“Purdue Pharma is expected Tuesday to plead guilty to federal conspiracy and kickback charges and acknowledge that its aggressive marketing of opioids over the last three decades helped propel an addiction crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans,” ABC News reported on November 24, 2020.
Geez, anyone with a rap sheet like that, should be put to death. I mean, like a Nuremberg trial, then a good ol’ hanging.
But how do you kill a corporation? Well, you sort of can, in a way; Wikipedia says,
“Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 15, 2019 in New York. On October 21, 2020 it was reported that Purdue had reached a settlement potentially worth $8.3bn, admitting that it ‘knowingly and intentionally conspired and agreed with others to aid and abet” doctors dispensing medication “without a legitimate medical purpose’. Members of the Sackler family will additionally pay $225m and the company will dissolve.” Also, “three executives were found guilty of criminal charges.”
(Read it here.)
It’s nice the company is gone, as it ought to be, but a corporation is only a legal construct; a fiction. The best you can do is deconstruct the fiction, so that a thing which existed only on paper doesn’t exist on paper any more. The problem is, that’s not very satisfying.
A bigger problem is the Sackler family made billions from this (Wikipedia says they were worth $13 billion as of 2017), and the measly $225 million in fines they have to pay allows them to keep almost all of it; where is the justice in that?
Unless the hundreds of private lawsuits against them strip them of that wealth, as juries and courts ought to. Let’s hope they do. In other words, let them keep their lives, but this family deserves to be stripped of every last dime they made from ruining lives and killing people.