800,000 Dead and Zero Criminal Charges: The Legal Loophole

A while back I had Peter Berg sitting across from me. Painkiller, the show I did about Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family. Someone sent me a New York Times article about a new twist in the opioid epidemic. These companies that serve as the middlemen between prescribers and the insurance companies, they're these companies that control what the insurance companies will allow to be prescribed. He called them the real Pablo Escobar, putting up numbers much larger than the Should we be looking at criminal charges on corporations? A while back I had Peter Berg sitting across from me. The guy who made Painkiller about Purdue and the Sackler family. He called them the real Pablo Escobar, putting up numbers much larger than the And here's where it stands today. Oxycontin helped fuel an epidemic tied to more than 800,000 American deaths. The Supreme Court threw out the deal that would have shielded the family. This April, Purdue was sentenced to five and a half billion dollars, but not a single Sackler has ever been criminally charged. So from everything you've seen, who actually gets held responsible for all this? Are these people untouchable? That's a great question. Maybe if more criminal charges were filed versus money and monetary, it would stop. But there never is. But I would like to see none of us want to have to face a 25-year prison sentence, or whatever it may be. But we often don't do that. In the beginning, we talked about changing laws, antiquated laws and regulations, and how those need to be updated. We created laws for something way back when, and here we have this bigger problem today. Maybe somebody should start looking at exactly what that question was. Should we be looking at criminal laws, criminal charges on corporations? Do you think it'll get to that point? We might. We keep asking those kinds of questions. Somebody might. But again, and I was talking outside with some of your people earlier, it's going to take... There's attorneys out there that have to rise up to the challenge. You know, everybody's in it because everybody needs to make money, right? And there may not be a big payday changing legislation that does something differently or handles it the right way, but they would have to get creative in their law. What would be the charges? And they would have to have the evidence, but they're also going to have to have the legislation and then get something passed to change a law, to create a law. I went through this with Ed Mazury. When we first began Hinkley, I had already been out in the community for close to a year. And Ed was really financially struggling to keep this case afloat. That's when he brought in some other law firms. But before he found those firms, he was trying to borrow money. And other attorneys were telling him, Ed, you're not going to win this case because you have a statute of limitations problem. So one afternoon, Ed called me into the law library, his big fancy law library, and he said, listen, kid, we're not going to be able to go forward. I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, really, honestly, this had been my time, my life away from my baby, my kids. I was a single mom. I never saw them. It was a huge struggle. And it's not like I was making a ton of money. And I've met these people. I believe in these people, that they believe in me. What do you mean, SOL, statute of limitations? I go, what the ****? We ---- out of luck. And he goes, basically. So he explained to me what the statute of limitations meant. And, you know, I was perplexed. And I just said, Ed, answer me this question, because I'm sitting here in your law library. How did all these laws come to be? Where did all these rules and these regulations and these laws and these standards, how big it's set and where they came from? Because somebody created them. Somebody wrote a law. Somebody challenged the system. I said, so you're not willing to do that? So it's just, we're ---- out of luck, statute of limitations. Literally, I saw Ed's ear lobes move back. Whenever I made Ed really mad, you know, that expression, his ears would move. And I'm like, oh, he's pissed. He's pissed. He goes, you're right, kid. Give me some time. Well, what had happened in Hinckley was because of the longer you can keep it a secret. Remember, it's the lies. It's the secret. It's the deception that kills. It's that silence. As long as they can hold that line past 10 years, they're out of the statute of limitations. They're home free. And PG&E had told everybody in Hinckley that there was chromium in their water, a natural element. Chromium-6, however, it's a man-made chemical and it's highly toxic. So what Ed did was he went and restudied this whole chromium deception that PG&E had, and that it was actually chromium-6. And the people had just learned when I came on that this was a lethal hexavalent chromium groundwater contamination, and it wasn't caused by chromium, that they learned the truth. So Ed pled in his papers, his pleading papers. Within one year last passed, the people just learned that it wasn't chromium, which is a naturally occurring element. Rather, it was hexavalent chromium. And we got out of the statute of limitations. And that's the scene in the film with the real judge, Leroy Simmons. He goes, tell your client, you're going to trial. But you've got to dig in there. You can't give up. And you've got to make those challenges. And Ed did it. And I challenged him. And Ed challenged me too. And yet the people in that community challenged me. And when you're in it, and you see the children and the suffering, you're more inclined to want to dig. You have to dig. You have to become your own detective. And you have to believe in yourself. And, you know, we were missing numbers. And I got into a document about what the levels of hexavalent chromium were or weren't. And one of the documents was dated 1993. And it said that the monitoring wells still contain 5 ppm hexachrome, which is lethally hazardous waste. And that 90% had been removed via agricultural domestic water use. So here's where I went. Wow. That's 1993. And the levels are still 5 ppm legal hazardous waste. And 90% has already been removed via domestic water use and consumption. And it's still 5 ppm. What were those numbers in 1985? What were those numbers in 1983? What were those numbers in 1975? And I went back to find those numbers. And I did. Because it was from the 60s into the time I got involved in that case, this community was flourishing. Their entire life was water. They used it to grow their food. They used it in their wells. They used it in their swamp coolers. They used every bit of water was their life. Those levels that were dumped at the PG&E facility were 58 ppm. That changed everything. Because now you have and you can run a model of how much those people had consumed in those years was show-to-dose response ratio and their illnesses. And so it's the hiding of the information. It's the hiding of the science and letting the system run out. So now you have a lower number and therefore, oh, you couldn't be sick from these low numbers. No, it's what you were exposed to in the past. That you start learning information. And so again, you know, even the Ford-Pinto theory. I mean, and that conversation with the scientist. If you hide the data, if you don't bother to find the data, you're not going to know the true science. And that's what's happening when I do this self-reporting registry database. These are people reporting their illnesses and diseases. And those are data sets that nobody else has. So how could science truly give us the number if you're missing that kind of data set? And I think that's the thing that I always worry about. And then it becomes a challenge for the law. And it's all colliding. I see it all colliding. Wow, who would have thought it was going to take data centers to unite America?