The Sacklers threaten us all with a good time

“Give us total impunity or we won’t accede to the total impunity deal” is a hell of an ultimatum.

The Sacklers are a multigenerational family of drug dealers, descended from the pioneer of the benzo epidemic, whose family drug business, Purdue Pharma, jumpstarted the opioid epidemic with its drug Oxycontin. The epidemic’s US body count is past 800,000.

The Sacklers are worth billions — the family’s net worth exceeds that of other criminal dynasties like the Rockefellers. They are facing a blizzard of litigation thanks to their active role in deceptive, aggressive opioid marketing.

Depositions and internal documents about the Sacklers reveal their direct role in Purdue’s explicit plan to create addicts and then demonize them, blaming their addiction on their personal moral failings rather than the deceptive practices of the pharma industry.

For many years, the Sacklers were among the world’s most effective reputation-launderers, dispensing crumbs from their family fortune to arts and cultural institutions so that their name was synonymous with generosity, not genocide.

They went to enormous lengths to suppress photos of themselves and generally refused to discuss the opioid epidemic and their family’s…