"He gives the kids free samples because he knows full well,
That today's young innocent faces will be tomorrows clientele."Tom Lehrer, "The Old Dope Pedlar"
The infamous Sackler family recently sold their interest in the local ski resort, and you could hear the sigh of relief all the way to Canada. Vermont has been very hard hit by the opioid tsunami, and almost everyone here lost somebody to "the other pandemic." So nobody wanted to be working to make them even richer.
There's a big reason a drug cartel so powerful they probably never personally killed anybody, got off so easily. They're an upscale, respectable drug cartel, with art museums full of school kids, and university chair endowments. They'll never be fugitives from justice. Justice goes to the opera in marble buildings bearing their name.
The heroin business was born in corporate drug labs, and devolved into a massive blackmarket pyramid scheme, sorted in order of product dilution. It figured heavily in the War on Vietnam, and the War on Afghanistan, and has killed tens of thousands in Mexico just in the past decade. According to some estimates, the "illegal" drug trade accounts for twenty percent of the global economy. It's nearly impossible to calculate, but it is flatly impossible to move that much money without the enthusiastic complicity of the major banks.
Now the cartels own their own banks, like the Mafia and the Vatican and other institutions with cash-flow problems. So, at the top, to this day, are the same billionaire "shareholders" as ever. At the bottom, the popular mythology is about twenty years behind the curve, as usual.
In the recovery field they used to talk about raising the bottom, so when a person bottomed out, they wouldn't be quite so destroyed at the start of a life-long struggle toward sanity. We've raised the bottom, all right. Now it's right next door. Most of the victims got suckered into this by prescription. Then they ran out of money.
Apparently the Sacklers had cornered the market from top to bottom, with chemistry that de-fanged the drug laws, doctors that prescribed hundreds of addictive pills for minor aches and pains, and shipments of millions of doses to suppliers in sparsely-populated rural areas that couldn't possibly absorb all that dope. By the time the stuff reached the streets, the Sacklers and their kind were long gone. Pay no attention to that little man behind the corporate veil.
There's one aspect of this horror nobody seems to notice. It's the business model. The Sacklers do business like every other enterprise does, if they are still in business. And that business model, like the software business, and the streaming-video business, and the "smart" lightbulb business for gosh sakes, the structure that drives the Internet, the "social" media, and anything else raking in the big bucks these days, is best described as "heroin-dealer."
It may not be obvious. Nobody buys an "app" in a box anymore, they download it. The only box involved is a checkbox "agreeing" to whatever abuse the purveyors--sorry, now it's "providers"--might wish to subject us. Almost immediately the "upgrades" start rewriting the code.
The language is telling. The difference between a "customer" and a "consumer" for example. When you purchased anything as a customer, you owned it. As a consumer, you are not an owner: you're a "user." Maybe an "end-user."
You can stop any time you want. Cancel your "social" media accounts. Disconnect Google Docs. Tell the boss you can only work with paper.
It's not the Information Age anymore. The machinery creating and feeding our modern addictions runs on our attention. The substances on which we have become dependent for our sense of well-being are as empty of vital nutrients as white sugar, and just as eagerly gobbled up by the unsuspecting human brain. This new system is pulling in money faster than Jeff can spend it on spaceship rides. And crumpling up our personal worldviews like so much used tinfoil.
In a way, the Sacklers represent the last of the info-age robber-barons. The dope-pusher business model had long gone virtual, by which I mean, even the products are ephemeral, insubstantial, entirely fictitious. But the organization was still moving truckloads of actual dope, leaving paper contrails streaking the landscape at a scale to rival the fast-food business. When addiction jumped onto the internet like a virus out of a bat, they were left behind with their pills and paraphernalia. It was only a matter of time before such an obsolete operation would collapse under its own weight.
For years it didn't seem to matter that people were dying in horrendous numbers. But now almost everybody's family has felt the icy touch of overdose death, and so many of the bodies turned out to be white. District Attorneys are elected officials. Now the courts have to pretend to punish the kingpins. And the kingpins have to pretend it really, really hurts, to move their enterprise to China.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
