How can this possibly happen unless the administration of justice is totally corrupt? It can't and the system is corrupt in more ways than one. The Sacklers and their company Purdue are parasites on our society.

The trouble is that government administrations around the world have been complicit or Sacklers couldn't have gotten away with doing what they have done. The fact is that modern medicine has known about the true dangers of narcotics in a reasonably extensive way since the 1860s Civil War, as this was the first time that both 'refined' narcotics and the hypodermic needle were used in combination in a big way. The consequence was that thousands of injured Civil War veterans became severely addicted to the over administrations of laudanum/morphine (it's the classic case historically).

By the turn of the 20th Century the narcotics problem was well known around the world and by the end of the first half of the 20th C. international treaties on narcotics were in place and they'd been revised many times. Not remembering the details I've just checked and I offer this quote from Encyclopaedia Britannica on its page on the History of Drug Control:

'In 1909 U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt proposed an international investigation of the opium problem; a meeting of 13 nations held in Shanghai in the same year resulted in recommendations that formed the basis of the first opium convention held at The Hague in 1912. Ratification of the Hague Convention occurred during the meetings of 1913 and 1914. Although further regulatory activity was suspended during the course of World War I, ratification of the Versailles peace treaties of 1919–20 also constituted a ratification of the Hague Convention of 1912. The League of Nations was then given responsibility to supervise agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs.' https://www.britannica.com/topic/drug-use/History-of-drug-co...

If you read on, you'll see there were many revisions of the drug treaties between WWI and 1950. You don't have to be a medico or in drug regulation to know narcotics are regulated by international treaty for a very good reason, yet in recent years governments around the world have acted as if these treaties (and their own narcotics laws) never existed.

Funny isn't it, if I or any of we individuals had smuggled heroin across almost any border of any country and we were caught then we'd be locked up for decades, or in some countries, we'd even be executed as they've death penalty for smuggling narcotics.

So how in fucking Hell's name did various governments let these corporate 'pharmaceutical'—drug-peddling corporate cowboys/sleazebags even operate given the history of drug regulation and past and present law—let alone push so much dope to so many for so long?

Furthermore, what were all those doctors who prescribed the drugs doing? What on earth was going on in their minds? I am not a medico and even I (as do most of us) know the scripts these doctors were issuing like confetti would lead to serious addiction.

As I see it, our governments and their regulating authorities like the FDA are so fucked-up by corporate influence and lobbying that nothing works in the interest of the citizenry anymore, essentially our democracies are stuffed!

There cannot be any other possible reason, especially so when even the doctors are deliberately ignoring a central and fundamental tenet of their medical training.

We ought to be out on the streets demonstrating over this. There's no way the Sackler family and Purdue should get any concessions over this matter whatsoever—nor should any deal be done with them. Their actions of deliberately pushing their narcotic OxyContin to the extent that patient addition was inevitable makes them fully culpable.

Nothing short of them being locked up ought to suffice.