End bankruptcy shopping

No more Sacklers, ever.

It looks like the Sacklers are going to get away with it. The multigenerational crime family that kickstarted the opioid epidemic by engineering overprescription of Oxycontin have the blood of 800,000 Americans on their hands and more than $10b in their pockets.

The Sacklers offer a masterclass in how to make and keep a blood-soaked fortune. They are masters of corporate secrecy. They are virtuosos at using philanthropy to launder their reputation. They are the kings of hiring vicious attack-lawyers to intimidate their critics.

They engineered medical disinformation; bribed doctors, pharmacists, and distributors; shifted blame to their victims by calling them “criminal addicts.”

They smuggled billions offshort into financial secrecy havens, including rogue states like Switzerland.

And then, when the bill came due, they engineered a bankruptcy that extinguished all civil liability claims against them, walking away from their obligations to states, cities, patients and families, while clinging to the majority of their money.

The only thing worse than a world with the Sacklers in it would be a world where we learned nothing from the defects in the system that they exploited.