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Jonathan Sackler Spent His Life Spreading Opioid Addiction Throughout the United States |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46703"><span class="small">Meagan Day, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 11 July 2020 08:21 |
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Day writes: "Disgraced opioid tycoon Jonathan Sackler died last week, two decades into a nationwide addiction epidemic that he helped create - and from which he pocketed billions."
Derrick Slaughter, age five, attends a march against the epidemic of heroin in Ohio. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Jonathan Sackler Spent His Life Spreading Opioid Addiction Throughout the United States
By Meagan Day, Jacobin
11 July 20
Disgraced opioid tycoon Jonathan Sackler died last week, two decades into a nationwide addiction epidemic that he helped create — and from which he pocketed billions. His life of spreading addiction was a monument to the brutal pathologies of capitalism.
 n 1999, two classmates asked me to the fifth grade dance. By 2009, both of them had developed opioid addictions. By 2019, one was sober, and the other was dead from a heroin overdose. The one who died left behind an infant son. “I never gave up on you,” my classmate’s mother posted on Facebook, “but you would not let me help you.” She chose a photo of him from around the time we slow-danced to the Aerosmith song from the Armageddon soundtrack.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention statistics on opioid overdose deaths start that same year, in 1999. Since then, nearly half a million Americans have died from overdoses on prescription and illicit opioids. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, and opioids are involved in two-thirds of them. Four out of five new heroin users are transitioning from misusing prescription opioids. More than one hundred people are now dying from opioid overdoses in the United States every day.
It’s well established now that the proliferation of prescription opioids, particularly the game-changing painkiller OxyContin, fueled the broader addiction epidemic. You can see the progression of the crisis in the data. The opioid deaths have come in three waves: first a rise in deaths from prescription opioids starting in 1999, followed by a rise in deaths from heroin overdoses beginning in 2010; then an explosion in deaths from dangerous synthetic opioids like fentanyl starting in 2013. For every person who dies, hundreds more are entangled in the criminal justice system, and thousands more are struggling with addiction as their lives fall apart. The crisis has swallowed entire communities. The primary industry in the town of Oceana, West Virginia used to be coal mining. Now it’s the black-market opioid trade, and the town is nicknamed Oxyana. In a documentary about the town, an opioid addict explains, “If you don’t work in the mines, the only other way you’ve got to make money anywhere close to working in the mines is to sell drugs. If you don’t see somebody getting up in the morning and going to work, they’re selling pills.” Overdoses are common in Oceana, and so too is violence related to the drug trade. A local dentist describes the opioid crisis as a darkness that has descended so heavily on the town that it’s even cast a pall over its natural beauty, a gray shroud over the green mountains.
The life I shared with my classmates was worlds away from Oceana, but the pills are everywhere, from double-wides in rural West Virginia to McMansions in the Texas suburbs. The story of how they became so ubiquitous begins when Purdue Pharma decided to manufacture OxyContin. Emails from a Purdue executive in 1999 demonstrate awareness that there was no evidence that controlled-release opioids were less addictive, and yet the company consistently made this claim in order to get OxyContin on the market and into the hands of as many consumers as possible. Purdue then spent decades downplaying the drug’s abuse potential, despite knowledge to the contrary.
For several years now, Purdue has been dragged through both the formal legal system and the court of public opinion. The public backlash has been ferocious: Americans are now more inclined to place heavy blame on the pharmaceutical industry for encouraging doctors to overprescribe the drugs than on individual drug users for becoming addicted.
Correspondingly, it’s hard to think of an American capitalist dynasty more roundly condemned in recent years than the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma. The family has followed the philanthropic playbook, lavishing art museums and university departments with funds to burnish the Sackler image, but this hasn’t shielded them from popular wrath. Their transgressions are too intolerable, and the contrast between their astronomical wealth and the devastation they’ve left in their wake is too stark to ignore. The Sacklers are intensely private, but with $13 billion at their collective disposal it’s impossible not to picture them lounging on superyacht sundecks while ordinary Americans fill the halfway houses and the morgues.
