For more than two decades, Hector Avilez Avila had been by his wife Carolina’s side. But when US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers showed up at his court appearance in 2017 to take him into custody, she was on her own overnight.The family’s financial burden fell completely to her. When their house and her business were flooded, she had to repair them without him. Suddenly, there was no one there to help her raise their two kids or take on the responsibilities they once shared.She watched as her children became depressed without their father. Sometimes, she said, they wouldn’t eat.“It was totally like a death in the family,” Carolina said. “For the first few months, your life goes crazy. It goes nuts. I had to figure it out.”Though almost half of the people living in the United States illegally are women, more than 90% of Ice arrests between 2013 and 2017 were of men, according to the non-partisan thinktank Migration Policy Institute (MPI). Many of them were breadwinners or caretakers, and experts say the damage done to the people they left behind may be irreparable.Under Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, deportation and separation have become even more daunting, as there are fewer easy fixes. When husbands and fathers were deported in the past, they often re-entered the country, said Randy Capps, the MPI director of research for US programs. But now, men know they will probably serve jail time if they try to cross the US-Mexico border and get caught by the border patrol.The consequences of indefinite separation can be devastating for those left behind. Researchers at MPI found that on average, a family loses between two-thirds and three-fourths of their income after the undocumented father’s arrest.“Economic hardship ensues when breadwinners are arrested and detained or deported, leading to the family’s increased dependence on charity care and public benefits, even though eligibility for most benefits is limited to the US-citizen children in these families,” researchers at MPI wrote.Carolina knows of another woman whose husband was detained; she now lives in a shelter with her one-year-old child. Capps said immigrant families are often forced to double-occupy homes with others or move frequently after their main provider is detained or deported because they can no longer pay rent.Even in less extreme circumstances, parents confront hard questions about their future when one of them is facing removal. Immigrants are being deported to countries that are often unsafe. Their partners must decide whether to follow them and potentially put their entire family in danger or stay in the US, where they know their family may never be complete again.Capps said most parents will choose to keep their children here even after one of them is deported. However, that is not always the case: a reported 500,000 US-citizen children resided in Mexico alone in 2010, though whether their family left voluntarily or followed a deported parent is unknown.People tend to focus on children when they talk about family separation, but women who lose a spouse to immigration enforcement face their own nightmares beyond financial and logistical instability. The trauma they undergo is believed to have long-term psychological effects, and even those who can manage economically without their partners still experience serious mental health risks.Antonio Puente, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, likened separation through immigration enforcement to someone lopping off one leg on a four-legged stool and asking someone else to sit on it.He said Americans are demanding that undocumented immigrants and their families face realities they would never be able to endure themselves.“We’re not deporting one person, or detaining one person,” Puente said. “We’re deporting or detaining an entire family.”Separation involves huge stress, Puente said. Spouses and partners left behind deal with a devastating personal loss that is constantly relived until separation ends.“In our cases, when a death happens, it happens once,” Puente said. “In this case, it happens every day that they wake up without their loved one present.”Carolina sobbed when it appeared her husband would probably sign his deportation papers and go back to Mexico. Avila believed that if he returned to his home country, he might be kidnapped and tortured for money like his uncles were. But he had been incarcerated for a year, and he was ready to get out.Where that left Carolina, she did not know. She had started looking at other, safer countries where she and her children might be able to join Avila. But if they moved away from the US, they would be leaving their home, where both she and the kids were citizens.Since then, Avila has been deported to Mexico, and Carolina and their children are visiting him this fall. “I’m so disappointed in this government,” Carolina said. “I swam this far to drown at the edge.” Topics US immigration Trump administration features

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration has launched a national security investigation into car and truck imports that could lead to new U.S. tariffs similar to those imposed on imported steel and aluminum in March. The national security probe under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 would investigate whether vehicle and parts imports were threatening the industry’s health and ability to research and develop new, advanced technologies, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. “There is evidence suggesting that, for decades, imports from abroad have eroded our domestic auto industry,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement, promising a “thorough, fair and transparent investigation.” Higher tariffs could be particularly painful for Asian automakers including Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T), Nissan Motor Co (7201.T), Honda Motor Co (7267.T) and Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS), which count the United States as a key market, and the announcement sparked a broad sell-off in automakers’ shares across the region. [MKTS/GLOB] The governments of Japan, China and South Korea said they would monitor the situation, while Beijing, which is increasingly eyeing the United States as a potential market for its cars, added that it would defend its interests. “China opposes the abuse of national security clauses, which will seriously damage multilateral trade systems and disrupt normal international trade order,” Gao Feng, spokesman at the Ministry of Commerce, said at a regular news briefing on Thursday which focused largely on whether Beijing and Washington are making any progress in their growing trade dispute. “We will closely monitor the situation under the U.S. probe and fully evaluate the possible impact and resolutely defend our own legitimate interests.” The probe comes as Trump courts voters in the U.S. industrial heartland ahead of mid-term elections later this year, and opens a new front in his “America First” trade agenda aimed at clawing back manufacturing jobs lost to overseas competitors. Related CoverageFactbox: Big U.S. auto dealers have significant import exposureU.S. auto import probe borders on 'provocation': Germany's DIHKIt could raise the costs for overseas automakers to export vehicles and parts to the world’s second-largest auto market. Growing trade tensions over cars and car parts, particularly with China, could raise risks for U.S. companies expanding their presence in the country, signs of which are already emerging. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Ford Motor Co’s (F.N) imported vehicles were being held up at Chinese ports, adding to a growing list of U.S. products facing issues at China’s borders. The majority of vehicles sold in the United States by Japanese and South Korean automakers are produced there, but most firms also export to the U.S. from plants in Asia, Mexico, Canada and other countries. Roughly one-third of all U.S. vehicle imports last year were from Asia. In addition to recently imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imports, the administration has threatened tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods over intellectual property complaints, and Beijing has vowed to respond. The administration is also trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to return more auto production to the United States. Commerce said the new probe would determine whether lost domestic production had weakened the U.S. “internal economy” and its ability to develop connected vehicle systems, autonomous vehicles, fuel cells, electric motors and batteries, and advanced manufacturing processes. In a separate statement, President Donald Trump said: “Core industries such as automobiles and automotive parts are critical to our strength as a Nation.” FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump talks with auto industry leaders, including General Motors CEO Mary Barra (4th L) and United Auto Workers (UAW) President Dennis Williams (4th R) at the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, U.S. on March 15, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File PhotoA Trump administration official said before the announcement that the expected move was aimed partly at pressuring Canada and Mexico to make concessions in talks to update the NAFTA that have languished in part over auto provisions, as well as pressuring Japan and the European Union, which also export large numbers of vehicles to the United States. An ad hoc industry group representing the largest Japanese, German and other foreign automakers called “Here for America,” criticized the effort. “To our knowledge, no one is asking for this protection. This path leads inevitably to fewer choices and higher prices for cars and trucks in America,” said John Bozzella, chief executive of Global Automakers, a trade group representing Toyota, Nissan Motor Co Ltd (7201.T), Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS) and others. A Toyota spokeswoman said that the company was monitoring the situation. Chinese automaker Geely Holding Group urged free trade practices for the auto industry, which is built on a complex supply chain under which vehicle components for any given car often originates from numerous countries. “As a global manufacturer, Geely Holding Group is in favor of free trade and open markets. Free trade creates jobs, wealth and economic growth,” a spokesman said, adding that its plant in South Carolina to produce its Volvo brand cars showed its commitment to the country. Shares in Toyota, Honda and Hyundai each fell roughly 3 percent in local trade following the announcement, while Mazda Motor Corp (7261.T), which does not have any U.S. production capacity at the moment, tumbled more than 5 percent. Late last week, Japan’s automakers’ association urged its export partners to keep tariffs on vehicles and components low and maintain free trade relationships. Roughly 12 million cars and trucks were produced in the United States last year, while the country imported 8.3 million vehicles worth $192 billion. This included 2.4 million from Mexico, 1.8 million from Canada, 1.7 million from Japan, 930,000 from South Korea and 500,000 from Germany, according to U.S. government statistics. FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the Susan B. Anthony List 11th Annual Campaign for Life Gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, U.S., May 22, 2018. REUTERS/Al DragoAt the same time, the United States exported nearly 2 million vehicles worldwide worth $57 billion. German automakers Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler AG (DAIGn.DE) and BMW AG (BMWG.DE) all have large U.S. assembly plants. The United States is the second-biggest export destination for German auto manufacturers after China, while vehicles and car parts are Germany’s biggest source of export income. Asked if the measures would hit Mexico and Canada, a Mexican source close to the NAFTA talks said: “That probably is going to be the next battle.” Reporting by David Shepardson and Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by James Oliphant, Makini Brice and David Lawder in Washington, Anthony Esposito in Mexico City; Naomi Tajitsu in Tokyo; Yawen Chen and Norihiko Shirouzu in Beijing; Hyunjoo Jin in Seoul; Writing by David Lawder and David Shepardson; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Peter Cooney & Kim CoghillOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Venezuelan authorities have arrested a national guard soldier and accused him of shooting dead a pregnant 18-year-old during an incident that local media described as a melee over scarce pork. Alexandra Colopoy was shot by First Sergeant David Rebolledo, according to a tweet by the state prosecutor late on Sunday night. No further details were provided, but critics of President Nicolás Maduro’s leftwing government seized on the incident, calling it a stark example of the oil-rich country’s meltdown. Local media reported that Colopoy’s husband and a witness said the soldiers were drunk when they arrived at the queue for pork in a poor area of Caracas. They said the soldiers ordered the people waiting in line to move on because the traditional Christmas meat had run out, but they refused. “The national guard went crazy and started firing,” Colopoy’s spouse Bernabé said in a filmed interview circulating on social media. “She fell to the ground,” he said, adding his wife was five months pregnant. His brother Alejandro was also shot, but was recovering, he said. Prosecutor Tarek Saab condemned the incident. “The Venezuelan state guarantees the respect and application of human rights, as well as sanctions for those who violate them,” he tweeted. Food riots and rowdy queues in front of supermarkets have become frequent in Venezuela. The Opec country is reeling from a fourth year of brutal recession. Millions of residents have salaries that add up to just a few US dollars a month, making it difficult to obtain enough food. “This is how the murderous regime treats the people,” opposition lawmaker Delsa Solorzano tweeted on Monday. “The sorrow of this man, whose wife and baby to be were killed by a bullet from the state, is Venezuela’s sorrow.” Topics Venezuela Americas news

The UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has said panic is spreading among the 3 million citizens of Idlib province as he suggested the Assad government and its allies had set 10 September as the date for a full-scale bombardment of the last large rebel enclave.De Mistura pleaded with the Russian and Turkish presidents to “look each other in the eyes” and find a solution that avoids a humanitarian tragedy in the region.Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who have backed the Syrian government and rebels respectively, are due to meet in Tehran on Friday to discuss Idlib. De Mistura suggested that if their discussions fail, it is likely that as many as 800,000 citizens will try to flee the province, including over the border to Turkey.The northern province and surrounding areas are the last major swathe of territory held by insurgents fighting the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, who has been backed by both Russian and Iranian forces in Syria’s seven-year-old civil war. It is held by a complex array of rebels and jihadists, many of whom have been blacklisted as “terrorists” by world powers. Syrian government forces are massing around the north-western province in preparation for the assault.Marine Gen Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, warned on Tuesday that a major Syrian military assault on the rebel-held enclave would lead to a “humanitarian catastrophe” and instead recommended more narrowly tailored operations against militants. “We don’t see any way that significant military operations are going to be beneficial to the people of Syria,” Dunford told reporters during a trip to Athens.“If major military operations take place we can expect humanitarian catastrophe and I think we would all want to see that be avoided.”De Mistura repeated his personal offer to go to Idlib to find a formula that avoids further conflict but admitted the airstrikes already launched in Idlib on Tuesday could be a sign that the talks between Russia and Turkey on how to defuse the crisis were not going well.Turkey has warned against an assault, and has assembled observation posts around the region. Iran insisted it would push the militants out of Idlib, but the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, claimed this could be achieved with minimum human cost. “We will try to prevent any damage to the Syrian people and complete the process of clearing extremists,” Zarif said, according to the state news agency IRNA.De Mistura also said he believed both sides in the conflict might have access to chlorine-based weapons, describing them as in the grey zone between conventional and chemical weapons.The White House warned on Tuesday that the US and its allies would respond “swiftly and appropriately” if Assad used chemical weapons again.De Mistura’s warning came after he set out a proposed timetable for diplomatic talks on a new constitution for Syria in an attempt to revitalise the moribund diplomatic process.De Mistura said he was asking Turkey, Russia and Iran to meet on 10 and 11 September, followed three days later by a meeting with France, the UK, US, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Germany and Egypt.He said the planned meetings represented “a moment of truth” in finding out whether the parties wanted a credible political settlement to end the seven-year civil war. He said this was vital for the millions of Syrian refugees waiting to decide whether to return home.De Mistura’s aim is to report on the peace process to a US-chaired meeting of the UN security council on 20 September, probably at the time of the UN general assembly.Late on Monday, the US president, Donald Trump, warned the Syrian president and his allies not to “recklessly attack” Idlib province, warning that hundreds of thousands of people could be killed.“The Russians and Iranians would be making a grave humanitarian mistake to take part in this potential human tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. Don’t let that happen!” Trump tweeted.The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said: “Just to speak out with some warnings, without taking into account the very dangerous, negative potential for the whole situation in Syria, is probably not a full, comprehensive approach.”The presence of militants in Idlib was undermining the Syrian peace process and making the region a base for attacks on Russian forces in Syria, he added.The Syrian government feels no external political pressure to rewrite its constitution to give a role to a militarily defeated opposition that it regards as illegitimate. This will make De Mistura’s objective more difficult.The plan for a constitutional committee was first advanced by the Russians at the beginning of the year. Since then discussions about the size and composition of the committee, including the role of the Kurds or opposition groups, have become deadlocked.• The map of Syria in this article was updated on 6 September 2018. Topics Syria United Nations Middle East and North Africa news

The worst, sleaziest parts of the horrible, sleazy 2016 presidential campaign came roaring back on Thursday, like a nightmare.First, there was the almost 600-page inspector general’s report from the justice department that sharply rebuked former FBI director James Comey for his gross mishandling of the Clinton email investigation. I have written previously that Comey’s bad actions in the email case probably cost Hillary Clinton the election and the IG’s report certainly confirms his many flawed actions and decisions.There was also the lawsuit against the Trump Foundation filed by the New York attorney general after a two-year investigation. The lawsuit is another bad acid flashback, documenting how the Trump family used its charitable foundation as a personal piggy bank to bestow favors on friends and to make outrageous, personal purchases, such as a giant portrait of the president that had no charitable connection whatsoever.Reading both documents, the IG report and the lawsuit, fills any sane person with the deepest regret that Donald Trump is president. This is a tragedy that could have been prevented, according to my reading of the justice department’s report. And anyone needing more evidence that Trump lacks the moral or ethical moorings to be president need only peruse the New York lawsuit eviscerating the Trump Foundation.Despite his sanctimony, his best-selling book and his claims to martyrdom after Trump fired him, James Comey is a singular villain. Though the IG report states that he had no political motive in doing so, he upended the 2016 election and all but destroyed Clinton’s candidacy.First came his terrible decision to denounce Clinton’s carelessness despite his bureau’s conclusion that she did not deserve to be indicted in the email case. That was a departure from prosecutorial practice, where legal norms call for public silence when there are no charges. On this serious misstep the report states, “It was extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to do so,” and the inspector general added, “and we found none of his reasons to a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by department leadership.”Comey kept his ill-considered decision to be a press hog hidden and Loretta Lynch, then the attorney general, could not stop him because of her own errors. The report calls her out for her airport meeting with Bill Clinton just as her department was deciding the email case, creating a conflict that effectively took her out of the decision-making process. She deserves the considerable blame directed her way in the report.Then comes the even worse cascade of events in October, when Comey made the even worse decision to reopen the email case after the FBI seized Anthony Weiner’s laptop in a separate investigation. His computer contained some of his wife’s copies of Clinton’s emails. Although these emails turned out to be duplicates of messages already inspected by the FBI, Comey precipitously decided to reopen the investigation. His letter to congressional Republicans reopening the email investigation dominated the headlines during the last days of the election. Voters who were late deciders, and there were enough of them to turn the election, fled from Clinton during these final days of the campaign, contributing to her loss.The inescapable conclusion of the report is that the FBI under Comey was a ship of fools. There was no need to reopen the investigation, especially so late in the election, as the FBI seized the Weiner laptop in September.The listing ship included agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, FBI officials who were involved in both the Clinton and Russia investigations, leading Trump’s supporters to suspect a conspiracy against him. Many of their text messages have been previously released, but the inspector general cites a previously undisclosed message in which Strzok says the FBI “will stop” Trump. This certainly adds to an appearance of being anti-Trump but the IG concluded: “Our review did not find documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting the political views these employees expressed in their text messages and instant messages to the specific investigative decisions we reviewed,” the report said. Page is gone but Strzok is still employed at the justice department.Unfortunately, this well-documented and well-reasoned report will surely provide ammunition for Trump’s outrageous attacks on the legitimacy of federal law enforcement and his efforts to undermine the justice department and the FBI. The internal watchdog’s sharp criticisms of Comey will also be used to bolster Trump’s decision to fire him, even though that decision involved Comey’s correct insistence on pursuing the Russia investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn and other Trump allies.Recent public opinion polls show that support for Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, is foundering. I hope the IG report, which finds that the FBI’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation before the election was not “free of bias”, does not provide new fodder for Trump’s empty claim that the Mueller inquiry if a partisan witch-hunt.As for the lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, we already knew that the Trumps used their charity as a private piggy bank and that, thanks to the great reporting of the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, almost none of the Foundation’s money actually came from the Trumps. Still, the president was already tweeting on Monday that the lawsuit is partisan and tainted by the sexual misconduct of the disgraced former New York attorney general.If only we’d had a more prudent FBI director in 2016. If only more attention had been paid to the Trump Foundation than Clinton’s meaningless emails. If only …• Jill Abramson is a political columnist for the Guardian Topics Trump administration Opinion US politics Hillary Clinton Donald Trump James Comey Robert Mueller comment

Donald Trump has denied he tried to fire (paywall) special counsel Robert Mueller in June last year. But the reports have given extra ballast to accusations of obstruction of justice over the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.The fact that this took place just a month after he ousted FBI director James Comey, “shows that the pattern of obstruction is a strong case because this is yet another indicator of his intent to derail the investigation,” Georgetown law professor Carrie Cordero argued on the Brookings Institute’s Lawfare podcast yesterday (Jan. 25).The main events known to the public that make up the argument for obstruction took place between January and July 2017. On July 15, Trump hired specialist white-collar crime lawyer Ty Cobb, who reportedly implemented a strategy of full cooperation with the FBI investigation. Since then, Trump’s most controversial actions towards the probe seem to have been curbed. Here’s a timeline of the biggest events during that six-month period. Jan. 27: Trump asks Comey for “loyalty” With Comey heading the investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, Trump invited Comey to dinner, Comey writes in Congressional testimony. The conversation made Comey feel that its purpose was “at least in part to an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship.” He asked him several times for loyalty, saying, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” and again, “I need loyalty,” Comey writes. Feb. 14: Trump asks Comey to “let” the Flynn case “go”After Comey briefed Trump on counterterrorism in the Oval Office, the president cornered him, saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Comey writes. He reportedly asked, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” Comey says he only responded with, “he is a good guy.”Flynn was being investigated for lying about his contacts with Russian officials. He later flipped, pleading guilty to four counts of lying to the FBI in exchange for cooperation with Mueller’s investigation into the campaign.March: Trump reportedly asked the White House counsel to pressure Sessions not to recuse himselfWhen attorney general Jeff Sessions was considering recusing himself from the Russia investigation, Trump asked White House counsel Don McGahn to lobby him not to do so, according to the New York Times (paywall). When he was unsuccessful, Trump “erupted in anger,” the Times writes, and reportedly said he wanted his attorney general to safeguard him, asking, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” (Cohn spent years as Trump’s fixer in New York.)Between March and May 9: Trump reportedly drafted a letter to Comey calling the investigation “fabricated and politically motivated”White House aides stopped him from sending the letter, according to The New York Times. On several occasions, he asked Comey to make public the fact that he was not under investigation, but Comey refused to do so. May 9: Trump fires ComeyTrump fired Comey (paywall) ostensibly for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The case for that misconduct was made by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, but Trump later told NBC that he was going to fire Comey “regardless of the recommendation.” He added: “When I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.’”June: Tries to fire MuellerWhite House counsel Don McGahn reportedly threatened to resign (paywall) if Trump did so, causing Trump to step back from the brink. Trump’s reported reasons for doing so were bizarre accusations of conflicts of interest, including that Mueller had ended his membership of one of Trump’s golf clubs over a fee raise. Mueller has reportedly interviewed current and former White House officials over the episode. July 8: Trump reportedly dictated a false statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyerWhen the New York Times approached Trump’s team for comment on Don Jr.’s now-notorious Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, his team wanted to be transparent and get ahead of the story, according to the Washington Post (paywall). Instead, the Post reports, Trump dictated a false statement, saying that they “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” In his book Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff writes that Trump’s advisers believe this was an “explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” leading a spokesman to quit over qualms that it amounted to obstruction of justice. Mueller has been explicitly examining the statement, the Times reports (paywall).

