When was the last time a billionaire was the best possible scapegoat for the DEA completely ignoring a problem that is now killing 60,000 Americans a year?
This isn’t a normal situation. It’s killing more Americans than died in Vietnam in the entire war per year. At some point someone is going to have to take the fall for it and the Sacklers are very low hanging fruit. Their wealth in this case actually makes it better for the Feds from a PR perspective. And let’s be clear, this thing is entirely the Feds fault. It wasn’t just the Sacklers, it was literally dozens of companies who all carried out this thing, for profit, while Federal law enforcement ignored it.
If you think that Federal Law Enforcement is going to take the blame for this… yeah I don’t know. I don’t see that happening. The Sacklers are very guilty and there’s mountains of evidence. It’s just the easiest way out of this mess for a lot of people on the government side.
EDIT: These settlement talks just failed because there’s zero incentive for the federal government to do a deal with these people. They need to extract a pound of flesh to show the American public and they aren’t going to give up their best scapegoats for a pittance. They’re going to ruin these people so that they can tell everyone that justice was served. Unfortunately real justice would look like most everyone who was making decisions at all of these companies, along with their sales reps, everyone at the DEA who made decisions on opiates during the ramp up period, and basically anyone else I haven’t covered being publicly executed Braveheart style in a giant televised event. You would literally have to execute more people than the French Revolution. I’m not being hyperbolic either. They will probably have killed more Americans than the Civil War by the time this is all over. Our constitutional system isn’t equipped to deliver justice in this situation because this was a pretty over the top systemic crime committed by literally thousands of people. The fact that we don’t do cruel and unusual punishment in this country combined with the complete capture of our system by a small group of really stupid evil people is the only reason that won’t happen.
This is the biggest example of the danger of allowing systemic impunity, and the core reason why the idea that no one is above the law was important to the founders. This should have never been allowed to get this far, but it was, and we really need to learn from that.
Had what may be a dumb thought: can you vape tobacco in leaf form like you can cannabis? Did some quick googling and it seems like maybe yes? Nicotine junkies out there should be giving that a try.
Have some younger family members in middle/high school and vaping really is out of control. You can easily take a puff surreptitiously and there is not much of an odor to detect. That combined w/ skirting the rules being exhilarating for kids and the addictiveness of nicotine, and alot of them end up doing it all day/everyday.
Call me cynical, but don’t think the tobacco companies switching focus to a new product kids happened to love and hooking a new generation to their nicotine products was an accident.
The tobacco companies are still only minor players in the vaping industry, and nicotine is no more harmful than caffeine. The anti-vaping hysteria has been completely divorced from reality for a decade, with no evidence of sanity anywhere on the horizon. You can close your eyes and ignore the whole thing and I promise you everything will be fine.
Not only that i’m probably 100% likely to go back to cigs if this ban goes through. Not because I want to, but because vaping really saved my ass and with no alternative it’s just inevitable I’ll go back.
Not sure how long jmakin’s been smoking/vaping, but I was a smoker for a couple of years. Didn’t even smoke that much either. Never smoked more than a half pack in a day but a couple of days after quitting, I had two tonic-clonic seizures. I’ve had epilepsy for 23 years and that was the only day I had more than one seizure in a day. As a matter of fact, it was the first time I had a tonic-clonic seizure in over a decade at that point.
The physical effects of nicotine withdrawal faded after about a week. But I remember 6 months into quitting cold turkey that I would have an occasional nicotine craving. I can’t imagine how difficult it is for a 2 pack per day smoker who has been smoking since being a kid to quit.