It’s no surprise then that when news of co-owner Jonathan Sackler’s death broke earlier this week, the reaction on social media was unsympathetic, to put it gently. On the one hand, the role of a single person in orchestrating this crisis shouldn’t be overstated. The deceased was only one member of the family that built and profited from the OxyContin empire, and despite its outsize role, not even Purdue Pharma bears sole responsibility for the calamity. Consider the deindustrialization and austerity that have left places like Oceana vulnerable to an explosion in the pill trade, its people desperate for money and release.
On the other hand, it’s easy to comprehend why the news of Jonathan Sackler’s passing received such a cold reception. With the constant churn of the news cycle, the new distractions, and the fresh terrors, it’s easy for some to forget that the opioid epidemic is still raging. Others are still electrified with grief. Did the Sackler family mourn the loss of their spouse, child, or friend?
The opioid crisis has claimed nearly five hundred thousand lives since 1999. That’s five hundred thousand irreparable tears in the fabric of millions of people’s personal worlds. Not only that, but nearly one-third of Americans know someone who is currently addicted to opioids. That’s more than one hundred million people actively witnessing, at various distances, the slow fade from life to death. Most feel helpless to reverse it, not least because capitalists like the Sacklers prefer to redistribute their money on a thoroughly volunteer basis, starving public services and rendering help hard to find for those without means.
In 2009, the midpoint in this saga so far, another boy I knew died of an opioid overdose. He was sixteen. He’d already established himself as an athlete when he was serendipitously cast in a school musical, where he discovered — as we all discovered, with pride and delight — that he could really sing.
There’s a video of him still up on Facebook from shortly before he died singing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song at an open mic. “I better not leave before I get my chance to ride,” go the lyrics. “All my life to sacrifice.” And sacrifice for what? For $35 billion, $10 billion of it straight to the bank. Hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed at the altar of profit. That, more than all the museum wings and endowed professorships put together, will be the Sackler legacy.
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The Political Genius of John Roberts |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55016"><span class="small">Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate</span></a>
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Friday, 10 July 2020 12:34 |
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Excerpt: "There will be much discussion in the coming weeks about the revelations of the Supreme Court's COVID-19 term. But perhaps more than anything, we should focus on the battle of the titans that has played out this year between Chief Justice John Roberts and President Donald Trump."
Chief Justice John Roberts at the State of the Union address. (photo: Getty)
The Political Genius of John Roberts
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
10 July 20
The chief justice stood up to Trump, placated Democrats, and scored indisputable points for judicial supremacy.
 here will be much discussion in the coming weeks about the revelations of the Supreme Court’s COVID-19 term. But perhaps more than anything, we should focus on the battle of the titans that has played out this year between Chief Justice John Roberts and President Donald Trump. It certainly has been a years-in-the-making enterprise: Roberts was showing signs of Trump fatigue by the end of last term, and his frustration with the Trump administration’s shoddy lawyering and outright fabrication was evident by the time he thwarted the administration’s effort to put a citizenship question on the census. It’s fair to say that, by this time last year, it was clear that Roberts, a lifelong conservative, was—unlike many other lifelong conservatives—not prepared to give up on every institutional and ideological principle he’d ever held in order to cater to Trump’s tempestuous whims. It was also clear that Roberts would prioritize public respect for the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary over short-term gains for the president and his party.
This was evident not just in his judicial writing. It was clear when he punched back at Trump’s claims that there were “Trump judges and Obama judges” and again when he defended judges (including Merrick Garland) in his annual state of the judiciary report this past winter. It was also why we didn’t think Roberts would rush to intervene dramatically in the impeachment process. Whereas almost everyone in Trump’s ambit has proved to be almost fanatically transactional in their dealings with the president, credit Roberts with being principled. He has signaled, time and again, that he cares more about keeping the court above reproach, and above partisan politics, particularly in an election year.