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday — the first expected step of a tentative agreement that the company reached last week to settle thousands of lawsuits related to its alleged involvement in the opioid epidemic.As part of the settlement, Purdue agreed to file for bankruptcy and effectively dissolve. If all goes as planned, a new company will form and continue selling OxyContin, with the sales revenue going to plaintiffs in the settlement. Purdue will also donate drugs for treating addiction and overdoses.The settlement does not involve a statement of wrongdoing. Purdue is accused of aggressively — and misleadingly — marketing its blockbuster opioid painkiller OxyContin, helping fuel an opioid crisis that has contributed to the more than 700,000 drug overdose deaths in the US since 1999.The deal is expected to be worth around $10 billion to $12 billion, including at least $3 billion from the Sackler family that owns Purdue. But that amount is under dispute as overly optimistic by the state attorneys general who have rejected the settlement deal, according to the New York Times.As of 2016, Purdue had made more than $31 billion in revenue from OxyContin.The settlement would be the largest payout from any company accused of fueling the opioid crisis. So far, 24 states and more than 2,000 municipal governments agreed to the settlement. Some politicians and activists have gone further than the lawsuits — demanding not just that opioid manufacturers and distributors pay for the financial harm they caused, but that they are held criminally liable. Several Democratic presidential candidates have proposed legislation that would attempt to hold individual executives accountable for their role in fueling opioid overprescribing.“If no Sacklers end up behind bars, an entire class of people will continue to feel that writing a check is the worst thing that will happen to them ever no [matter] what they do,” Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford, said on Twitter.At least for now, though, Purdue and the Sacklers are only facing financial consequences.The opioid epidemic can be understood in three waves. In the first wave, starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, doctors prescribed a lot of opioid painkillers. That caused the drugs to proliferate to widespread misuse and addiction — among not just patients but also friends and family of patients, teens who took the drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and people who bought excess pills from the black market.A second wave of drug overdoses took off in the 2000s when heroin flooded the illicit market, as drug dealers and traffickers took advantage of a new population of people who used opioids but either lost access to painkillers or simply sought a better, cheaper high. And in recent years, the US has seen a third wave, as fentanyl offers an even more potent, cheaper — and deadlier — alternative to heroin.It’s the first wave that really kicked off the opioid crisis — and it’s where marketing for opioid painkillers is likely most relevant. Multiple studies have now linked marketing for opioid painkillers to addiction and overdoses, particularly direct marketing to doctors that encouraged them to prescribe more of the drugs. And another study linked an increase in the supply of opioid painkillers to more overdose deaths.Beyond the research, we’ve also seen more reports over the past few years about opioid companies aggressively marketing their products, even as it became clearer that the drugs weren’t the safe, effective alternative to other painkillers on the market that they claimed the opioids to be.A filing in Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s lawsuit against Purdue exposed how Richard Sackler, then Purdue’s president and part of the family that owns Purdue, was personally involved in some of those efforts. The filing claims that Sackler pushed to market OxyContin as a “non-narcotic” in other countries, even though it’s an opioid; Robert Kaiko, who created OxyContin, had to talk him down from the idea. The company also allegedly overlooked excessive prescribing in the US, even as some of Purdue’s staff warned of pill mills that should have been reported to federal officials, Maia Szalavitz reported for Tonic.Purdue countered that the filing “is littered with biased and inaccurate characterizations of these documents and individual defendants, often highlighting potential courses of action that were ultimately rejected by the company.”Other reports, however, suggest opioid companies were widely irresponsible. As a group of public health experts explained in the Annual Review of Public Health, opioid companies exaggerated the benefits and safety of their products, supported advocacy groups and “education” campaigns that encouraged widespread use of opioids, and lobbied lawmakers to loosen access to the drugs. Purdue, as the maker of the then-new OxyContin, played a big role in these efforts, but so did companies like Johnson & Johnson, Endo, Teva, and Abbott Laboratories.The result: As opioid sales grew, so did addiction and overdoses.It’s not just that the drugs were deadly; they also weren’t anywhere as effective as Purdue and others claimed. There’s only very weak scientific evidence that opioid painkillers can effectively treat long-term chronic pain as patients grow tolerant of opioids’ effects — but there’s plenty of evidence that prolonged use can result in very bad complications, including a higher risk of addiction, overdose, and death. In short, the risks and downsides outweigh the benefits for most pain patients.Yet even as these risks became apparent over the years, drug companies continued marketing the opioids. (Purdue didn’t stop advertising opioids to doctors until last year.) So different levels of government are now trying to hold the companies responsible — and get them to pay to help fix the mess that they contributed to.For more on the lawsuits against opioid companies, read Vox’s explainer.

As lawsuits mount against the company responsible for making OxyContin — a drug blamed for helping to spark the nation’s opioid crisis — New York Attorney General Letitia James said on Friday that the family behind the company may have attempted to hide at least $1 billion in assets. The allegation could lead to the reexamination of a proposed settlement between drug maker Purdue Pharma and plaintiffs who brought more that 2,000 lawsuits against it. And some legal experts believe it could ultimately lead to members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue, facing criminal charges.James’s office is pursuing a lawsuit against both Purdue and individual Sacklers, and as part of that suit, issued 33 subpoenas to financial institutions in order to better understand the family’s wealth and influence. The return of one of those subpoenas led to the discovery of the previously undisclosed $1 billion in wire transfers.The settlement was based on the assumption that the Sacklers collectively possess about $13 billion in wealth, but James argues the transfer could mean the family has far more wealth than previously thought, which would presumably give those pursuing the settlement license to seek more than the $3 billion that has been tentatively agreed to.“While the Sacklers continue to lowball victims and skirt a responsible settlement, we refuse to allow the family to misuse the courts in an effort to shield their financial misconduct,” James said in a statement. Purdue faces lawsuits by more than 50 states and territories, and 2,300 cities and counties. Those jurisdictions argue the Sacklers and their company must help to pay for an opioid addiction crisis they profited from and helped to create, and that necessary treatment and recovery programs will cost many billions of dollars. While many local leaders were initially onboard with the tentative settlement, James’s allegations could lead them to reconsider, and to return to the negotiating table in hopes of getting more Sackler money for these programs.In the 1990s, Purdue Pharma unveiled OxyContin as a non-addictive painkiller. The company encouraged doctors to prescribe their drug “with the promise that misuse, addiction, and overdose would be rare,” as Vox’s German Lopez has explained, because although it contained more opioids than other, similar drugs, it also had an extended-release formula. In fact, that formula made it more prone to misuse, because people soon realized that crushing, snorting, and injecting the pills would allow them to bypass the slow release mechanism. This discovery — and the misuse of rival opioid-based drugs — launched what is now a full-out opioid epidemic, Lopez writes: The opioid epidemic can be understood in three waves. In the first wave, starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, doctors prescribed a lot of opioid painkillers. That caused the drugs to proliferate to widespread misuse and addiction — among not just patients but also friends and family of patients, teens who took the drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and people who bought excess pills from the black market. A second wave of drug overdoses took off in the 2000s when heroin flooded the illicit market, as drug dealers and traffickers took advantage of a new population of people who used opioids but either lost access to painkillers or simply sought a better, cheaper high. And in recent years, the US has seen a third wave, as fentanyls offer an even more potent, cheaper — and deadlier — alternative to heroin. Even as addiction to this pill began to rise, the Sackler family continued to argue that their pills were safe, and that misuse was rare.David Sackler, who served on Purdue’s board of directors for six years, has repeatedly argued that OxyContin makes up such a small share of the opioid market (about 4 percent of all opioid prescriptions) that it cannot be to blame. But of opioids implicated in misuse and addiction cases, OxyContin makes up a far greater share that 4 percent. And as Vox’s Lopez explained, Purdue is seen as particularly culpable for the current epidemic due to its helping to launch a culture of overprescribing supposedly-safe painkillers: Purdue also had a significant role beyond OxyContin. By marketing its new opioid as safe and effective, Purdue helped foster an environment in which opioids in general — not just OxyContin — were far more loosely prescribed. As Kolodny and other experts explained in the Annual Review of Public Health, Purdue’s advocacy through “education” campaigns and astroturfs was about how opioids in general are safe and effective — even helping spread the term “opiophobia,” which suggested that doctors were irrationally scared of prescribing opioids.The marketing push worked; doctors began prescribing the drug more and more. But as use of the drug as a painkiller increased, so did it negative effects: Between 1999 and 2017, nearly 200,000 overdose deaths were linked to painkillers. As Lopez wrote, “much of that can be connected back to OxyContin and other legal opioid painkillers, with people who use even illicit opioids like heroin often tracing their initial opioid use — the thing that got them hooked — to the painkillers and, yes, Purdue and the Sacklers.”This year has marked a sea change in how communities affected by opioid addiction are addressing the issue: They have started taking drug manufacturers to court. Earlier this year, Massachusetts and New York filed prominent lawsuits in federal court, joining other states, counties, and Native American tribes in alleging the Sackler family continued to market harmful drugs, as well as drugs used to treat the addiction the company’s opioids first triggered, even after they admitted to misrepresenting OxyContin’s addictive effects. Those legal challenges have only mounted over last several months, with hundreds more municipalities filing their own suits against the company. This week, many lawyers involved in the individual cases expressed support for a deal with the Sackler family that would yield about $12 billion for victims, with $3 billion of that number coming from the family’s personal wealth. But 25 states — including New York — and the District of Columbia have said this deal is not strong enough, and does not force the Sackler family to part with enough of its personal assets.As Vox’s German Lopez reported earlier this week, the deal requires Purdue to file for bankruptcy and dissolve, but does not require it to admit wrongdoing. A new company would form from the dissolution of Purdue, and continue to sell OxyContin; sales revenue would go to plaintiffs, and the company would also donate drugs for addiction and overdose treatment: Some politicians and activists have gone further than the lawsuits — demanding not just that opioid manufacturers and distributors pay for the financial harm they caused, but are held criminally liable. Several Democratic presidential candidates have proposed legislation that would attempt to hold individual executives accountable for their role in fueling opioid overprescribing. New York’s Letitia James is one of those attorneys general who feels the settlement doesn’t go far enough, and one who is working to hold individual Sacklers personally responsible for the epidemic. In building its case against the Sackler family, her office has filed subpoenas with financial institutions tied to the family. It was one of these subpoenas that uncovered the unreported wire transfers, which were conducted through several unnamed financial institutions, primarily Swiss bank accounts. Some of these transfers were quite large: One wire transfer was worth $64 million and was routed through the Channel Islands, according to Friday’s court filing.And James alleges that at least one member of the family, Mortimer Sackler, a former Purdue board member, used real estate like a multimillion townhouse that he owned on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side to conceal assets from the courts.A spokesperson for Mortimer Sackler denied the former board member — or any member of his family — was attempting to do anything underhanded.“There is nothing newsworthy about these decade-old transfers, which were perfectly legal and appropriate in every respect,” a spokesman said in a statement. “This is a cynical attempt by a hostile AG’s office to generate defamatory headlines to try to torpedo a mutually beneficial settlement that is supported by so many other states and would result in billions of dollars going to communities and individuals across the country that need help.”James’s office obviously begs to differ, as does her counterpart in Oregon, who in filing that state’s lawsuit alleged that the Sackler family personally took about $11 billion from their company in the last decade in a manner that both enriched the family and “starved” the company so that it would be able to file for bankruptcy. It remains to be seen whether the new allegations will lead to an updated settlement. But even if the settlement goes forward as currently drafted, some states (like New York) will continue with their own suits, which could mean more damages for the Sacklers. And as some legal experts told the New York Times, should James and other attorneys general continue to find evidence that leads to allegations like the one New York made Friday, individual Sacklers, particularly those who served Purdue in an official capacity, could find themselves in danger of drawing criminal charges.

