Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Q: The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, the privately held drug company that has made billions from OxyContin, and Sacklers hold most of the seats on the board. Members of the family have been accused in a case brought by the state of Massachusetts of deceiving patients and doctors about the drug's risks as deaths mounted. And documents recently released in the case shine new light on former Purdue Pharma President Richard Sackler's role in the aggressive marketing of the powerful opioid. As the allegations mount, family members who made their fortunes well before OxyContin even went on the market have sought to distance themselves from their relatives. At the same time, activists have called on institutions to cut ties with the Sacklers, staging protests at museums that have received millions in donations. "The Sackler name is becoming synonymous with the opioid epidemic, and it is damning for these institutions to have their name up," said Nan Goldin, a photographer whose works have been displayed at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum and at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a Sackler Wing. Lost in the outrage: One of the most generous and best known of the Sacklers died in 1987, nearly a decade before OxyContin was released. Arthur M. Sackler made his money from medical research, medical advertising and trade publications. His younger brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, bought out his stake after he died. Arthur Sackler's name is on a gallery at the Smithsonian, a wing of galleries at London's Royal Academy of Arts and a museum at Beijing's Peking University. The Sackler Wing at the Met, which houses the celebrated Temple of Dendur from ancient Egypt, was funded by all three brothers. Richard has likewise donated heavily to various institutions. After a federal investigation, Purdue Pharma and three executives none of them Sacklers pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay more than $600 million for misleading the public about the risks of OxyContin. The Stamford, Connecticut, company has also been hit with a multitude of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that killed more than 47,000 people in 2017 alone. Arthur's nephew, Richard Sackler, who became president of Purdue Pharma in 1999 and remains on the board, is at the center of the litigation. He and other current and former executives have been accused of hiding the dangers of the drug from doctors and patients, encouraging physicians to prescribe more of the highest doses and minimizing the abuse crisis as it was unfolding. "This is not too bad. It could have been far worse," he wrote to Purdue Pharma executives in 2001 after a federal prosecutor reported that 59 people in one state had died from OxyContin, according to documents released this week in the Massachusetts case. At the launch party for OxyContin in 1996, Richard Sackler boasted the drug would bring a "blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition," the documents say. Years later, they say, he sought to shift blame onto drug users themselves, recommending the company "hammer on the abusers in every way possible." "Richard followed that strategy for the rest of his career: collect millions from selling addictive drugs, and blame the terrible consequences on the people who became addicted," attorneys in Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's office wrote. "By their misconduct, the Sacklers have hammered Massachusetts families in every way possible. And the stigma they used as a weapon made the crisis worse." A spokesman for Richard Sackler's family referred questions about the lawsuit to the company. Purdue Pharma said in a statement that Massachusetts' case the first one brought by a state to personally name members of the Sackler family is "littered with biased and inaccurate characterizations." The company said it will "aggressively defend against these misleading allegations." Arthur Sackler's widow and children insist that they never financially benefited from the sale of OxyContin. "It is a gross injustice to connect Arthur to the opioid crisis some 30 years after his death when he had nothing to do with it," Dame Jillian Sackler said in a statement. "It denies the many important contributions he made working to improve world health and to build cultural bridges between peoples." But activists have made no distinction between Arthur and his relatives. In July, dozens of activists led by Goldin held a protest inside the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard, scattering pill bottles and holding banners that read "SHAME ON SACKLER." Similar demonstrations have been held at the Met and the Smithsonian. Goldin, who was addicted OxyContin for years, said that getting the institutions to act will be difficult. "Who is going to turn down the money? They offer millions to these institutions, and the board members are not necessarily committed to action, so it's going to take a lot," she said. A Met spokesman said that the Sackler family's support began decades before the opioid crisis, but that the museum will be examining its gift acceptance policies. The Guggenheim, home to the Sackler Center for Arts Education, had no comment. A Harvard spokesman said in an email that Arthur Sackler's donation in 1982 paid for the construction of the building that originally housed the museum but that his foundation does not fund the museum. ___ Associated Press reporter Verena Dobnik contributed to this report from New York. ___ Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://www.twitter.com/aedurkinricher

