> I find these two positions very hard to re-conciliate.
Why do you need to reconcile them? "HN" is not a person and does not need to have consistent beliefs. "HN" is a loose association of independent people who believe different things and choose to comment on different matters. If you think some individual is being hypocritical, take it up with them.
These don't conflict, the only similarity is the presence of a drug.
Purdue Pharma was using legal drugs already with high purity and free of contamination, so this case already satisfies the desired goal that is hoping to be extended to other substances.
Nobody (in your first audience) wants opiates to be illegal. People want the pharma company to not undermine doctor advice to patients with kickbacks, especially after patient consequences.
The violated the FDA, which is a much better framework than the DEA. This is consumer protection in play. In all vice topics: Criminalization doesn't have consumer protection, decriminalization doesn't have consumer protection, only legalization has consumer protection.
> On another hand, HN demands extreme punishment against a pharma company which produced opioids.
They didn't just produce opioids. They fraudulently claimed that the opioids they produced were non-addictive.
>Purdue admits it illegally and misleadingly marketed its opioids, including “to more than 100 health care providers whom the company had good reason to believe were diverting opioids” for misuse; illegally paid doctors to prescribe more opioids; and took part in other fraudulent and illegal practices. Purdue says it did all of this between 2007 and at least 2017 — after a separate guilty plea in 2007 forced the company to pay more than $600 million in fines.
IMO these two positions are no hard to re-conciliate. The thing about "drugs should be legal and available" is that it should go hand-in-hand with honest information about those drugs. What evil pharma companies do is lie and misrepresent information about those drugs. The amount of incorrect marketing done about OxyContin is just insane.
> On one hand, HN in general advocates for legalization of all drug usage, one argument being that if they were legal they would be very high purity and free of contamination (deliberate or accidental).
> On another hand, HN demands extreme punishment against a pharma company which produced opioids.
I am not a fan of legalization, I am a fan of decriminalization. But I think the problem here for many is that this was not a legalized drug trade, this was manipulation of the health care system for profit.
Any legalized drug industry would also have a legal framework and those breaking that framework would/should be punished for it. Purdue mislead patients, doctors, and paid illegal kickbacks, failed to act in good faith to limit the illegal supply of their drugs etc etc.
This wasn't like some guy buying weed to get high, many of the victims were regular people who took this medicine on the advice of their doctors.
"I find these two positions very hard to re-conciliate"
Same as per vmception's comments.
Also, what you need to realize is that opiate drugs are almost unique amongst drugs. There are staggering numbers of them in different classes - oral, injectable, short/long-acting etc.
The tragedy is that they're all addictive and the degree of their addictiveness is directly proportional their effectiveness at reducing pain (see Burroughs's perceptive quote in my post).
Thus, titrating the right dose and determining the period for which the drug should be given becomes a very difficult tightrope act, especially so if a long period is involved. Give too little and the patient suffers pain, give even a little too much and addiction is very likely the result. It's a nightmarish problem.
Opiates are the Janus of drugs - one face shows a miracle drug - the other is unmitigated pain and tragedy - and often death.
The issue here is that Purdue deliberately peddled oxycontin, a drug that can be taken by mouth, in ways that encouraged patients to easily slip into the 'too much' side. That this should never happen without supervision is a longstanding axiom of opiate management and has been known and well understood for over one hundred years.
In essence, Purdue and the Shacklers deliberately chucked away years of best practice which then benefited them financially but to the patients' devastating expense.
The matter of what drugs should be legalized etc. is somewhat different matter (which others have covered well so I won't address it except to say that they're not logically in conflict as they address different things).
Do some more reading on what Purdue actually did. The point of legalization is to have high quality drugs and high quality information about those drugs. Purdue created drugs, sure, and then they launched what can only be described as information warfare on our country.
"...they launched what can only be described as information warfare on our country."
Yeah, exactly. As I've hinted in my posts, given the millions of pages on opiate info gathered over the last 150 or so years, the many laws in every country, international treaties on drugs then how did this information warfare happen?
As I've said, the FDA was AWOL, so was the medical profession.
How on earth did this happen? Distorting scientific fact to the extent that almost all professionals ignored the problem has to be very serious, somewhat akin to the climate change denial methinks.
We really do need to work on the psychology of how this happened. Right, this happened so easily it will almost certainly happen again.
Pharma has a higher obligations to ensure they don't abuse their perceived authority. Think of it as say a cop commit 1st degree murder vs a hobbo doing it the same. Everyone I know of would prescribe that cop with steeper sentence while not so for hobbo and some would pity. Of course in actual reality rarely cop would get that while a hobbo in every multiverse would have higher chances getting convicted. Pharma in general will actively exploit all legal avenue to sell you their drugs. Some even skirt the boundary of illegality. With enough influence, they can outright do wrong things KNOWINGLY.
And it is these set differences that elicit people to seemingly have that contradictory response when it comes to "drugs should be legal and available".
I don’t think it’s extreme to expect a company that fraudulently claimed their product wasn’t addictive to compensate states for the harm that misrepresentation caused.
Because it's not a black & white subject, and with the polarization of the extremes in today's discourse you can't bring some points to the discussion, or you'll be shoved to one extreme.
We forget that ultimate freedom is ultimate responsibility, and the truth is that some people just aren't able to be responsible for themselves, some for brief periods of time, others for life.
For some people things like drugs or even money is the worst thing we can give to them because it will only fuel bad habits like addictions and gambling. Some people will for sure become addicts and gamblers if the conditions are right.
Now: are we okay with these behaviors that are frown upon? Or are these actual destructive behaviors that shouldn't be left loose?
Even if these are extreme behaviors that only apply to a small fraction of the population, it's millions of people we're talking about.
Now in this case, some people were probably not properly informed about the side effects and addiction. They were lured into their addiction. Or they just thought chemical addiction wouldn't through to them.