According to the reports, sourced to people involved in negotiations, Purdue will file for bankruptcy and effectively dissolve. Then a new company will form and continue selling OxyContin, with the sales revenue going to plaintiffs in the lawsuit settlement. Purdue will donate drugs for addiction treatment and overdose as well.But the settlement does not involve a statement of wrongdoing, the Times reported.The deal is expected to be worth around $10 billion to $12 billion, including $3 billion from the Sackler family, according to the Post. As of 2016, Purdue had made more than $31 billion in revenue from OxyContin.Still, the settlement would be the largest payout from any company accused of fueling the opioid crisis, which has contributed to the more than 700,000 drug overdose deaths in the US since 1999.The first of the trials for the more than 2,000 lawsuits against opioid companies, which have been consolidated by a federal court in Ohio, are slated to begin next month.One sticking point: Not everyone who’s suing Purdue and other opioid manufacturers and distributors for their role in the overdose crisis is on board with the settlement. These other jurisdictions may seek further payouts.“Connecticut has not agreed to any settlement,” William Tong, the state’s attorney general, told the Times. “I cannot predict whether Purdue will seek bankruptcy, but all I can say is we are ready to aggressively pursue this case wherever it goes — whether it is in the Connecticut courts or through bankruptcy.”According to the Post, Purdue has tentatively settled with 24 state attorneys general and more than 2,000 cities and counties, but more than half of state attorneys general rejected the settlement and want to pursue their own legal action against Purdue and the Sacklers.Some politicians and activists have gone further than the lawsuits — demanding not just that opioid manufacturers and distributors pay for the financial harm they caused, but are held criminally liable. Several Democratic presidential candidates have proposed legislation that would attempt to hold individual executives accountable for their role in fueling opioid overprescribing.“If no Sacklers end up behind bars, an entire class of people will continue to feel that writing a check is the worst thing that will happen to them ever no [matter] what they do,” Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford, said on Twitter.At least for now, though, Purdue and the Sacklers are only facing financial consequences.The opioid epidemic can be understood in three waves. In the first wave, starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, doctors prescribed a lot of opioid painkillers. That caused the drugs to proliferate to widespread misuse and addiction — among not just patients but also friends and family of patients, teens who took the drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and people who bought excess pills from the black market.A second wave of drug overdoses took off in the 2000s when heroin flooded the illicit market, as drug dealers and traffickers took advantage of a new population of people who used opioids but either lost access to painkillers or simply sought a better, cheaper high. And in recent years, the US has seen a third wave, as fentanyls offer an even more potent, cheaper — and deadlier — alternative to heroin.It’s the first wave that really kicked off the opioid crisis — and it’s where marketing for opioid painkillers is likely most relevant. Multiple studies have now linked marketing for opioid painkillers to addiction and overdoses, particularly direct marketing to doctors that encouraged them to prescribe more of the drugs. And another study linked an increase in the supply of opioid painkillers to more overdose deaths.Beyond the research, we’ve also seen more reports over the past few years about opioid companies aggressively marketing their products, even as it became clearer that the drugs weren’t the safe, effective alternative to other painkillers on the market that they claimed the opioids to be.A filing in Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s lawsuit against Purdue exposed how Richard Sackler, then Purdue’s president and part of the family that owns Purdue, was personally involved in some of those efforts. The filing claims that Sackler pushed to market OxyContin as a “non-narcotic” in other countries, even though it’s an opioid; Robert Kaiko, who created OxyContin, had to talk him down from the idea. The company also allegedly overlooked excessive prescribing in the US, even as some of Purdue’s staff warned of pill mills that should have been reported to federal officials, Maia Szalavitz reported for Tonic.Purdue countered that the filing “is littered with biased and inaccurate characterizations of these documents and individual defendants, often highlighting potential courses of action that were ultimately rejected by the company.”Other reports, however, suggest opioid companies were widely irresponsible. As a group of public health experts explained in the Annual Review of Public Health, opioid companies exaggerated the benefits and safety of their products, supported advocacy groups and “education” campaigns that encouraged widespread use of opioids, and lobbied lawmakers to loosen access to the drugs. Purdue, as the maker of the then-new OxyContin, played a big role in these efforts, but so did companies like Johnson & Johnson, Endo, Teva, and Abbott Laboratories.The result: As opioid sales grew, so did addiction and overdoses.It’s not just that the drugs were deadly; they also weren’t anywhere as effective as Purdue and others claimed. There’s only very weak scientific evidence that opioid painkillers can effectively treat long-term chronic pain as patients grow tolerant of opioids’ effects — but there’s plenty of evidence that prolonged use can result in very bad complications, including a higher risk of addiction, overdose, and death. In short, the risks and downsides outweigh the benefits for most pain patients.Yet even as these risks became apparent over the years, drug companies continued marketing the opioids. (Purdue didn’t stop advertising opioids to doctors until last year.) So different levels of government are now trying to hold the companies responsible — and get them to pay to help fix the mess that they contributed to.For more on the lawsuits against opioid companies, read Vox’s explainer.

America is in the middle of its deadliest drug overdose crisis in history, with the opioid epidemic now linked to tens of thousands of deaths every year and other types of drug overdoses steadily increasing in recent years.In his nearly three years in office so far, President Donald Trump hasn’t done much to fight the crisis. He declared an emergency over the opioid epidemic, but a watchdog agency found the declaration didn’t lead to much actual policy change. And while Trump, with the support of Congress, has committed a few billion dollars to the opioid crisis here and there, the funding falls short of the tens of billions of dollars that experts claim is needed to fully confront the epidemic. Advocates have called Trump’s approach “a lot of talk, little action.”The Democratic candidates for president, however, are promising a more serious approach. The candidates currently leading in the polls have rallied around proposals to commit tens of billions to the crisis and to addiction treatment in particular, with Elizabeth Warren’s bill to spend $100 billion over 10 years especially drawing support. Most candidates have also talked up their health care plans in relation to the opioid epidemic, claiming that the plans would boost access to addiction treatment by making sure it’s covered by health insurance. The Democrats have also talked a lot about holding drug companies accountable for their role in fueling the opioid crisis and curtailing excessive prescriptions for opioid painkillers.Fewer Democratic candidates, though, have thrown their explicit support behind expanding harm reduction approaches, such as needle exchanges, supervised consumption sites, and the opioid overdose antidote naloxone.At the very least, though, the calls for bolder action make the Democratic candidates very different from a Trump administration that has, for the most part, neglected the crisis so far.The Democratic presidential candidates have generally called for holding pharmaceutical companies and their executives accountable for the opioid crisis — vowing not just to fine them, which the federal government has long done, but also to hold these corporations and their leaders criminally liable. Most candidates have also talked favorably about reducing prescriptions for opioid painkillers and making alternative pain treatments more available.Beyond that, Democrats have varying proposals for expanding access to drug addiction treatment and, in fewer cases, harm reduction approaches.The most popular proposal is the CARE Act, which Warren first introduced in 2018 with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). That legislation, modeled after the Ryan White CARE Act Congress passed in 1990 to boost access to HIV/AIDS treatment, would commit $100 billion over 10 years to funding addiction treatment and harm reduction programs at the local, state, and federal levels. It’s the kind of investment that experts and advocates have said is needed to really fight the opioid epidemic.Several candidates besides Warren, including Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, have backed the CARE Act.This would help address a serious problem: According to federal data, just one in 10 people with a drug addiction get specialty treatment, largely because addiction treatment is often far too expensive or simply doesn’t exist in an area.The Democratic proposals go further, though, in emphasizing evidence-based treatment. As Vox is now investigating, much of the addiction treatment that’s available out there has little to no evidence behind it. (If you have gone through treatment and would like to help our reporting, fill out our survey.) But the candidates’ plans seek to target approaches that have studies and other empirical research behind them.For opioid addiction, for example, the plans prioritize medications like methadone and buprenorphine that studies show cut the death rate among patients by half or more. Despite the strong evidence for these medications, the majority of addiction treatment facilities in America don’t offer them — and the candidates’ plans would try to change that.The candidates also point to their universal health care proposals to boost access to addiction treatment. Federal laws currently require health insurers to in many cases cover treatment, but the laws are notoriously underenforced. Candidates claim their health proposals would put more enforcement behind the laws and regulations, which experts say is key to better integrating addiction treatment into the rest of the health care system.Where there’s less explicit support is harm reduction services, which try to acknowledge that some people are going to continue using drugs and minimize the risks that come with that. Several Democrats explicitly back expanding access to naloxone, and fewer explicitly support more needle exchanges, where people can pick up sterile syringes to avoid needle-based infections. Both of these harm reduction ideas have strong evidence in their favor.Very few — mainly Warren, Sanders, and Bill de Blasio — explicitly back supervised consumption sites, which are safe spaces where people can use drugs under medical supervision. Trump’s administration says that these are illegal under federal law. The sites have generally positive but somewhat weak evidence behind them.In another area, Buttigieg and Andrew Yang have called for decriminalizing at least opioids by removing the federal threat of jail or prison time for possession. While all the candidates have talked about scaling back the war on drugs at some point, decriminalizing currently illicit drugs besides marijuana has historically gotten very little support from major party politicians. But the idea, some advocates argue, would eliminate some of the stigma and fear that’s attached to drug use and treatment.With the exception of candidates who have said very little of substance about opioids, like Julián Castro, Marianne Williamson, and Wayne Messam, the Democratic candidates have generally made it clear that they would go further than Trump has. The major question is if they’d have the support from Congress needed to implement most of their plans should one of them make it to the White House.Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Warren has introduced a bill that would commit $100 billion over 10 years to fight drug addiction — a huge investment in treatment and harm reduction programs, focused on evidence-based practices like opioid addiction medications and naloxone. She’s also acknowledged the role of health insurance, including Medicare-for-all, to help cover addiction treatment. In her criminal justice plan, Warren called for diverting people with drug addictions from prison to treatment, and backed needle exchanges and supervised consumption sites. And she’s supported separate legislation that would impose criminal penalties on big company executives that “knowingly hurt people through criminal negligence — such as fueling the opioid crisis.”Sen. Bernie Sanders: Sanders cosponsored Warren’s bill to commit $100 billion over 10 years to drug addiction treatment and harm reduction programs. He has also argued that Medicare-for-all will guarantee access to addiction treatment. In his criminal justice plan, he backed supervised consumption sites and needle exchanges, and emphasized the need to move away from locking up people with drug addiction and instead giving them access to treatment. And he’s introduced legislation that would aim to “hold CEOs of drug companies criminally liable for illegal advertising, marketing, or distribution of opioids,” among other steps to reduce access to opioids.Sen. Kamala Harris: Harris cosponsored Warren’s bill to spend $100 billion over 10 years on drug addiction treatment and harm reduction programs. Her office said that her Medicare-for-all plan would expand access to addiction treatment. She’s also supported moving away from incarceration to treatment for people with drug addictions. And she’s introduced a bill to, her office said, get the Food and Drug Administration to “provide greater oversight over advertising and other promotion materials for opioid drugs,” including stopping misleading marketing from pharmaceutical companies.South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Buttigieg released a comprehensive plan to tackle drug addiction and mental health issues in the US. The proposal would aim to scale up addiction treatment across the country, including through a 10-year, $100 billion grant program to encourage innovation at the community level, with an emphasis on boosting access to opioid addiction medications. It would also push insurance companies to cover addiction treatment and undertake broader efforts to ensure treatment is integrated into the health care system. It would decriminalize all drug possession at the federal level and push treatment over jail or prison for people with addictions. And it would expand naloxone and needle exchange programs.Andrew Yang: Yang put out a plan to address the opioid crisis. It would boost funding to addiction treatment by more than $15 billion a year, and — in a proposal that would be extremely controversial among experts and advocates — require that overdose patients are “sent to mandatory treatment centers for three days to convince them to seek long-term treatment.” The plan would also take several steps to reduce opioid prescribing, including by increasing FDA regulation and imposing a tax on opioid painkiller manufacturers that’s retroactive to 2005 (which might be unconstitutional). Separately, Yang has also called for decriminalizing opioids. His plans do not give any attention to harm reduction programs, but he’s spoken favorably about harm reduction on the campaign trail.Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke: O’Rourke’s office said Medicare for America, the health care bill he supports that would essentially let anyone enroll into Medicare, would help expand access to addiction treatment by getting the US to universal health care. He’d also back the expansion of buprenorphine, the opioid addiction medication. He’d push for accountability of opioid painkiller companies. And he’d support alternative pain management approaches, including medical marijuana.Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: Gabbard’s campaign website does not include a plan regarding the opioid epidemic, and her staff did not return requests for comment. In the past, Gabbard introduced a bill to hold top company executives and drug manufacturers criminally liable for misleading opioid marketing. Her statements on the opioid crisis have typically focused on holding opioid companies accountable, with little attention to boosting drug addiction treatment or harm reduction services.Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro: Castro’s campaign website does not include a plan regarding the opioid epidemic, and his staff did not return requests for comment. Based on news reports, he has made very few comments about the opioid epidemic on the campaign trail.Sen. Amy Klobuchar: Klobuchar’s campaign put out a $100 billion plan to address mental health issues and drug addiction. The proposal would promote early interventions for drug use, including at schools, as well as boost addiction treatment, including medications for opioid addiction. It would enforce laws requiring insurers to cover addiction treatment. It would also support research for more addiction treatments and non-opioid pain treatments. And it would discourage the use of jail or prison over treatment for people who use drugs, as well as encourage first responders to carry naloxone. It would impose a 2-cent fee on each milligram of an active opioid ingredient in painkillers to help pay for the plan and try to hold drug companies accountable for their involvement in the current overdose crisis.Montana Gov. Steve Bullock: Bullock’s campaign said he would boost access to drug addiction treatment by “build[ing] on Obamacare by adding a public option, ending surprise medical billing, and allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices.” As governor, he also signed a bill into law that curtails opioid painkiller prescriptions.Sen. Michael Bennet: Bennet’s health care plan includes a section on fighting drug misuse. His proposal would put $60 billion to fighting addiction and scaling up treatment. He would also require insurers to pay for addiction treatment and non-opioid pain treatments. And he would expand access to naloxone. He also vowed to hold opioid painkiller producers and distributors accountable with criminal penalties for illegal marketing and by forcing them to pay for $20 billion to help fund his plan.Marianne Williamson: Williamson’s campaign website does not include a plan regarding the opioid epidemic, and her staff did not return requests for comment. On the campaign trail, she’s spoken about holding opioid companies accountable, the excessive prescribing of painkillers, and having “24-hour 12-step programming available on cable television.”Tom Steyer: Steyer’s campaign said he will focus on incarcerating people from “drug companies conspiring to addict Americans to opioids,” instead of simply fining them. He has also criticized Trump for enacting a tax cut that some drug companies benefited from, when much of that money could have gone to efforts to end the opioid crisis.Rep. Tim Ryan: Ryan’s campaign website does not include a plan regarding the opioid epidemic, and his staff did not return requests for comment. As a member of Congress, Ryan has spoken about expanding addiction treatment and curtailing opioid painkiller prescriptions.Former Rep. John Delaney: Delaney put out a plan to tackle the opioid epidemic. It would spend $3 billion to $4 billion more a year, raised through a new tax on opioid painkillers, to help states expand access to addiction treatment. His campaign also pointed to his health care plan, which would take steps to get insurers to pay for more addiction treatment. Delaney would also move to curtail opioid painkiller prescribing by pushing doctors to prescribe less, going after pharmaceutical executives who played a role in the crisis, and increasing federal enforcement efforts against the diversion of opioid painkillers.New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: De Blasio’s campaign website does not include a plan regarding the opioid epidemic, and his staff did not return requests for comment. As New York’s mayor, he has implemented policies to expand drug addiction treatment (especially medications for opioid addiction), access to naloxone, needle exchange services, and education programs related to drugs. He has also supported efforts to open a supervised consumption site in New York. And the city, under de Blasio, sued drug companies for their role in the opioid crisis.Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam: Messam’s campaign website does not include a plan regarding the opioid epidemic, and his staff did not return requests for comment. Based on news reports, he has made very few comments about the opioid epidemic on the campaign trail.Former Rep. Joe Sestak: Sestak said in a statement that he supports expanding access to treatment, pointing to Virginia’s program increasing reimbursement rates from Medicaid to ensure that evidence-based addiction treatment is encouraged and more available. He also said that he would improve enforcement to require insurers to pay for addiction treatment. He would increase research on addiction treatments, including into psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and MDMA. And he would take steps to punish drug companies for their role in the opioid crisis by levying fines that would be used to help pay for more treatment and establishing a new office in the Department of Justice to ensure these companies are held criminally liable.