A: Opioid crisis brings unwanted attention to wealthy family.
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Q: Nguyen's suicide has sparked a contentious legal battle headed to Massachusetts' highest court over whether schools can be held responsible when students take their own lives. The case is being closely watched by colleges and universities, who say a decision against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would place an unreasonable burden on untrained employees to stop suicides. "It would be groundbreaking," said Gary Pavela, a consultant on law and policy issues in higher education and author of a book about legal questions surrounding student suicides. "It would cause alarm in higher education," he said. The student's family says his death was preventable and that the school had a legal duty to use reasonable care to protect him from harm. Nguyen's professors and other MIT officials knew he was a suicide risk, but failed to get him the help he needed, an attorney for Nguyen's family argues. Months before Nguyen's death, a professor encouraged his colleagues to pass him or they might have "blood on their hands." Moments before Nguyen jumped, the professor "read him the riot act" over an email Nguyen sent to another MIT official that they deemed inappropriate, court records say. "Academic freedom is not a license to needlessly and recklessly endanger students known to be at risk of death with impunity; and this court should not allow it to become one at institutions that routinely admit students many with mental health issues as young as their mid-teens," attorney Jeffrey Beeler wrote in court documents. Beeler declined to comment and said Nguyen's family didn't want to speak to the media. MIT says the school wasn't aware of the severity of his condition and he was treated by outside professionals and refused on-campus resources. None of the nine professionals who treated Nguyen while he was at MIT believed he was an imminent risk of killing himself, the school says. "Mr. Nguyen's suicide was a tragedy. That does not warrant a legal conclusion that MIT or any individual associated with MIT had a legal duty to prevent it," attorneys for the school, two professors and one dean named in the lawsuit say in court documents. MIT, which refused to answer questions about the case, said in a statement it "remains committed to the well-being of its students, offering a robust network of support resources, including comprehensive mental health services." Nguyen's family attorney disputes the idea that the man didn't want help and has accused MIT of blaming the victim. No state supreme court has ever found that colleges and universities have a legal duty to prevent student suicides, MIT's attorneys say. Courts have generally been reluctant to do so because, among other things, suicide is an impulsive act that's difficult to predict, Pavela said. A Massachusetts trial court judge ruled in 2005 that an MIT housemaster and dean could be held responsible for the death of a woman who lit herself on fire in her dorm room. But Elizabeth Shin's case, which was later settled for an undisclosed amount, never reached the state's highest court. The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments in Nguyen's case on Tuesday after a lower court judge tossed the lawsuit last year. A group of 18 colleges and universities including Harvard University and Boston College is urging the court to reject the case, saying a decision in favor of the family could have devastating consequences. Fear of liability may cause professors and others without mental health expertise to overreact to concerns, which in turn could discourage students from coming forward with their problems, the schools say. Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a psychiatry expert at Columbia University, agrees. "To the extent that you heighten every resident assistant's sensitivity to the risk of suicidality, with the threat of liability hanging over them, they are far more likely to over predict, over intervene, see it where it's not," Appelbaum said. The Nguyen family attorney and their supporters including the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys say the schools' concerns are baseless. Beeler, in his filing, said he merely wants the court to affirm that the duty to provide reasonable care "extends to the ivory tower as it does every other civilized corner of the Commonwealth." Thomas Murphy, chair of the amicus committee of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, says a jury should get to decide whether MIT was negligent and caused Nguyen's suicide. "Maybe the school can convince them that they didn't cause (Nguyen's suicide) and it was going to happen anyway," he said. ___ Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://twitter.com/aedurkinricher. Read more of her work at http://bit.ly/2hIhzDb

A: Case stirs question of school liability for student suicides.
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Q: The California deaths were caused by a strain of the influenza virus that is sending sufferers across the nation to the doctor for flu-like symptoms at rates that are 50 percent higher than normal, said Lyn Finelli, head of the influenza surveillance and outbreak response team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "That's way above the norm for flu," Finelli said. "It tells us we're still in the middle of flu season, and in the Northeast and California it's going up, up, up." The flu strain responsible for the California deaths, H1N1, also predominates nationwide this year. It hits people hardest between the ages of 25 and 64, partly because some older people are believed to have more immunity due to similar outbreaks many decades ago. In California, 52 people died last week alone, including one child, the state's chief of communicable disease control told reporters on a conference call Friday. "This influenza season continues to be a severe one as the increasing number of influenza-related deaths indicates," Ron Chapman, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement, urging Californians to get vaccinated. In addition to the 147 confirmed California flu-related fatalities this season among people under age 65, another 44 suspected flu deaths remain under investigation, said Dr. James Watt, chief of the state's Division of Communicable Disease Control. Most of those felled by the disease had other health conditions, but not all, he said. Last year at the same time, the state had recorded just 14 flu deaths among Californians under age 65. The death of a 47-year-old television advertising executive in the state's capital city prompted a renewed call for residents to become vaccinated against flu. Sacramento County, with 21 deaths so far, leads the state in fatalities. "After reading the heartbreaking story of Nancy Pinnella, went to CVS and got my first flu shot ever," California's first lady, Anne Gust Brown, posted on Twitter. It is not fully clear whether California is an outlier in the severity of its cases, because states are not required to report flu deaths to the CDC, and data is collected differently from state to state and county to county, said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald. The fatality data that the public health agency does collect, on pediatric deaths, is not useful in studying H1N1, because the virus is more likely to attack adults, Finelli said. The public health agency does, however collect information on why people go to the doctor, and whether they are hospitalized for flu. Those signs, she said, show that this year's flu is likely to continue to hit hard. Although the number of cases nationwide appears to have plateaued, she said, that does not take into account that California and the Northeast are lagging other areas with a late flu season. Meanwhile, CDC data does show that far more people under the age of 65 are being hospitalized with flu-like symptoms than last year. As of last week, for example, 76 percent of those hospitalized for flu were under age 65, compared to less than 50 percent last year. Nationwide, the data shows that somewhat fewer people have contracted flu so far this year than last year, Finelli said. This year's strain, however, appears to be causing severe illness in a population that is more typically robust, she said.

A:
California sees high rate of flu deaths in unusually severe season.
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