their customers.

Few Republicans have the candor to accuse the poor of sloth outright, instead indirectly consigning them to the oblivion of work requirements and the cheap food products low wages can buy.

I do sympathize with the mothers I see on the L fobbing off screaming children with high fructose corn syrup -- and I seek a betterment of their condition, and my own, not by leaving them solely to their own devices, but by assigning responsibility to the more powerful actors here and seeking state restraint as the remedy with sufficient scale and force to succeed.

Advertising can conceal the entire toolbox of dissimulation, hence the coordinated efforts to undermine regulation limiting the hocking of known toxicities. The market drive to eat will find and create food within the bounds of law, as it does, to such horrifying effect in Brazil as the United States.

> At one meeting, a representative from the food industry accused Anvisa of trying to subvert parental authority, saying mothers had the right to decide what to feed their children, recalled Vanessa Schottz, a nutrition advocate.

The same argument is used in the US to thwart limitations on sugary beverage purchases and other junk food with SNAP -- these compose 10-20% of purchases, 50% of which goes to Wal-Mart, alongside 2-5x greater premature mortality from cardiac arrest and diabetic related complications.

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2016.3...

Incentivizing the poor to hock Nestle timed according to Brazilian food assistance checks is clever. Reminds me of Herbalife, and Betting on Zero -- Hispanic populations, eager to succeed in entrepreneurship, here too are victims of pyramid schemes preying on ill health.