It’s impossible to talk about the causes of America’s opioid epidemic without pointing to the manufacturers and distributors that marketed and proliferated dangerous opioid painkillers. Yet for much of the crisis, these multibillion dollar opioid companies have avoided much in the way of serious accountability.Until, perhaps, now. On Wednesday, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, tentatively agreed to pay as much as $12 billion to settle lawsuits it faces for its role in the opioid crisis. It would be the largest settlement related to the epidemic, which has contributed to the more than 700,000 drug overdose deaths in the US since 1999.The settlement is part of a federal case in Cleveland in which more than 2,000 lawsuits, largely from various levels of government, have been consolidated in an effort to reach a single landmark legal resolution to the opioid epidemic — forcing not just opioid makers like Purdue but also distributors like CVS and Walgreens to help pay for the drug addiction and overdose crisis.Other cases, however, are proceeding as well. Attorneys general in Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, have said that they didn’t agree to the Purdue settlement and vowed to continue with their own cases against opioid makers and distributors, including Purdue. Oklahoma recently concluded cases against Purdue, Johnson & Johnson, and Teva.There are two major legal arguments behind these cases, one against opioid manufacturers and another mainly against opioid distributors:1) Starting in the mid-1990s, opioid manufacturers unleashed a misleading marketing push underplaying the risks of opioid painkillers and exaggerating the drugs’ benefits. This, the lawsuits argue, adds up to false advertising with deadly consequences by encouraging doctors to overprescribe the pills and getting patients to think the pills were safe and effective.2) Meanwhile, opioid distributors supplied a ton of these pills, even when they should have known they were going to people who were misusing the drugs. This is backed by data showing that, in some counties and states, there were more prescribed bottles of painkillers than there were people — a sign that something was going very wrong. Federal and some state laws require distributors to keep an eye on the supply chain to ensure their products aren’t falling into the wrong hands. Letting these drugs proliferate, the lawsuits say, violates those laws.Opioid manufacturers and distributors, of course, deny these allegations. While some lawsuits have been settled and some executives have even been criminally convicted for their involvement in the epidemic in the past, opioid companies vigorously reject the argument that they have carelessly fueled the current drug crisis. And so far, what the companies have paid by and large amounts to a fraction of the revenue they’ve taken in from the drugs.According to the lawsuits, opioid companies enabled this epidemic. So they should pay up.The big argument against opioid makers: These companies knew or should have known that their products weren’t safe or effective, yet they advertised their drugs as safe and effective anyway. One lawsuit representative of this line of argument is Ohio’s, which goes after Purdue; Endo; Teva and subsidiary Cephalon; Johnson & Johnson and subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals; and Allergan.The lawsuit cited several examples of misleading marketing: An Endo-sponsored website, PainKnowledge.com, in 2009 claimed that “[p]eople who take opioids as prescribed usually do not become addicted.” Janssen approved and distributed a patient education guide in 2009 that attempted to counter the “myth” that opioids are addictive, claiming that “[m]any studies show that opioids are rarely addictive when used properly for the management of chronic pain.” Purdue sponsored a publication from the American Pain Foundation, which was heavily funded by opioid companies, claiming that the risk of addiction is less than 1 percent among children prescribed opioids — suggesting pain is undertreated and opioids are necessary.This is only a small sampling. In total, former Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine claimed opioid companies spent “millions of dollars on promotional activities and materials that falsely deny or trivialize the risks of opioids while overstating the benefits of using them for chronic pain.” In doing this, he argued that opioid makers were “borrowing a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook.”A 2015 analysis in the Annual Review of Public Health reached similar conclusions, finding opioid makers exaggerated the benefits and safety of their products; supported advocacy groups and “education” campaigns to encourage widespread use of opioids; and lobbied lawmakers to loosen access to the drugs.The result: As opioid companies saw their profits increase, so too did drug overdose deaths and addiction treatment admissions.It’s not just that opioids aren’t as safe as the drug companies claimed, it’s that the drugs may not even be as effective. There’s simply no good scientific evidence that opioid painkillers can effectively treat long-term chronic pain as patients grow tolerant of opioids’ effects, but there’s plenty of evidence that prolonged use can result in bad complications, including a higher risk of addiction, overdose, and death. In short, the risks outweigh the benefits for most chronic pain patients.Some opioid makers had to pay earlier on in the crisis for what the government described as false advertising. In 2007, Purdue and three of its top executives paid more than $630 million in federal fines for misleading marketing, and three executives were criminally convicted, each sentenced to three years of probation and 400 hours of community service.But local, state, and federal governments, as well as individuals and activist groups, argue that the faulty marketing continued even after that, leading more people to file legal action against opioid makers. Some states, such as Oklahoma and Kentucky, have already gotten a payout. Purdue reportedly agreed to settle thousands of cases in front of a federal court in Cleveland. Yet other cases, including against other opioid makers as well as Purdue, remain.I previously reached out to the major companies named in the lawsuits. Only Purdue gave a comment on the record, denying a major role in fueling the opioid crisis.Beyond the false advertising charges, there’s a separate legal argument, dubbed the “diversion theory” by some proponents, for companies that distribute, as opposed to manufacture, opioids. Under federal and some state laws, opioid distributors have a legal obligation to stop controlled substances from going to illicit purposes and misuse. The diversion theory argues that these distributors clearly did not do that: As the opioid epidemic spiraled out of control and as some counties and states had more prescriptions than people, it should have become perfectly clear that something was going wrong — yet, the claim goes, distributors continued to let the drugs proliferate.Michael Canty, an attorney advising states and other jurisdictions on opioid-related legal challenges, drew a comparison between opioid distributors and credit card companies.“[Credit card companies say], ‘Someone tried to make a very large purchase on your account in another state and we flagged it as suspicious and stopped it from going through.’ That’s what distributors should be doing,” Canty previously told me. “For example, there’s a small town with 500 residents, and the local pharmacies order a million pills from the distributors. That should set off an alarm bell from a compliance standpoint or a quality control standpoint, where the distributors say, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on here? We need to investigate this order. And until it passes muster, we won’t ship.’”The Cherokee Nation’s lawsuit is representative of this line of argument, leveled against big names like the McKesson Corporation, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart. The lawsuit has some fairly alarming numbers behind its claim: 845 million milligrams of opioids were distributed in the 14 counties that make up the Cherokee Nation — which, if you assume an average pill size of 20 milligrams, amounts to 360 pills for each person using prescription opioids in the Cherokee Nation.This is part of a national problem. The CDC, for example, put out 2012 data that found there were more painkiller prescriptions than people in several states.West Virginia’s case is particularly striking. It is the state hardest hit by the epidemic, suffering the highest rate of overdose deaths in recent years. A previous investigation by the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia found that from 2007 to 2012, drug firms poured a total of 780 million painkillers into the state — which has a total population of about 1.8 million. Some of the numbers were even more absurd at the local level: The small town of Kermit has a population of 392, but a single pharmacy there received 9 million hydrocodone pills over two years from out-of-state drug companies.“When you have 140 prescriptions being written for every 100 people, you know that people have failed to meet their obligations,” Serena Hallowell, another attorney involved in the legal challenges, previously told me. “And they’re not just ethical obligations, which I would say they have too. They’re obligations under state and federal law and their own industry guidelines as well.”As with opioid makers, distributors have already paid some fines and settlements for the opioid crisis, sometimes multiple times over — including McKesson, CVS, Walgreens, and Cardinal Health. Now legal challenges are wrapped up in the consolidation of lawsuits in Cleveland, although some individual lawsuits are still going on across the country.Similar challenges could, in theory, be tried against opioid manufacturers too. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), for one, previously pursued one of the nation’s largest opioid makers, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, for the proliferation of its pills in Florida since 1999. But as the Washington Post found, the investigations went nowhere. In the end, the company agreed to pay, without admitting wrongdoing, just $35 million to settle the case with the federal government — far from the billions of dollars the DEA reportedly hoped for, and a tiny fraction of the $3.4 billion in revenue the company reported in fiscal year 2016.I previously contacted the opioid distributors named in the lawsuits. AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and CVS said they’re committed to stopping the misuse of their products and that they will work closely with federal regulators to do so. Cardinal Health went further, arguing that it “is confident that the facts and the law are on our side, and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves against the plaintiff’s mischaracterization of those facts and misunderstanding of the law.”With the lawsuits, the hope has always been that state and local governments could land a massive legal settlement, similar to the settlement reached with big tobacco companies in the 1990s.In 1998, big tobacco companies agreed to the Master Settlement Agreement with 46 states. This massive agreement forced tobacco companies to pay tens of billions in upfront and then annual payments, and it put major restrictions on the sale and marketing of tobacco products.Similarly, a big settlement with drug companies could place restrictions on marketing for opioids. Money from the lawsuits could also help pay for addiction treatment. The latter would help fill a major gap in care: According to a 2016 report from the surgeon general, only 10 percent of people with a drug use disorder get specialty treatment — in large part due to a lack of access and options in their area.Purdue’s tentative settlement moves in this direction. According to the Washington Post and New York Times, Purdue will file for bankruptcy and effectively dissolve. Then a new company will form and continue selling OxyContin, with the sales revenue going to plaintiffs in the lawsuit settlement. Purdue will donate drugs for addiction treatment and overdose as well. All of that could help pay for potentially billions in treatment.But some advocates aren’t satisfied. For one, the $10 billion to $12 billion settlement makes up a small part of the more than $31 billion in revenue that, as of 2016, Purdue had made from OxyContin. And even though the Sackler family that owns Purdue will reportedly have to pay $3 billion as part of the settlement, the Sacklers will still walk away as billionaires.There are also questions about whether the money from settlements will actually go to addiction treatment. Much of the money meant for tobacco addiction treatment in the Master Settlement Agreement ended up going to other things, like filling state budgets.So some critics have demanded not just financial consequences but prison time for opioid makers as well — to ensure that, if nothing else, there’s actual accountability. “If no Sacklers end up behind bars, an entire class of people will continue to feel that writing a check is the worst thing that will happen to them ever no [matter] what they do,” Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford, said on Twitter.One complicating factor in the case against opioid makers and distributors: Unlike tobacco companies, they can’t be held solely liable for the opioid crisis. Unlike cigarettes at the time of the Master Settlement Agreement, opioids are already regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This could let opioid companies punt responsibility to the FDA, since the agency approved these drugs for medical use. Jodi Avergun, a former chief of staff at the DEA and now a defense lawyer, told Reuters that this is a “fundamental weakness” of the opioid lawsuits.There’s also the involvement of the rest of the health care system in the opioid crisis, from medical boards to doctors to patients themselves. That all of this involved so many different actors could insulate opioid companies from carrying too much of the legal consequences. That’s especially true since some of these other actors have copped to serious negligence; the West Virginia Board of Pharmacy, for example, admitted that it didn’t enforce a law for reporting suspicious orders of narcotics for years.“With tobacco, it really is an interaction between an industry and the consumer,” Humphreys previously told me. “In this case, there was supposed to be this intervening body that also failed. That doesn’t mean the pharmaceutical companies should get off, but … plenty of other people enabled it.”Still, some opioid makers and distributors are starting to feel the consequences. Whether those consequences will be enough to make a dent in the opioid crisis remains to be seen.

