For those unfamiliar with US news, the family who owns the primary opioid manufacturer and distributor, and who was proven to have intentionally lied about addiction risks and pushed excess volume into rural communities to boost sales, obtained blanket legal immunity for their entire family as part of a bankruptcy settlement.
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1031053251/sackler-family-imm...
They made $10 B selling opioids.
They'll pay $4.3 B and forfeit ownership of their company, in exchange for the immunity.
This is not new either, when I was young they would lace weed and coke with crushed crack to try and get people hooked. But that was rare and could be spotted. This fentanyl shit is everywhere killing people left and right and these absolutel pieces of shit get a pass and half the money.
The drug manufacturers and pushers don't want it legalized so they can continue to prey on us, I'm so fed up.
I have no faith left in humanity.
Edit to add- had the emt not had norcan or whatever it is to give him on-site, he wouldn't have made it to the hospital to receive it there. Fentanyl is beyond evil. I've watched friends and family start on painkillers and become addicts. Some kicked it, some never did. How can you destroy lives and families and not only profit but gain immunity =(
It's grown completely out of control and it seems like every few weeks I learn of someone else dying.
A few years back, NYC shut down several methadone clinics and open-air heroin dealing has run rampant throughout parts of the city around where the closed clinics (like Penn Station) were. Certainly not helping matters.
The party is officially over for me and has been for years now. The risks are too high.
Please, if you have friends that use, urge them to stop -- by any means necessary.
There are no easy answers, but the path we are currently following with the drug war seems worse than if we didn't do anything at all.
Having said that, the Omar character on the Wire was very well acted.
This news comes shortly after the Sackler family finally got away with defacto mass murder.
At this point, it is pure speculation, but I wonder if this is also yet another case where the product was laced with fentanyl. last year alone they counted ~100.000 drug related deaths in the US. it's madness. Fentanyl is wiping out entire rural communities.
I don't have an answer for how to stop this or at least slow it down, there are just too many factors at play, including floods of cheap fentanyl smuggled into the country from china.