When your school or museum starts considering whether to return Sackler money, keep this in mind. Not just depraved indifference. Fiercely determined depraved indifference.

(Quoted here.)

Purdue Pharma, opioid epidemic, 2014:

In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges.

I know. They’re not really the same thing. Business practices have evolved since 1982. The Sacklers alone make money at both ends.

U Buffalo’s generous donor

Gives each of his salesmen a boner.

One dancer exotic

For every narcotic

That you sell for the company’s owner.

Seven hundred million dollars over the last ten years in personal compensation! Not bad. This guy makes the Sacklers look like chumps. And all on the backs of poor slobs in West Virginia who took his drugs and destroyed themselves and their worlds. And now the CEO of the most disgusting opioid distributor in the world (“In 2006 and 2007 … McKesson Corp … shipped more than 5.66 million opioid pills to a single pharmacy in a tiny town in rural West Virginia, according to a scathing congressional report released last month.”) has decided that with the eyes of the courts upon his business methods the time is absolutely right to retire.

Time to explore other ways he can make a contribution to society.

For Andrew Kolodny, co-director of Opioid Policy Research at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Purdue’s wrongdoing is the Sacklers’ wrongdoing. As the inventors and owners of Purdue, the Sacklers deserve the “lion’s share” of the blame for America’s opioid crisis, he said.

He explained that the United States’ opioid epidemic is as severe as it is because the medical community began aggressively to prescribe opioids in the ’90s in response to what Kolodny deems a “brilliant marketing campaign” carried out by Purdue. He said the company has faced legal consequences for some of the specific ways in which it marketed OxyContin, but it was never punished for the “nonbranded marketing” they performed by persuading the medical community to feel more comfortable prescribing opioids.

U CONN DECLINES TO RETURN SACKLER FAMILY DONATIONS

AMID FUROR OVER OPIOID MANUFACTURER PURDUE PHARMA

“It’s a case about greed.”

***********************

As for the concurrent Sackler Family Values trial:

… Purdue executives determined — and recorded in secret internal correspondence — that doctors had the crucial misconception that OxyContin was weaker than morphine, which led them to prescribe OxyContin much more often, even as a substitute for Tylenol.

Hey! I coulda had a opiate!

[UPDATE as the trial begins tomorrow:

Also on trial is Sunrise Lee, a former stripper who, as an Insys sales manager, enticed physicians into writing more prescriptions, prosecutors said. “Doctors really enjoyed spending time with her and found Sunrise to be a great listener,” another manager, Alec Burlakoff, told colleagues, according to court filings.]

Kapoor Hall, the fancy pharmacy school building at the University of Buffalo, was dedicated only a few years ago, with a big ol’ ribbon-cutting ceremony and all. John Kapoor himself was there to share his inspiring immigrant story, along with tips on how to run a profitable pharma concern with integrity.

Did UB have any inkling when it took his money that, this Monday, Kapoor’s trial, for “conspiring to pay doctors bribes and kickbacks that were disguised as fees for speaking events,” will put quite the spotlight on their decision to monumentalize him? Since Kapoor’s arrest (and the guilty pleas of several of his company’s executives; and the guilty pleas or upcoming trials of a number of bribed doctors — one of whom is a GW grad! This guy “ignored and bullied patients who resisted staying on the powerful pain-killing spray.”), the school has gone this way and that on whether to sandblast the name of a man who basically shoved for-cancer-pain-only fentanyl down the throats of thousands of people who came to their pusher-doctors complaining of sore knees and elbows. Some of those people are dead; quite a few are addicted; and far be it from UD to deny that this represents one logical and popular way to earn billions in the pharma trade… But the question before us is: Wouldn’t a little due diligence (given how relatively late in his criminal career UB did business with him) have spared Buffalo a good deal of trouble and embarrassment?

The author of America’s biggest health care fraud ever goes to trial February 11! (Various boring underlings have already pled guilty. I’m sure Philip Esformes’ lawyers will describe the evil way these evil people led their client astray.) UD promises you that the guy who bribed U Penn’s basketball coach to get his kid on the team will be spectacular on the stand. This is one to watch. We’ll enjoy – hell, love – covering it here on University Diaries.

For it is Sackler, Sackler, emblazoned on our faculty
But now it looks as though they got the dough through smack-dependency.

Yes it was Sackler, Sackler long before the o.d.s came.
But now the name has come to sound like scum — it’s a bad bad name.

The authors said they were particularly struck by the fact that the number of [opioid-maker] marketing interactions with doctors — such as frequent free meals — was more strongly associated with overdose deaths than the amount spent.

“Each meal seems to be associated with more and more prescriptions,” Dr. [Scott] Hadland said.

Don’t tell me they’re too high — that’s simply not true.

If someone has to die, it’s them and not you.

Don’t bring around a cloud to rain on my charade!

‘Prescription blizzard deep and dense and so white’

This is the sort of poetry that I write.

This is the vast catastrophe that I have made!

[chorus]

More people killed by my little pill

Than traffic fatalities – right, sir!

More people thrilled by taking my pill

Before they all say goodnight, sir!

Med schools across the nation bear our great name

Philanthropy removes all sense of shame

As we distribute heroin — the highest grade!

The affidavit filed with the charges described many of Pham’s text messages, indicating in one case that he was having a sexual relationship with a patient. He was prescribing drugs to that woman and also to her 9-year-old daughter, according to the document by DEA Special Agent Lindsey Bellomy.

But it’s certainly not the first time in a lot of other states; more and more doctors are doing jail time for killing their patients.  

… Louisville, expecting to find – I don’t know, another standard-issue striving southern school – I was stunned by its special quality of debasement, by the absence of even lip-service in the direction of intellect and integrity. τον αθλητισμό και τον αυτο-εμπλουτισμό (Sport and Self-Enrichment) seemed its motto, as administrators stole whatever money they could get their hands on while hiring psychos to coach the guys. Louisville indeed was basically a Greek university (steal everything) with teams.

UL’s in one of its mopping up phases at the moment, trying to figure out how not to be stupid and corrupt while at the same time trying to recover some funds from … well, from lots of people, starting with its last president, who set up quite the clever scheme to reward himself and cronies with all the money that should have been going to the coach… I mean… to the students? … professors? … But the last sicko coach, whose … non-standard… recruitment and retention methods led to his firing, is suing the school for tens of millions of dollars; and of course the prez is doing absolutely everything he possibly can to harass the school and make it give up its lawsuit against him.

It’s quite an edifying spectacle, higher-thought-wise — a university spending all its time and money keeping the football games (no one goes to the games — too grossed out) going and the suits and countersuits humming. Prez tried to get the whole thing dismissed (too vague, he said), which didn’t work; then he actually tried to make it so UL had to pay his legal costs which haha also didn’t work but you know it gummed stuff up a little more so maybe Jimbo would die down at one of his many Florida McMansions (financed with UL money) at some point during pre-trial proceedings or whatever…

Jimbo Ramsey-wise, when things were good, they were very good.

Former University of Louisville President James Ramsey resigned under pressure a mere 27 days into the 2016-17 fiscal year, but he was still the nation’s highest-paid public college president that year, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle, which maintains a database of compensation received by chief executives of public and private colleges, reported this week that Ramsey was paid about $4.3 million that fiscal year — more than any of the other 250 top executives for public colleges and systems included in its review.

Ramsey made millions despite stepping down as U of L’s president on July 27, 2016, less than a month after the fiscal year began on July 1.

Don’t get no better than that, baby! Don’t get no better! Let’s see Jimbo’s successor clean up like that! Let’s just see her try!