She was not his only girlfriend, her sister said, and she suffered.She would come home to find her on the couch. “Crying, crying, talking on the phone and smoking,” Tiffany Rojas said. “My poor sister.”By 2017, she had lost a new job at a hair salon and stopped paying her share of the rent at the subsidized apartment she had moved into on Revere Avenue. She still regularly saw her 12-year-old son, who had moved in with her mother, often stopping by to make sure he was bathed and ready for school. But the stretches between her visits grew longer. Once, she turned up limping and with bruises on her face, said her brother, who asked that he and his mother not be named because they had been threatened in the past by Ms. Rojas’s dealers over her debts. Another time, she called saying she had been kidnapped by dealers and needed hundreds of dollars.The person who knew more about what happened in Ms. Rojas’s hidden life was a family friend, a taxi driver who had always had a crush on Ms. Rojas, her family said, and gave her rides to appointments with people that he came to realize were her dealers.The driver, whose name is being withheld because of his role in the investigation, said one dealer had fallen in love with her and offered to give her medication to wean her off street drugs if she moved in with him. But she refused. Another threatened her, and he and the taxi driver almost came to blows.Ms. Rojas’s bruises came after three women jumped her, a brutal beating that left her walking for a time with a cane, according to the driver. She bought from many dealers, moving on as she racked up debts or the relationships soured.Her drug of choice remained painkillers, which go for about $10 per pill on the street in the Bronx, where prescription pills are sold alongside counterfeit ones. “She loved her Percocets,” her mother said in Spanish.

Enlarge this image Judge Thad Balkman will rule Monday in the Johnson & Johnson opioid trial. Sue Ogrocki/AP hide caption toggle caption Sue Ogrocki/AP Judge Thad Balkman will rule Monday in the Johnson & Johnson opioid trial. Sue Ogrocki/AP An Oklahoma judge will announce a ruling Monday in the state's multibillion-dollar case against drugmaker Johnson & Johnson. The case is being closely watched to see if a court is prepared to hold a pharmaceutical company responsible for contributing to the opioid crisis that took more than 47,000 American lives in 2017 alone. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter's suit alleges that Johnson & Johnson, through its pharmaceuticals subsidiary Janssen, created a public nuisance by spreading misinformation to doctors and the public, using deceptive and aggressive marketing of the potent painkillers.The lawsuit also alleges that the manufacturers' campaign to health care professionals understated the dangers of addiction, leading to opioids being overprescribed for pain in Oklahoma and leading to thousands of overdoses, deaths and related harms from addiction, such as child welfare cases and crime.The company denies any wrongdoing.Judge Thad Balkman will deliver his decision from the bench, after presiding over a seven-week civil trial that ended in July in Norman, Okla. Shots - Health News Pain Meds As Public Nuisance? Oklahoma Tests A Legal Strategy For Opioid Addiction If the state's claim prevails, Johnson & Johnson could ultimately have to spend billions of dollars in Oklahoma helping to ease the epidemic. State attorneys are asking that the company pay $17.5 billion over 30 years to provide funds for addiction treatment and prevention programs in the state, officials say.Balkman could choose to award the full amount, or just some portion of it, if he agrees with the state's claim.In the case of a loss, Johnson & Johnson is widely expected to appeal the verdict. If Oklahoma loses, Hunter has said the state will appeal.Oklahoma's legal team based its entire case on a claim of public nuisance, which refers to actions that harm members of the public, including injury to public health. During closing arguments in July, Hunter called the company the "kingpin" of the opioid crisis, as NPR reported."What is truly unprecedented here is the conduct of these defendants on embarking on a cunning, cynical and deceitful scheme to create the need for opioids," Hunter said.But Johnson & Johnson's attorney, Larry Ottaway, rejected that idea in his closing argument in July, saying the company's products, which had included the fentanyl patch Duragesic and the opioid-based pill Nucynta, were minimally used in Oklahoma.He scoffed at the idea that physicians in the state were convinced to unnecessarily prescribe opioids due to the company's marketing tactics."The FDA label clearly set forth the risk of addiction, abuse and misuse that could lead to overdose and death. Don't tell me that doctors weren't aware of the risks," Ottaway said.Johnson & Johnson is the sole defendant in the case after two other companies — Teva Pharmaceuticals and Purdue Pharma — both settled with the state for millions of dollars before the trial began.In April, a poll released by NPR and Ipsos found that a third of Americans have been directly affected by the opioid epidemic. The survey found that 57% of Americans felt pharmaceutical companies should be held responsible for making the crisis worse. This story was part of a reporting partnership with NPR, State Impact Oklahoma and Kaiser Health News.