To that end, the term-ending financial documents decisions are a masterwork. Both Mazars and Vance read as resounding victories for centuries-old principles about the limits of presidential immunity and Congress’ legitimate authority to conduct executive oversight. Both were interpreted as blistering losses for Donald Trump by Donald Trump. Yet they will compel the lower courts to dither and squabble in ways that will keep the financial documents away from the public eye for months if not years. You can’t help but admire the deftness of Roberts’ ability to simultaneously split the baby, persuade both sides that they won, and score indisputable points for judicial supremacy, all while also achieving nothing immediate.
As he did last year, Roberts played the term perfectly. He won the headlines and preserved the big lofty principle about big lofty courts, while still making it impossible for any of us to know exactly how corrupt the Trump family really is. But the stakes were even higher this year, as the election loomed over the term. And so he set out to ensure that the Supreme Court would not become a campaign issue. The chief justice knows that both parties treat the court like a pińata, trying to convince their respective bases that they know how to smack the most candy out of it. He knows Democrats remain traumatized over Merrick Garland’s stymied appointment and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s toxic confirmation. During the Democratic primary, multiple top-tier candidates pronounced themselves open to adding seats to the Supreme Court to counter Republicans’ judicial chicanery. Roberts also knows that a term filled with one conservative triumph after another would only have given Democrats ammunition to run against the court, framing it as a partisan institution in need of reform. That didn’t happen.
By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine mainstream Democrats seriously endorsing court packing after the term that just wrapped. A majority of the justices pushed back against the Trump’s administration’s attempt to deport Dreamers, to write LGBTQ people out of civil rights laws, and to shield the president from all congressional scrutiny. They halted, at least for now, the effort to regulate abortion clinics out of existence. And they shoved off an attempt to expand the scope of the Second Amendment.
Some of these cases divided the justices along ideological lines, with Roberts joining the liberals. But others attracted the votes of Trump appointees Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who would’ve added fuel to the argument that the court is partisan had they consistently sided with the president. Yes, there were sweeping conservative decisions as well, including startling assaults on the separation of church and state. But these cases were wonky and complicated, not straightforward Citizens United–style routs that upended American democracy. The blockbusters that dominated the news were with compromises (as in the subpoena cases) or outright liberal wins (as in the LGBTQ discrimination case). And the average Democratic voter probably won’t know or care that, say, Roberts has laid the groundwork for more restrictions on abortion while striking down Louisiana’s TRAP law.
The irony of Roberts’ endless maneuvering is that preventing the court from appearing political requires him to act politically. Brokering compromises behind the scenes, manipulating the docket to keep hot-button cases far away from the court, forecasting the impact of each decision on the election—these are inherently political acts undertaken to convince public that the court is apolitical. They are not the traditional duties of a jurist. But Roberts is the exceedingly rare judge who understands politics, not just party politics, but also how to behave politically. And he recognizes that, as Americans lose faith in the other two branches of government, he has the power, and perhaps the responsibility, to cultivate more trust in the court.
It is worth asking what Roberts will do when Trump eventually leaves office, when the chief justice no longer feels obligated to prove that his court is not beholden to a singularly toxic and corrupt president. To be sure, this chief justice is still not a centrist; he remains devoted to his pet projects, like blessing voter suppression laws or hobbling administrative agencies’ independence. It is simply too soon to tell whether Roberts has really had a change of heart on hot-button issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, or if he just wants to shield his court from political blowback in an election year. While he has succeeded in lowering the temperature of SCOTUS discourse, he has not clearly abandoned those conservative crusades that evoked so much Democratic outrage in the first place. Citizens United is still on the books. The Voting Rights Act in still in grave peril.
But if he has distinguished himself this term, it’s for steadfastly refusing to join in the abdication of conservative principles to the cult of Trumpism. The number of conservatives in public life who have stood up to the worst aspects of Trumpism—the xenophobia, the small-mindedness, the abject cruelty—has been vanishingly small. You may not agree with the chief justice’s views on race, religious liberty, or voting rights. But Roberts deserves credit not just for protecting his court from Trump, but also for positioning it to fight another day.
