Regrann from @c1tygotyou - #Repost @freedom_faction with @get_repost ・・・ If the devil wears Prada, what do #America’s most destructive #drugpushers wear? They wear smiles. The drug pushers we have in mind here have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, enough fatalities to decrease overall U.S. life expectancy at birth for the last two years running. Yet no police #SWATteams have pounded down any doors hunting these drug pushers down. These particular drug pushers have devastated millions of families across the #UnitedStates. Yet some of America’s most honorable institutions, outfits ranging from #YaleUniversity to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have spent decades lauding their philanthropic generosity and benevolence. We’re obviously not talking #ElChapo or any of his drug-running buddies here. We’re talking about the mega-billionaire family behind one of America’s most profitable drug-industry empires, the privately held #PurduePharma. Last week, flacks at Purdue announced that the company will no longer be flooding doctors’ offices with sales representatives hawking #OxyContin, the now-notorious opioid painkiller. This move may be the closest admission of guilt we will ever see from Purdue Pharma — or the patriarchs of the Sackler family that gave it birth. The roots of Purdue’s criminal profiteering, as #PatrickRadden Keefe has chillingly related in the New Yorker, stretch all the way back to three brothers in mid-20th century Brooklyn. All three — Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler — became doctors. All three had an entrepreneurial bent. Arthur had entrepreneurial genius. Arthur Sackler saw that the pharmaceutical industry of his day had no clue to the marketing magic — and magical profits — that modern Madison Avenue advertising approaches could fashion. He linked the two. His ad agency pioneered tactics that would revolutionize prescription drug marketing. Pharmaceutical companies, under Arthur Sackler’s guidance, began hiring noted doctors to vouch for their products and subsidizing studies that showed how useful their products could be. Sackler’s campaigns deluged doctors’ offices with attractive promo brochures and filled medical journals (at West Kendall)