CLEVELAND (AP) — OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma is expected to file for bankruptcy after settlement talks over the nation’s deadly overdose crisis hit an impasse, attorneys general involved in the talks said Saturday.The breakdown puts the first federal trial over the opioid epidemic on track to begin next month, likely without Purdue, and sets the stage for a complex legal drama involving nearly every state and hundreds of local governments.Purdue, the family that owns the company and a group of state attorneys general had been trying for months to find a way to avoid trial and determine Purdue’s responsibility for a crisis that has cost 400,000 American lives over the past two decades.An email from the attorneys general of Tennessee and North Carolina, obtained by The Associated Press, said that Purdue and the Sackler family had rejected two offers from the states over how payments under any settlement would be handled and that the family declined to offer counterproposals.“As a result, the negotiations are at an impasse, and we expect Purdue to file for bankruptcy protection imminently,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery and North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein wrote in their message, which was sent to update attorneys general throughout the country on the status of the talks.Purdue spokeswoman Josephine Martin said, “Purdue declines to comment on that in its entirety.”A failure in negotiations sets up one of the most tangled bankruptcy cases in the nation’s history. It would leave virtually every state and some 2,000 local governments that have sued Purdue to battle it out in bankruptcy court for the company’s remaining assets. Purdue threatened to file for bankruptcy earlier this year and was holding off while negotiations continued.It’s not entirely clear what a breakdown in settlement talks with Purdue means for the Sackler family, which is being sued separately by at least 17 states.Those lawsuits are likely to continue but face a significant hurdle because it’s believed the family — major donors to museums and other cultural institutions around the world — has transferred most of its multibillion-dollar fortune overseas.Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who was one of the four state attorneys general negotiating with Purdue and the Sacklers, said Saturday he intends to sue the Sackler family, as other states have.“I think they are a group of sanctimonious billionaires who lied and cheated so they could make a handsome profit,” he said. “I truly believe that they have blood on their hands.”In March, Purdue and members of the Sackler family reached a $270 million settlement with Oklahoma to avoid a trial on the toll of opioids there. The Sacklers could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.Under one earlier proposed settlement, Purdue would enter a structured bankruptcy that could be worth $10 billion to $12 billion over time. Included in the total would be $3 billion from the Sackler family, which would give up its control of Purdue and contribute up to $1.5 billion more by selling another company it owns, Cambridge, England-based Mundipharma.Shapiro said the attorneys general believed what Purdue and the Sacklers were offering would not have been worth the reported $10 billion to $12 billion.In their latest offers, the states also sought more assurances that the $4.5 billion from the Sacklers would actually be paid, according to the message circulated Saturday: “The Sacklers refused to budge.”In their message, Tennessee’s Slatery and North Carolina’s Stein said the states have already begun preparations for handling bankruptcy proceedings.“Like you, we plan to continue our work to ensure that the Sacklers, Purdue and other drug companies pay for drug addiction treatment and other remedies to help clean up the mess we allege they created,” they wrote.The nearly 2,000 lawsuits filed by city and county governments — as well as unions, hospitals, Native American tribes and lawyers representing babies who were born in opioid withdrawal — have been consolidated under a single federal judge in Cleveland.Most of those lawsuits also name other opioid makers, distributors and pharmacies in addition to Purdue, some of which have been pursuing their own settlements.Purdue also faces hundreds of other lawsuits filed in state courts and had sought a wide-ranging deal to settle all cases against it.The company has been the most popular target of state and local governments because of its OxyContin, the prescription painkiller many of the government claims point to as the drug that gave rise to the opioid epidemic. The lawsuits claim the company aggressively sold OxyContin and marketed it as a drug with a low risk of addiction despite knowing that wasn’t true.The impasse in the talks comes about six weeks before the scheduled start of the first federal trial under the Cleveland litigation, overseen by U.S. District Judge Dan Polster. That trial will hear claims about the toll the opioid epidemic has taken on two Ohio counties, Cuyahoga and Summit.A bankruptcy filing by Purdue would most certainly remove the company from that trial.The bankruptcy judge would have wide discretion on how to proceed. That could include allowing the claims against other drugmakers, distributors and pharmacies to move ahead while Purdue’s cases are handled separately. Three other manufacturers have already settled with the two Ohio counties to avoid the initial trial.___Mulvihill reported from New Jersey.

The role of marketing in the pharmaceutical industry—the apparatus that profits more from maximizing use than optimizing outcomes—is at an inflection point. A reckoning could lead to serious reform. But a settlement deal currently on the table—in which Purdue Pharma, the Connecticut-based producer of Oxycontin, would pay about $11 billion—stands to repeat the mistakes of the past, and to achieve little meaningful progress.While opioid use has always led to some level of abuse, today’s epidemic of addiction and misuse is new. Beginning in the late 1990s, drug makers inundated the pharmaceutical market with potent and long-acting opiates. Aggressively marketed messages of the pills’ efficacy and safety made their way into medical-school lectures and clinical-practice guidelines.Medical schools, in turn, taught students that the drugs were important scientific advancements, often good and even necessary to prescribe. When I was in residency, I was told to think of pain as “the fifth vital sign.” My job was to use every tool in the pharmaceutical arsenal to keep pain “well controlled.” The pharmaceutical companies’ marketing push had put the stigma on not using pills, and even when it was technically accurate, it had the effect of focusing doctors’ concern on pain—and drawing that focus away from the future potential for abuse.This escalation of salesmanship and market competition involved many global pharmaceutical corporations. But unfettered profit-seeking in the sale of potent opioids has been widely traced to the 1996 introduction of Oxycontin by Purdue. In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty in federal court to a felony charge, having misled doctors and patients about the drug’s potential for abuse and addiction. The company and some executives were ultimately forced to do community service and pay a total of $634 million in fines.In a subsequent congressional hearing, Senator Arlen Specter asked why these executives didn’t go to jail. The prosecutor John Brownlee had wanted to indict them individually on felony charges, The New York Times later reported. Brownlee possessed records that Purdue had known about Oxycontin’s growing abuse for three years, according to the Times. But after meeting with Purdue’s legal team, the Justice Department reportedly refused to get behind Brownlee’s recommendations. The individual executives were allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges instead, and were not personally implicated in any felony wrongdoing.Purdue continued aggressive promotion of Oxycontin, and opioid overdoses only increased. In the ensuing five years, enough pills were sent to overdose-mired West Virginia alone that there would be 433 per person.Then, in June of last year, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed a lawsuit against Purdue alleging yet again that the company knowingly misled doctors and consumers about the dangers of its product. (Purdue denied this.) Thousands of other state and federal lawsuits followed.

花费8年时间、融资23亿美元，Magic Leap 的首款产品姗姗来迟。随着今年这款产品被越来越多的的人体验，Magic Leap One 的评价也大相径庭，有人认为这是“一个悲剧”，有人评价这是“MR的新开始”。但对更多的人来说，这可能是一个很想体验但并没有机会体验的“重量级新产品”。在多位业内公司、业内朋友的赞助下，36氪联合顺为集中了多台Magic Leap One，希望向更多业内人士提供一次上手体验Magic Leap One的机会。如果你对此感兴趣，应该不希望错过这样一次体验的机会。为了使体验效果更有针对性，我们还准备了多台HoloLens、小米VR一体机，方便大家现场第一时间多维度进行对比，从而形成更客观、专业的评价。同时，现场我们还准备了几个私密的行业分享，方便参与者对AR/VR/MR行业一线有更全面的了解。考虑到我们现场的设备数量、产品的续航时间，我们评估在6个小时的时间内可能只能承载50人左右的规模，因此本次活动会对参与人数进行限制，需要提前报名（接受筛选）、对体验时间进行提前预约。活动地点：10月22日 16：00-22：00活动地址：北京市朝阳区（具体地址将会在报名通过后邮件通知）报名截止时间： 2018年10月21日 12：00报名通知：2018年10月21日 20：00左右联系方式：[email protected]

The report also does nothing to vindicate Mr. Trump’s initial assertion that Mr. Comey’s mishandling of the Clinton investigation was the basis for his termination. The president let his real reason out of the bag when he revealed in the Oval Office to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister that the Comey firing relieved “great pressure” related to Russia — and admitted to the journalist Lester Holt that he fired Mr. Comey because of the “Russia thing.” He cannot use the inspector general report to erase those admissions.As such reports often do, this one covers a grab bag of additional issues — ones that offer no support for Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Mueller, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. For example, while the inspector general has some choice words for former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s lax oversight of Mr. Comey, she was long gone by the time Mr. Mueller commenced his work.Mr. Trump and his surrogates have from the start been engaged in a smear campaign to discredit the Mueller investigation, starting with their first, spurious claim — nearly a year ago — that Mr. Mueller and members of his team had supposed “conflicts of interest” that disqualified them from working on the Russia investigation. The misrepresentations of the inspector general’s report that have begun, and those sure to follow, are simply the latest attempt to advance the unsupported refrain that the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt” cooked up by members of a “deep state” conspiracy to delegitimize his presidency. It’s not.On the contrary, the detailed report makes clear the independence of the Justice Department and the value of letting a thorough and fair investigation run its course. That is consistent with recent NBC/Wall Street Journal polling, which indicates that most Americans have confidence that Mr. Mueller is conducting a fair and impartial investigation.Just as the inspector general has done with respect to the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email investigation, so too should the special counsel be allowed to complete his investigation of Russia’s interference with the election and any efforts by the president or his associates to thwart that investigation, and report his findings to the public. The American people need to know whether the Mr. Trump campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election, and whether President Trump corruptly intervened to stop that or other investigations. We must not allow his persistent efforts to muddy the waters obscure the resolution of those urgent inquiries.

Three of Hong Kong’s most high-profile democracy activists have pleaded not guilty to charges of public nuisance for their involvement in nearly three months of street protests in 2014 that brought parts of the city to a standstill.The three men face up to seven years in prison if convicted under a colonial-era law for encouraging mass protests that became known as the Umbrella movement and called for direct elections for Hong Kong’s leader, a position that is in effect appointed by Beijing.Sociology professor Chan Kin-man, 59, law professor Benny Tai, 54, and baptist minister Chu Yiu-ming, 74, formed “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” in 2013, saying if the government did not deliver universal suffrage the following year they would take to the streets. The trio eventually merged their group with student protesters, lead by Joshua Wong, and spent 79 days camped out in front of the government headquarters. But the protests did not lead to any changes.In the four years since the protest, freedoms in Hong Kong have been dramatically curtailed, with the government aggressively targeting pro-democracy activists with what some say are politically motivated prosecutions, barring candidates from standing for election, removing popularly elected members of the city’s legislature and banning a fringe political party. Last month, the government expelled a Financial Times journalist for hosting a talk on the topic of independence.Hundreds attended the trial of a total of nine activists on Monday, which had to be moved to a larger courthouse in anticipation of the intense public interest. In a show of defiance, the nine defendants and more than 100 supporters unfurled yellow umbrellas, a symbol of the movement, outside the court, clapping and demanding an end to “political prosecution”. “A movement can be crushed but not defeated,” the nine defendants said in a joint statement. “These charges enable the government to abuse the power of prosecution and infringe on the freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. The nine defendants unanimously decided not to plead guilty.”Tai told Reuters he hoped the trial would be an opportunity to “reboot the spirit of the people”.Mei-kei Tam, director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, said in a statement that the prosecution was an act of retaliation aimed at silencing the pro-democracy movement. “The charges against all nine activists must be dropped, as the government’s case is based solely on the legitimate exercise of the rights to free speech and peaceful protest,” Tam added.“The prosecutors are using deliberately vague and ambiguous charges that will have chilling consequences for freedom of expression and peaceful assembly in Hong Kong.”The prosecutor, Andrew Bruce, argued the trio’s call for protests to occupy streets had caused a “common injury done to the public” and accused them of supporting the demonstration “by way of unlawful obstruction of public places and roads”, according to AFP.Before the trial, Chan gave a farewell speech at the university at which he taught for more than 20 years, according to AFP, and announced plans to retire early next year.“So long as we are not crushed by imprisonment and trial and do not become overly frustrated and angry, then we will become stronger and we can inspire many more people,” he said. “Only in the darkest hours, we can see the stars.” Topics Hong Kong China Asia Pacific news