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FOCUS: Trump Broke the Tax Release Tradition. There's Only One Way to Fix It. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52420"><span class="small">Bob Bauer, The New York Times</span></a>
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Friday, 10 July 2020 11:07 |
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Bauer writes: "When Richard Nixon declared, 'People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,' we often forget that he wasn't talking about Watergate. He was speaking about compliance with tax law."
The public's interest in access to this or any president's tax filings depends on strong reform legislation from Congress. (photo: unknown)
Trump Broke the Tax Release Tradition. There's Only One Way to Fix It.
By Bob Bauer, The New York Times
10 July 20
The public’s interest in access to this or any president’s tax filings depends on strong reform legislation from Congress.
 hen Richard Nixon declared, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,” we often forget that he wasn’t talking about Watergate. He was speaking about compliance with tax law. The public had a “right to know,” in this case, what was in his returns and if he had followed the law.
The Supreme Court’s decisions on Thursday in the Trump tax cases vindicated important principles about presidential accountability under the rule of law. A 7-to-2 majority rejected the president’s claim of immunity from compliance with a state criminal subpoena, and the court also turned down his argument that state prosecutors and Congress should have to meet demanding standards to obtain a president’s personal financial information.
But these cases left very much in doubt when the president will have to provide his tax returns, and it is clear that the public will not see them any time soon, if ever.
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It's Been an Awful Week for the Fossil-Fuel Industry |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Friday, 10 July 2020 08:32 |
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McKibben writes: "It's been a truly awful few days for the fossil-fuel industry, which is another way of saying that it's been an unexpectedly good few days for planet Earth: a trio of sweeping and unlikely victories have demonstrated the depth of great organizing and the increasing weakness of the industry's hold on our political system."
On Monday, news came of an unprecedented federal court ruling in favor of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, who have been fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Reuters)
It's Been an Awful Week for the Fossil-Fuel Industry
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
10 July 20
t’s been a truly awful few days for the fossil-fuel industry, which is another way of saying that it’s been an unexpectedly good few days for planet Earth: a trio of sweeping and unlikely victories have demonstrated the depth of great organizing and the increasing weakness of the industry’s hold on our political system.
First, on Sunday, Duke Energy and Dominion Energy—enormous Southeast utilities—announced that they were scrapping plans for the Atlantic Coast natural-gas pipeline, despite having invested $3.4 billion in the project. They’d actually won a big Supreme Court ruling just weeks earlier, giving them the right to lay the pipeline beneath the Appalachian Trail—but that, executives from the two companies said in a joint statement, wasn’t going to be enough. “This announcement reflects the increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States. Until these issues are resolved, the ability to satisfy the country’s energy needs will be significantly challenged.” Translation: they were evidently rattled by a court order earlier this spring in the granddaddy of all pipeline battles; a Montana federal court ruled in April that the Trump Administration couldn’t simply waive environmental laws to help the backers of the Keystone XL pipeline. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline may have had Supreme Court permission to traverse the Appalachian Trail, but the companies must have realized that they were going to face litigation at every stream crossing along the route.
On Monday came the news that a federal court had ruled in favor of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, who have been fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. In this case, the pipeline has already been built, and is carrying oil. Stunningly, the court said that Energy Transfer, the company that developed the pipeline, has to shut it down and drain the crude within the next thirty days—an unprecedented blow. The ruling will be appealed, and, if the company is lucky enough to draw some Trump appointees in its panel at the D.C. Circuit Court, it could be overturned. But what a moment. D.A.P.L. had been the most iconic fight of recent years, with hundreds of tribes from across the continent descending on Standing Rock, at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, to take a stand. No one who was there in 2016 will ever forget the scene: the smoke rising from a hundred campfires, the nonstop ceremonies of prayer and drumming, and the incredible courage of activists facing militarized police forces that did not hesitate to deploy the tools in their anti-protest arsenal. The images of dogs biting peaceful protesters were straight out of Birmingham, circa 1963, and a reason that the Obama Administration, in its waning days, put the kibosh on the project. Donald Trump revived it immediately upon taking office, but the judge ruled this week that the haste with which the Administration pushed through the pipeline violated environmental rules, in particular because there was no study into the environmental impact of possible leaks on reservation water supplies.
