2023/06/06
A judge's gavel rests on a book of law. - Dreamstime/Dreamstime/TNS
Compare and contrast, please.
Wednesday in Upstate New York, Nauman Hussain was sentenced to 5-15 years in prison for his role in the October 2018 deaths of 20 people after the brakes of an enormous stretch limousine failed. Hussain wasn’t driving the car. Rather, he rented out the vehicle — and a jury found evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that before doing so, he failed to ensure it was safe to drive. For that, he was convicted of 20 counts of second-degree manslaughter.
In Manhattan Tuesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that members of the Sackler family, the billionaires who own Purdue Pharma, will get full immunity from all civil lawsuits related to the mass dissemination of powerful pain drugs that have addicted millions and killed thousands. (Though Purdue Pharma has twice pleaded guilty to criminal charges, the Sacklers themselves have never been charged.) The ruling, the culmination of years of legal wrangling, shields the family atop Purdue Pharma and paves the path for the company’s bankruptcy restructuring in exchange for $6 billion in Sackler money that will go to help address the epidemic their company helped fuel.
The cash is no small sum, and will help people in desperate need across America, including here in New York, where opioid deaths have risen from about 1,000 in 2010 to more than 4,000 today. Nationally, opioid deaths now number more than 80,000 per year. Addicted people need counseling, effective medication-based treatment and a range of other services so they don’t wind up part of rising death counts.
It would be facile to call the Sacklers personally responsible for all the deaths and addictions, many of which have been caused by fentanyl. But when their company created and marketed OxyContin, it did more than any other corporate actor to fuel a public health crisis that’s torn America at the seams. Someone once said that one death is a tragedy (or in this case, 20 deaths), while a million deaths is a statistic. It’s not entirely untrue.
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© New York Daily News
Compare and contrast, please.
Wednesday in Upstate New York, Nauman Hussain was sentenced to 5-15 years in prison for his role in the October 2018 deaths of 20 people after the brakes of an enormous stretch limousine failed. Hussain wasn’t driving the car. Rather, he rented out the vehicle — and a jury found evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that before doing so, he failed to ensure it was safe to drive. For that, he was convicted of 20 counts of second-degree manslaughter.
In Manhattan Tuesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that members of the Sackler family, the billionaires who own Purdue Pharma, will get full immunity from all civil lawsuits related to the mass dissemination of powerful pain drugs that have addicted millions and killed thousands. (Though Purdue Pharma has twice pleaded guilty to criminal charges, the Sacklers themselves have never been charged.) The ruling, the culmination of years of legal wrangling, shields the family atop Purdue Pharma and paves the path for the company’s bankruptcy restructuring in exchange for $6 billion in Sackler money that will go to help address the epidemic their company helped fuel.
The cash is no small sum, and will help people in desperate need across America, including here in New York, where opioid deaths have risen from about 1,000 in 2010 to more than 4,000 today. Nationally, opioid deaths now number more than 80,000 per year. Addicted people need counseling, effective medication-based treatment and a range of other services so they don’t wind up part of rising death counts.
It would be facile to call the Sacklers personally responsible for all the deaths and addictions, many of which have been caused by fentanyl. But when their company created and marketed OxyContin, it did more than any other corporate actor to fuel a public health crisis that’s torn America at the seams. Someone once said that one death is a tragedy (or in this case, 20 deaths), while a million deaths is a statistic. It’s not entirely untrue.
___
© New York Daily News
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