On Monday it was two years to the day since thousands of armed Nazis invaded my town, threatened my family and my neighbors, and killed a young woman named Heather Heyer. I had spent the day in a fog, reflecting on the brave people of Charlottesville, Virginia who had stood their ground against the embodiment of hatred that now seems to spew at us every week – often from the White House itself.I needed some catharsis. I needed a lift. I needed some rock’n’roll.That evening I saw the film Blinded by the Light, which is about to debut in the US but opened in Britain on 9 August. It’s the story of a south Asian teenager growing up in a soon-to-be-post-industrial city who discovers that the music of Bruce Springsteen helps inspire him to dream beyond his given environment. Along the way the young man faces social alienation and violent threats from bigots who resent his family’s presence in an economy that turns working-class people against each other.I shuddered as I watched familiar scenes and heard echoes of dialogue from my own 1980s adolescence. I’m also the son of an immigrant who grew up in an industrial city then confronting the policy-driven disposability of working people. For me, it was Ronald Reagan’s plan to extract money and hope from cities like Buffalo. For the young man in the film, Javed, it was Margaret Thatcher’s war on “society” that helped destroy the fabric of life in Luton.Javed channels into his writing and relationships Springsteen’s embrace of those crushed by impersonal political forces, sensitivity to the suffering of others, and powerful optimism about the potential for personal and societal change.Never without his Sony Walkman headphones embracing his thick black hair, Javed programs the soundtrack of his life and spreads the gospel of Bruce, only somewhat successfully. This turn toward the culture of the west angers his traditional father, who moved the family from Karachi before Javed was born. As the only son, Javed should have worked toward a steady, lucrative, and dependable middle-class career in Luton, living with his family as long as they needed his financial support as they paid for two of his sisters’ weddings.Javed wants none of that. He not only dreams of being a professional writer, he dreams of moving far from Luton, just as Springsteen wrote of running from the working-class town that “rips your bones from your back” in which he was raised.The youthful immigrant family tensions are familiar. They appear just as starkly in such Asian-centric antecedents as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Mississippi Masala (1991), and Bend it Like Beckham (2002).British director Gurinder Chadha is responsible for Bend it Like Beckham and Blinded by the Light. The two films have many similarities, including sibling conspiracies to hide dalliances from conservative parents, energetic Bhangra dance scenes, a wedding that gets complicated, and a brilliant use of pop music to drive key scenes.The film was a collaboration between two life-long British Springsteen fans, Chadha and journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, upon whose book, Greetings from Bury Park, the film is based. Manzoor first wrote of his debt to Springsteen in the Guardian in 2002, and has continued to chronicle his – and our – relationship with the musician ever since.Springsteen has long made his music relevant to young people striving for something more, struggling to balance the demands and stability of community with values that challenge traditions. That’s what rock’n’roll, born of blues and country music, channeled through charming, southern Christian men like Little Richard and Elvis Presley, has always done for us.This world desperately needed rock’n’roll in the 1950s as we emerged fully from the brutal compromises of depression and war to imagine abundance, freedom, mobility, and sex. The best rock movies, even set in their own times, explicate those themes and reconnect us with the possibility of something better.I won’t count Blinded by the Light among the best rock films. It’s a bit sappy at times and many of the characters are predictably flat. It’s among the best south Asian immigrant films, though, three of which have come from the deft directorial hand of Chadha, who has a warm comic sensibility as well as a feel for the narrative power of a good pop song.Regardless, Blinded by the Light is the film we need in the summer of 2019. As nativist fantasies put the UK on the brink of a no-deal Brexit and the United States is run by and overrun by white nationalists striving to make America whiter, we need inspiration that reminds us that others have stared down Nazi skinheads not so long ago and prevailed.The National Front and skinheads lurk just off screen throughout Blinded by the Light. They appear in a climactic scene that threatens to sever all the bonds of Javed’s family and community. The film’s depiction of a National Front march through Luton, which I watched on the anniversary of a similar but more deadly Nazi march in my own current town, shows the consequences of abandoning one’s community when it needs you most.One lesson we can take from Blinded by the Light is that we can strive for justice and better lives within communities that reach beyond our colors, religions, and points of origin. We can and must work to find common cause, to recognize our common fate. We need not run away from our communities to transcend them. We can choose to represent them – and us – better. The film also inspires us to remember that working-class solidarity is possible, if fragile.And, more importantly at this moment of looming war between India and Pakistan, that south Asian solidarity among Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims is not just possible in the diaspora. It’s necessary.In the 1980s I had thick black hair, just like Javed. I wore my Walkman headphones just like Javed. If Springsteen was not blasting through them, the Clash were.That music forged my commitment to describe the world in all its glory and ugliness and perhaps, in small ways, chart a better way forward. I can’t say I became a writer because of Springsteen. But I can say his music has given form and direction to what I have written. And sometimes he has just helped me drive a little bit faster, a little bit farther. Topics Bruce Springsteen Opinion comment

Abdulkafi Alhamdo is an English teacher in Syria. He loves Coleridge and Shakespeare and is currently teaching his students Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In 2016, he was evacuated from Syria’s very own heart of darkness – Aleppo – where he taught traumatised school children in cellars and bombed-out buildings throughout the siege, even as they starved. Now he lives and works in the rebel-held north-west province of Idlib, where he and fellow teachers are struggling with few resources and little support to educate the next generation, those who will shape the future of Syria.Idlib, the largest province in Syria to remain outside the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has seen a steady increase in violence in recent months with bombing raids by Russian and Syrian jets and the arrival of refugees fleeing from other war-ravaged zones, which – according to Alhamdo – makes the ongoing work of Syria’s teachers all the more vital. “We want education to continue because we don’t want these young children or students to think of guns,” he says. “Without schools, they would carry guns but, because of their attendance at school, they are students.”According to Anna Nolan, director of the human rights group The Syria Campaign, at least 2.5 million locals and refugees are now packed into Idlib, which has been described as “a kill box”. There is great humanitarian need and no state education, but Nolan says that remarkable efforts are afoot on the ground to preserve civil society, with teachers organising their own schools and university classes, often working voluntarily without pay to build an extraordinary patchwork of DIY education.Some have set up their own after-school clubs offering formal lessons, creative arts and vocational training, while others forced out of buildings by armed rebel groups are teaching classes in the open air and on WhatsApp. “There’s a real determination,” says Nolan. “What we hear again and again is that they know that education is the key to the future and this is the generation that will rebuild Syria. The depth and creativity of the services being provided is incredible.”Many of the teachers now working in Idlib are themselves displaced, among them Alhamdo, who fled Aleppo with his wife and young daughter and nothing else. In Idlib, the bombs are still falling – “There’s always bombing. This is our life,” says Alhamdo – but it’s nothing like his experience in Aleppo. “Aleppo was something unusual,” he says. “Every day when I went to school to see my students – they are like my children – I just check who is absent, who is alive and who is not, and then I start teaching them. We would stop many times because there were bombings. For one or two hours, we go to a cellar then, after the bombing stops, we go back again to our class and teach. If the bombing was heavy, we let our students go home.”In April 2015, Saad Al-Ansari school, where Alhamdo was teaching, was hit by a rocket. He was returning from the playground when an explosion ripped through the building, killing four teachers and three students and injuring dozens more. “My heart jumped out of my body,” he recalls. “I saw the students running out, blood on their faces. They were in trauma, crying: ‘Did you see my little brother? Did you see my sister?’ They did not know what to do. Most of them were running out without shoes, without their books. I went inside and saw blood everywhere.”From that point on, the large-scale schools were abandoned and teachers organised their classes in small, makeshift schools in local neighbourhoods, so that the children did not have so far to travel to school and – should another rocket hit – the number of potential victims would be fewer.“When you teach in such circumstances, you are more psychologist than teacher,” says Alhamdo. “You have to be so careful about their trauma and their personal stories. When there’s heavy bombing, you tell the children they are heroes because they are still learning. It was a very, very difficult job.”The children, traumatised by their experiences, found it hard to concentrate, but their teachers tried to preserve some normality for them. They still sat their public exams, hidden in cellars away from the shelling. “The conditions were very, very bad, but we could not let the war or their situation affect their progress. They are the future of Syria for us.”Now in Idlib, he is teaching linguistics and the modern novel at the Free Aleppo University in the Idlib countryside to students who have fled from regime-held areas. The university opened in 2016 as one of the country’s few remaining centres of higher education. On days when shelling is intense and the danger is too great, students have lessons via WhatsApp, and some medical students have lectures online from doctors in the US. “I am proud of my students and I’m proud of teaching … My students are my heroes,” says Alhamdo.In one recent incident, students and teachers resisted an attempted takeover of the university by the armed military faction Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). When they refused to sign the university over, HTS threatened the university and prevented them from using the building for lectures, so Alhamdo and his colleagues took their lessons outside. “It might not be safe for me as a teacher but we cannot surrender.”In Atmeh, a village in the north of Idlib near the Turkish border, Sawsan Abbar has opened the “Read and Rise” primary school for girls. Her husband is the headteacher. The school is attended by 120 girls, all of whom have been displaced from their home towns and cities by the war. There are few teaching resources so Abbar and her colleagues have to be creative, sourcing materials from the internet and printing them out for their students.In the absence of so much else, the school has taken on a central nurturing role in the children’s lives. “Some of the kids call me and other teachers Mama or Auntie,” says Abbar, adding: “What keeps me awake at night is aerial bombardment. We have to skip school sometimes and it’s very worrying.”Meanwhile, in the city of Maarat al-Nu’man, also in Idlib province, teacher Mariam Shirout has set up her own after-school provision for children in the area. In the morning she teaches in the city schools that are still functioning – they were once state schools but have been taken over by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – and in the afternoon she opens the doors to her own school for children aged four to 15. It is called Bilelem Nartaqi, which means “with education, we advance”. It started small in 2013 but has grown and now educates between 150 and 200 children from all over the city.“Education is the backbone of the area,” she says. “No matter what happens, I will be working until the last minute. When I see the children coming to the centre under the bombardment because they want to spend time with their friends and me, I can’t think about stopping anything, ever.”Shirout and five colleagues teach reading, writing, mathematics, English and Arabic. They also provide extracurricular activities including drama and singing and vocational training such as sewing. “My school also provides psychological and social support to the children to help them deal with the traumatic experiences they are going through.“The shelling can really affect their work,” she says. “They are trying to be ambitious and believe they can continue with their work, but sometimes they have to stop for a few days because the shelling is unbearable. They are really afraid. Sometimes the schools stop for around 10 days or a month because of the intensive shelling.”Shirout, who is single and has no children of her own, says her pupils are becoming adults prematurely. “They just want to survive. They are always distracted, always thinking of something else. Their minds are always busy. They love school. They want to come, but they are still really distracted and that makes it hard to learn.“I worry about my students all the time – not just about their physical safety but their mental health and their future. The education services available are not enough – it’s like a sticking plaster. If the situation continues as it is, the future of most of the students will be lost.“My students are not children any more. We can’t ask them what they want to be in the future. The future is not clear.” Topics Syria Schools Refugees Middle East and North Africa Bashar al-Assad features