Then, on Monday night, the Supreme Court let that Montana ruling on Keystone XL stand, meaning that the project can’t be built until much of the litigation is settled. That process will take us well past the November election; because Joe Biden has pledged to oppose Keystone, Trump’s defeat would mean a battle that has been fought for more than a decade would be over.
If it seems as if all the action around these cases is in court, it’s not. The only reason that there were substantial legal challenges in the first place is because of the epic organizing that preceded the lawsuits. In the case of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, thousands of local and national groups have fought it at every turn—as Adam Siegel wrote for the Blue Virginia blog, “Bit by bit, as opposition delayed fossil foolish infrastructure and political momentum swung (especially in Virginia) against them, the [utilities’] analysis made clear that going with lower-carbon options would provide a higher and lower risk return (profit) for shareholders.” (Or, as an activist tweeted, “In case you thought that small actions don’t matter . . . this is a result of every tree sitter, each person who chained herself to a piece of equipment, sat at an air board mtg, blocked a site.”) That’s equally true in the Dakotas, where it has been made clear to anyone paying attention that indigenous communities are at the forefront of the fight for a livable planet. And Keystone was where Native Americans, climate scientists, farmers and ranchers, big environmental groups, and activists all found one another for the first time.
These three announcements, in the span of twenty-four hours, are the payoff of a decade of endless hearings and petitions and trips to jail—a triumph against what seemed overwhelming odds. They also show that, going forward, only the truly reckless will henceforth invest their money in giant fossil-fuel-infrastructure projects. The victory here is measured not just in pipelines defeated but in pipelines and other projects that will never even be proposed, simply because it has been demonstrated that opponents have the resources—in bodies, in determination, in legal talent, and in moral standing—to slow them down to the point where profitability becomes impossible. Should Trump be reëlected, he may be able to help some of these giant projects hang on. If he’s defeated, their lifeline will be gone, and with it a century’s worth of fossil-fuel expansion.
Passing the Mic
Pramila Jayapal is the first Indian-American woman elected to Congress—her district includes most of Seattle, including the area that was briefly an “autonomous zone” in the city’s center. She’s the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and I wanted to get her insights because, last month, a House Select Committee put forward the most comprehensive climate proposal yet introduced in Congress. This interview has been condensed for clarity.
Let’s assume a Biden Presidency and a Democratic-controlled Senate and House. Is there going to be sufficient gumption to move dramatic climate legislation through, or will the government be stuck in incrementalist mode?
Right now we’re seeing a crucial awakening to many of our country’s foundational demons. Trump’s Presidency, the COVID-19 crisis, and mass uprisings against white supremacy have laid bare systemic anti-Blackness, deadly public-health inequities, and economic greed. Incrementalism cannot be the solution. The structural inequities in our system are what allowed Trump to be elected in the first place; our task in the new Administration must be to fix those holes urgently and transformatively. Our movement will have to work harder than ever across silos to make the connections between climate, migration, health, and justice, so that we can push on all fronts simultaneously, powerfully, and leaving no one behind.
There’s been a lot of talk this summer about the overlap between climate justice and racial justice—the idea that vulnerable people can’t breathe for too many reasons. Do you sense that bridges between those issues and caucuses are being built in Congress, too?
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which I co-chair, has long been the leader in advocating for intersectionality across multiple issues. Ahead of the release of the report from the House Select Committee on Climate, the C.P.C.’s climate committee developed a set of recommendations for how to urgently tackle the climate crisis with a focus on jobs, decarbonization, and justice. It is a testament to our inside and outside organizing work that many of our recommendations were included in the Select Committee’s report. So we have started to build the bridges we need, but there is much more to do to take on money in politics and the status quo, which prioritizes corporate profits over the health and safety of our communities.
