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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29058 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Purdue Pharma, held by the Sackler family, made billions from sales of Oxycontin, and so was a major force behind the opioid epidemic.

I have yet to see a single proponent of drug legalization (with the underlying reasoning being that if drugs were legal and produced to pharmaceutical standards, then no one would ever use them dangerously) write a single piece, in any venue, arguing that this claim is simply not true. One would think that if they really believed in their professed position, they would be screaming from the rooftops that the Sackler family should be absolutely praised for flooding the market with carefully crafted, pharmaceutical quality drugs, because the only logical conclusion is that this action necessarily saved lives by giving consumers a choice to use a well-regulated product rather than possibly tainted cartel dope.

Can anyone link me to even one such argument? It can be from the weirdest economist that you can dig out of the George Mason basement; it can be the weirdest communist stoner with a cushy lefty sinecure; I don't care. I just want even one that actually embraces the premises of the legalization movement and actually applies them to the case of the Sackler family, concluding that everyone else has gotten it wrong, and that we must necessarily view their actions as an unalloyed good for the world.

I have yet to see a single proponent of drug legalization (with the underlying reasoning being that if drugs were legal and produced to pharmaceutical standards, then no one would ever use them dangerously)

I am a proponent of drug legalization, but that underlying reasoning is garbage and I cannot think of a single person I know who holds the position I do based on that reasoning.

I mean, obviously, I was being flippant in a parenthetical. But yeah, there are people in this very thread who are saying that pharmaceutical drugs have nothing to do with overdose deaths, at least. I haven't gotten them down to the nitty gritty of other types of dangerous use, but most advocates of drug legalization generally don't want to talk about any type of dangerous use.

In any event, would you praise the Sackler family for at least trying to flood the market with pharmaceutical drugs (whether they succeeded in this endeavor or not, would you praise the endeavor)? Would you say that the only real problem is that they didn't manage to sell billions more pills through millions more doctors looking the other way to millions more straw purchasers? That if only they had flooded the market enough that the street price of pharmaceutical drugs dropped to rock bottom, then it would have positively helped the opioid crisis?

In any event, would you praise the Sackler family for at least trying to flood the market with pharmaceutical drugs (whether they succeeded in this endeavor or not, would you praise the endeavor)?

Absolutely not - I come at this from the "smelly hippy" angle rather than the libertarian one, and I think that what they did was actually monstrous. I'm a proponent of drug legalisation, but I think that legalisation should be accompanied with responsible education and policies with regards to addiction and the like. The Sacklers were ultimately responsible for and made substantial profits from a legal and corporate structure that heavily encouraged and even induced addiction in cases where it wasn't necessary. I absolutely think that drugs should be legal, but I think that part of that liberalisation should include responsible management of them. Encouraging addiction because those ruined lives are extremely profitable is the part of what the Sacklers did that I object to, not so much the distribution of the drugs themselves.

The Sacklers were ultimately responsible for and made substantial profits from a legal and corporate structure that heavily encouraged and even induced addiction in cases where it wasn't necessary.

How so?

Someone else has already written this up for me, so I'll just quote them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201004103052/https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sackler-familys-plan-to-keep-its-billions

With the launch of OxyContin, in 1995, Purdue unleashed an unprecedented marketing blitz, pushing the use of powerful opioids for a huge range of ailments and asserting that its product led to addiction in “fewer than one percent” of patients. This strategy was a spectacular commercial success: according to Purdue, OxyContin has since generated approximately thirty billion dollars in revenue, making the Sacklers (whom I wrote about for the magazine, in 2017, and about whom I will publish a book next year) one of America’s richest families.

But OxyContin’s success also sparked a deadly crisis of addiction. Other pharmaceutical companies followed Purdue’s lead, introducing competing products; eventually, millions of Americans were struggling with opioid-use disorders. Many people who were addicted but couldn’t afford or access prescription drugs transitioned to heroin and black-market fentanyl. According to a recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal, the disruptions associated with the coronavirus have only intensified the opioid epidemic, and overdose deaths are accelerating. For all the complexity of this public-health crisis, there is now widespread agreement that its origins are relatively straightforward.

...

Her filing was studded with damning internal company e-mails revealing that, even in the face of a skyrocketing death toll from the opioid crisis, members of the Sackler family pushed Purdue staff to find aggressive new ways to market OxyContin and other opioids, and to persuade doctors to prescribe stronger doses for longer periods of time.

eventually, millions of Americans were struggling with opioid-use disorders.

This is an absolutely magic sentence that tells us nothing about how any of this works. There is no model here. At least, there is no model that can be stated in words, in public. My suspicion for why is because the model that is implicitly being used violates the claims of people who are pro-legalization.

Did you actually click the link? I didn't include the sordid details but they do actually explain what happened and how it worked. A magic sentence like that is totally fine when you include the explanation in another part of the text.

I did click the link. I read the whole thing. They don't explain any sort of model for the intermediate steps. If you need to convince yourself of this, just try. Try on your own to reconstruct a model of how it's supposed to work from the article. Use your own words. See if you can do it.

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