The Injustice of the Oxycontin Plea Deal …

Certainly, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime in the case of three current and former Purdue Pharmaceutical executives pleading guilty for misleading the public about Oxycontin addiction.  They will pay $634.5 million in fines, collectively, with the three executives (no longer working at Purdue) to pay $about $34 million of that amount.  It seems like a cushion of a deal compared to the vast multitude of African American men who get anywhere from 63 to 78 months for the sale of five grams of crack. 

The disparity in this is fairly ugly and downright unjust.  We don’t excuse the street corner sale of illicit drugs (which should warrant punitive measures) that terrorize our communities with addiction and violence. But it seems downright fishy and awfully foul that White male business executives who turned a yearly $1.2 billion profit off the sale of one of the most viciously addictive drugs on the street market – and continued pushing it despite knowledge of its dangers – would not suffer the same demise as Black men who are serving disproportionate sentences for less in an overcrowded prison system. 

Although the U.S. Sentencing Commission recently proposed an amendment reducing crack/cocaine sentencing 51 to 63 months, it does little in reducing the ghastly number of Black boys and men being held in jail for long periods of time for the pettiest offenses.  As if its done any good.  Obviously, it hasn’t.  But, this is the continuing saga of a misguided drug war which ultimately rewards obscenely wealthy manufacturers of illicit drugs – the true “drug lords” like Purdue – with fines and plea bargains while the corner pushers, addicts, whole communities and their families suffer. 

Purdue knowingly distributed an addictive drug that was actively traded on corners and made a serious profit while aware of the social and economic impact.  To us, that appears like the actions of a fully operational drug cartel – not the blunders of an unwitting corporation. In this case, Purdue was the cartel, making it increasingly easy for small-time dealers to push Oxycontin since it was readily and legally available.  There is just no other way to characterize this and plain insulting to portray it otherwise.  We can’t wait to expose the ignorance and racism of this one: because guilty, drug-cartel organizing White Purdue executives don’t wear crooked hats, bulkly t-shirts and chains means they’re less guilty?   Obviously, they hid behind corporate privilege, pretty much feeling nothing was wrong since it was under the guise of “best business practices” and legal operations.   In this case, once again, the drug lords got away while their underlings await incarceration for barely making a fraction of a percentile of what Purdue made on Oxycontin.