What’s it like in Seattle right now—what does it feel like on the street?
The energy on the streets is real, as people push for transformative justice in policing and community safety, economic relief, and universal health care. COVID-19 cases have tripled in just two months; forty per cent of the cases in our state are among Latinx people, who make up only thirteen per cent of the population. Additionally, among COVID-19 deaths, the death rate is more than fifty per cent higher among Black people compared to white people. And yet, finally, we are taking on police brutality and moving progressive taxation legislation that pushes corporations to share the wealth and lessen devastation. We are reminded of the transformational W.T.O. protests two decades ago, and the strength of mass movements. Through all the pain and volatility, people are seeing their power, and using it to take care of each other and for the common good. Neighbors look out for each other, hospital workers march against police brutality, and mass uprisings take on existing power structures. It is messy, but with a palpable sense that our fates are forever interconnected.
Climate School
Policymakers may be starting to get a little more serious about some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the energy orchard. The Democrats’ Select Committee report mentions plans for massive building retrofits. Rick Barnett, writing at the Energy Central blog, offers an in-depth discussion of building a “continuous thermal seal” around homes and offices. He writes, “Most interior space is surrounded by thermal defects such as lumber, pipes, electrical boxes, ducts, doors and windows. This is like wearing a flannel shirt when you need a parka.” Happily, the parka is available off the shelf, and plenty of local contractors know how to wrap it around you—with immediate savings that should more than finance the cost.
You might want to check out a topographical map of your neighborhood—new data indicate that six million more American homes than previously thought are in the hundred-year-flood zone. That’s a seventy-per-cent increase from current government figures.
Those Marxist eco-radicals at Goldman Sachs ran the numbers and have predicted that global private investment in renewable energy will amount to sixteen trillion dollars in the next decade, overtaking oil and gas for the first time next year.
Observers have been understandably fixated on Siberia these past weeks, watching the fearful heat wave there and the resulting fires. But, regarding the other end of the planet, researchers said last week that the South Pole is now warming three times faster than the global average. The temperature there is unlikely to rise above freezing, but warmer seas mean that, along the Antarctic coast, the ice shelves are subject to an ever-greater danger of collapse.
Scoreboard
Two more big European insurers—one of which is Munich Re, the world’s largest—may be getting ready to drop their coverage of the Trans Mountain tar-sands pipeline, in Canada, after hard campaigning from First Nations groups who don’t want it crossing their land. On the other hand, the Boston-based company Liberty Mutual, which had pledged not to support the vast new Adani coal mine in Australia, seems to be sponsoring another such project not far away, forcing activists into a tiring game of whack-a-coal.
George Washington University has joined Georgetown University and American University in plans to divest from fossil fuel, meaning that the centers of intellectual power surrounding the nation’s capital are in agreement about the shape of the energy future.
Volkswagen’s massive factory in Zwickau, Germany’s “city of cars,” produced its final internal-combustion car last month, “a Golf R Estate with 2.0-litre petrol engine in Oryx White Pearl Effect.” The factory has been in operation since 1904; after its workers go through a few weeks of retraining, it will start churning out electric vehicles.
With an eye to future negotiations, the House Select Committee on Climate laid down one really important marker, even if it’s buried on page 287 of its new report: “Congress should not offer liability relief or nullify Clean Air Act authorities or other existing statutory duties to cut pollution in exchange for a carbon price.” Because this is likely to be the first bargaining position of the oil companies if President Biden takes over, it’s good to be on the record in advance that it’s not acceptable. The Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, among others, apparently deserves credit.
Warming Up
Want to see a great ad for a great product, the e-bike? You can’t on French TV, because it’s been banned for hurting the feelings of the auto industry. But that’s why we have YouTube. Better yet, the inspiration for the commercial apparently came from a classic Supremes hit.
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