The Yale Daily News takes note of the … awkward friendship between Yale and the company that made and marketed all those opioids that fucked everyone up.
[T]he Drug Enforcement Administration found that [Sackler company] Purdue Pharma had used “excessive and inappropriate” marketing that “very much exacerbated” OxyContin abuse. In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its executives pled guilty to federal charges of misbranding the drugs, collectively paying more than $600 million in fines… Mundipharma, a company associated with Purdue Pharma and owned by members of the Sackler family, has continued to push [OxyContin] in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. A Los Angeles Times investigation found that Mundipharma had paid doctors to give presentations abroad on the benefits of the drug. In 2015, the company saw a $100 million increase in sales from China — a jump of 45 percent — compared to the previous year, although Mundipharma did not disclose the portion of its revenue that came from OxyContin sales alone. There, the company used cartoon videos that understated the likelihood of addiction in a campaign for opioid pain relievers.
The YDN asked various friends and beneficiaries of the Sacklers on campus to comment, and … well… what do you expect?
“These are gifts that different family members made as individual family gifts. These were not gifts from the company — these were individual family gifts, so in that sense, these individuals have wealth that they gave to us, so it’s no more complicated than that when they made these gifts a number of years ago,” said Vice President for Development Joan O’Neill.
God knows how they got all that money… But for sure in the process of converting that money from corporate earnings to individual assets, they… uh… It’s no more complicated than that it all became … laundered?… And anyway, it was so long ago…
“While it is now clear that these drugs have been abused and there is certainly an addiction problem in our country, responsibility for it cannot be attributed to a single cause.”
You’d think the dean of Yale’s med school would be able to distinguish between a problem and an epidemic which the President of the United States has declared a public health emergency. As to his larger capacity for argumentation: Who said there was one cause? He’s correcting a straw man, ain’t he? All we’re talking about is one of the very biggest, and one of the most unconscionable, ongoing, causes.
Anyway. It’ll all settle down. Most opioid addiction occurs in no-‘count places like West Virginia, and why should a place like Yale give a shit about that?