Summary
Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family have agreed to a $7.4 billion settlement over their role in the opioid crisis.
The deal, $1 billion larger than a previous 2024 proposal rejected by the Supreme Court, includes $6.5 billion from the Sacklers and $900 million from Purdue.
Funds will support opioid addiction treatment and prevention efforts.
The settlement, among the largest in U.S. history, still requires court approval.
Critics note the Sacklers’ $11 billion withdrawals before Purdue’s bankruptcy, and victims emphasize the ongoing human cost of the crisis.
The fundamental cause of the corporate behaviour is that by law their first priority is to make profit for the shareholders.
Fix that and things will change.
Purdue was privately held. This was the family itself being greedy pieces of shit.
And corporations are not required to only focus on profit growth. Their duty to the shareholders is to see a return on their investment. That is very open to interpretation. Companies can definitely take a longer term growth strategy or even a slower one and pump out dividends.
You don’t even have to change that, but I’d love to see something that at least changed it to long term profits, like over 3-5 years, not quarterly where everything is running into the ground for every penny. We can even do that by changing how we tax stocks. The longer held, the less paid on taxes.
But even without that, well regulated capitalism is fine.
The real root problem is campaign finance deregulation which allows corporations to buy out both parties primaries for people who will make them more money, and further deregulate campaign finance so that the next round the politicians get more and are incentived to repeat.
Especially with how campaign “war chests” can roll over forever.
It’s a snowball effect and the longer we ignore it the harder it is to fix. The harsh truth is most elected Dems at the federal level shouldn’t be there and need to be replaced. We can’t just wait for the rotten apples to fully rot to make space for new ones. We need to get them the fuck out the barrel