Pure Evil

Day 1521.

My friend Molly sent me a piece from the New York Times.

Further discovery in the Purdue trials show that the Justice Department had noted that the consulting company McKinsey & Co ‘the world’s most prestigious consulting firm’ had in 2017 advised Purdue on how to ‘Turbo Charge’ sales of OxyContin in the face of soaring overdoses.

The master plan was to rebate suppliers such as Anthem and CVS $14,810 per ‘event’
‘EVENT’...that’s an overdose, that’s our children, that’s my precious Luke!

This rebate, the mechanics of which are not explained, was an inducement to ‘find a way to counter the emotional messages from Mothers with teenagers that overdosed’....That’s me!
And Purdue loved the idea and noted that they should have done it sooner!

So here I am, joining a tribe of other warrior Mothers, shooting my mouth off to warn people with my ‘emotional message’ and Purdue wheel in McKinsey & Co, at great expense, I am sure, to figure out how to counter us and sell more of the shit that is killing hundreds of thousands.

Now, this wasn’t just a few suggestions over dinner, this is a 160 page document of emails and a full slide presentation. They’d done the numbers, projecting that in 2019 there would be 2,484 CVS customers that would have either overdosed or developed an opioid use disorder. So in 2019 CVS alone would get $36.8m!

It’s chilling to imagine the profit that was predicted in order to make that sum worth it.
It makes a mockery of the $8.3 billion in penalties that Purdue are facing.
And those charming Sacklers with $225 million in civil penalties.
I wonder how much jail time I would get for this?

But there’s more...

McKinsey & Co, it appears from the documents released, got a bit worried, not about the deaths, but about legal repercussions after Massachusetts filed a lawsuit in 2018 against Purdue. They thought it might be best to have a chat with their risk committee to see if they should do anything ‘other than eliminating all our documents and emails’. So they knew this proposal was fucked up.

I thought I could no longer be shocked. I thought I had heard it all.
I had to read the article multiple times to even fathom it’s content. It’s like they were offering $14,810 for every person killed, like they were hiring assassins.

The McKinsey presentation was in 2017.
This was when the opioid crisis was already out of control.
This was after Luke was already dead.
Luke, and thousands and thousands of Lukes.

No wonder the Sacklers and Purdue were trying to wrap their lawsuits up to avoid further discovery, as has been implied.

So let me get my tiny brain around this.
Purdue were willing to dish out $14,810 per ‘event’ to their vendors.
Not to the Mothers whose children had suffered that ‘event’.

How many of us could have used that $14,810 for funerals, headstones, grave plots?
Because I am still living with the consequences of that ‘event’ 1521 days later.

How much Naloxone would that buy?
How much treatment, harm reduction, therapy would that buy?

How did they arrive at $14,810?

Who are these people at McKinsey?
Oh! how I’d love a little chat.

So I urge you to check out McKinsey & Co.
Who else do they advise?
And see if you would trust anything they touch,
now that you know that their response to the opioid crisis ....
was to ignore the warnings and sell more opioids.