Confronting the Sacklers

This is not justice, but it is better than nothing:

“You murdered my daughter and destroyed my family,” said Donna Mazurek, whose daughter, Paige, was prescribed Purdue Pharma’s opioid painkiller OxyContin after a root canal, became addicted, spiraled into heroin and overdosed when she was 22.

Ms. Mazurek, from Michigan, spoke at an extraordinary Zoom session in a federal bankruptcy courtroom in White Plains, N.Y., on Thursday. Her voice quaked as she addressed three members of the billionaire Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma — two expressionless people visible on the video screen and one unseen, Dr. Richard Sackler, a former Purdue president who was watching with his camera off.

The hearing, conducted by Judge Robert Drain, who is overseeing Purdue’s bankruptcy, featured 26 people from 19 states. It was a long-sought, galvanizing release of pain, rage and grief, a session the Sackler family agreed to last week, as part of the still-evolving terms of efforts to settle thousands of lawsuits against them and their company. After years of litigation and prolonged settlement talks between state and local governments and the Sacklers and Purdue, Thursday’s session was the first time individuals had been allowed to directly address the Sacklers.

“This is a day like no other in the history of American jurisprudence,” Anne Andrews, a lawyer on a committee for 70,000 relatives and those in recovery, said just before the start of the hearing. “The Sacklers have to listen to the direct victims of their crimes, the stories of people who have died, who lost the potential of their lives. But for years the Sacklers painted them in their emails as slime, addicts, as low lifes, and that it was their fault they were addicted. But they are America. They are you and me.”

The critical point here is that Oxycontin was marketed for years as non-addictive, based on no actual evidence whatsoever. A lot of people died so a few plutocrats could get even richer. The Aristrocrats!