The Shameful Case of the Sacklers (part 3): Evil Triumphs 

i got hit by a car on my bicycle and broke all the phones in my left hand, my left leg and foot. i had to have many surgeries to fix me and i now have titanium all over my body, i was put on oxycontin 40mg three times a day and two 30mg oxiyIR. after my doctor retired no doctor would give me the same level of medication so i went to the street and it took almost 11 years to clime out of the opiate pit or heroin, so many friends died or killed or locked up over this stupid pill and this demonic family

My sister is a heroin addict. This video is extremely accurate in how it conjures up the disappointment, despair, and misery associated with addiction. The footage you used of the protesters showing pictures of their loved ones who were addicted and presumably died, made me cry. It’s a good video and I thank you for your efforts x

Can we all take a moment and recognize just how fan-freaking-tastic Georg is? For serious....I wish I could watch every second of new content this man creates with new eyes over and over again.

Heroin dealers don't pretend they are selling you medicine. There's something much more honest about that.

Makes perfect sense to fine a company millions because they were making _billions_ with their illegal activity. That slap on the wrist will show them

I'm listening to this with my head in my hands. What a world we live in

When my now husband had appendicitis last year, he was prescribed oxycodone for post op stuff. I couldn’t believe how much they had loaded him up on opiates before, during and after the surgery, and then the fact that they threw more at him (with a little warning pamphlet and a destruction kit) was bizarre. He really didn’t even need the pills. I can definitely see how ordinary people could get into this stuff. It’s sick. Thank you so much for this, Georg.

In an action film, the finale would be a gun toting Bruce Willis (playing attorney John Brownlee) crashing through the glass roof of a New York penthouse, telling a convenient gathering of Sackler family and executives not to move because they're under arrest. Meanwhile police bust down the doors and start handcuffing them all. Bruce comments "I feel like the pain I've been living with for years is finally gone" as the last one is bundled into a police van. Real life is so much less satisfying and so much more depressing.

Watching this mini series of videos has consistently made my blood boil. It’s baffling how much evil one can get away with if you have the money and the connections.

Why does evil fail so often in our fiction? Because it wins so much in reality, it helps to think there's a place, even imaginary, where the wicked get their just deserts.

Excellent work, Georg. I'm on Oxycodone while I wait for surgery, so I can speak to its necessity in some cases - it's definitely improved my quality of life in the short term and stopped the screaming - but I am acutely aware of the extreme difficulty of withdrawal and the simultaneous danger of death posed by the drug itself. Want the pain to stop? Take one. Want your heart to stop? Take four. Want to stop? You're SOL, but have you tried heroin? The marketing of this drug as safe and non-addictive is absurd and inhuman, but I guess greed and inhumanity go hand-in-hand.

I spent the last year researching this topic for my long paper for law school. I turned it in on December 31st. I'm waiting for my grade. As a person in recovery, the Sackler family has been of interest to me. The damage done is immeasurable. Of course people are skeptical of vaccines and big pharma after all this. The damage Curtis Wright and his ilk did cannot be measured. It is lasting, and the fact that nobody went to prison is infuriating. It means these companies will continue doing this crap. Great job on this series.

Quite honestly, one of the best things on RU-vid. This is why online media is so much better than traditional media, keep on doing what you do Georg.

As someone doing a pharmacology degree I'm so happy that you're doing these sort of videos. Really interesting!! I appreciate these must require alot of effort too, so thank you :)

If Columbia can waste Escobar on a rooftop, America should at least be capable of doing the same to the Sacklers.

I say it every time, but Georg's turn from movie analyst to documentarian has been admirable. Great content all around, and much needed condemnation of the unscrupulous behavior of many rich families: modern day robber barons

Excellent series, Georg. My beef with all this is that chronic pain is a serious issue, and thanks to the opioid crisis, coupled with mass-murderer Harold Shipman and Dr David Kelly killing himself with dextropropoxyphene, palliative care in the UK is now a tangled mess with doctors terrified of being investigated and struck off for prescribing pain meds. So people like my disabled son now struggle to get the medicine he needs and has to be reviewed every 6 months despite being crippled for life.

Aside from morphine in terminal/extreme cases, I think Codeine's the strongest opiate prescribed in my country. Hospitals of course have fentanyl and all that, but it's nearly unheard of for your regular Joe Bloggs to be prescribed something as heavy duty as Oxycontin to go home and do what they will with. My heart absolutely breaks for the millions of families who haven't, and possibly will never, heal from the Sackler's malice and greed. Thank you Georg for taking the time to present this whole story is such an easily-digestible way.

It's depressing, but still, an hour of Georg, so I'll take it.

What an excellent conclusion to this series. I believe that everyone in America needs to see this video and demand reform so that this kind and level of crime cannot go unpunished like the Sacklers did.

Money: We broke the law Justice: Then we must act Money: **taps name tag** Justice: Oh! Money! Oh god I didn't realise it was you. How have you been man? Money: Getting by

"She expressed concern about how the criticism of the Sacklers was affecting her family. 'Lives of children are being destroyed,' she said." Apparently Jacqueline Sackler has no sense of irony or self awareness.

I recently graduated from law school. My take-away from this is that bribery is much more common than one would think. I'll be on the look-out for that. Even if we can't hold these people accountable, maybe we can stop the next similar attempt earlier.

This should be more widely shown to public. So they're punishment at least really should be shaming their name

Georg, I cannot even find the words to express how grateful I am that you and others like you exist in the world. Thank you for making these video editorials and essays.

I was addicted to opiates for 15 years. Started on Oxy, moved onto to fentanyl then cocaine. Finally had to use methadone for 5 years but tapered off. Let me save you the pain and money and the poor health: don't do drugs beyond weed.

I can't imagine how much work and research it took to put this three part series together. But thank you for it and I wish more people were listening.

Georg's slow transformation into a calm, polite Behind The Bastards is complete. (This is an enormous compliment).

The crazy thing is, most corporations have histories just as bad if not worse than the sacklers...

I watched Dopesick and was very impressed in the congruity between your documentary and the details they included in that series, but yours is quite a bit more enjoyable. You are very detailed and well spoken. Thank you for making these videos!

My mom was Raymond Sackler’s executive secretary in the late 70’s/early 80’s. He always treated her with respect. I don’t remember her mentioning Richard, but I do recall that she wasn’t as enthusiastic as she had been previously, and opted for early retirement.

A whole hour George. You spoil us.

These have been great. Cannot wait to watch the thrilling conclusion. Hopefully the good guys win!

Hell yeah, an hour of Georg, I'm down for that. Unfortunate but necessary topic.

I was punching my mattress throughout this whole series. Great job collecting and presenting all this info. Good luck over there in the states, it sure doesn't seem like a place for the unfortunate.

Georg, I have digitized your voice to give me directions off my phone. You cannot stop this..

I will say that since your pivot from film critic to documentary maker makes this video the crown jewel of all of your work. We really appreciate your reports on white collar crimes.

I took 10-20 milligrams per day for 10 days for severe back pain prior to surgery. After surgery, the pain was gone. The wound from the invasive surgery was nothing by comparison. So i immediately stopped taking it, while doctors advised i should maybe take it another 2 or 3 days, because i just had surgery going deep into the spine and grinding away some bone and stuff. I had one day and one night of terrible withdrawal symptoms. Now i consider even a broken bone or post surgery pain to be moderate pain and would refuse opiates for anything like that. It is insane that they prescribe this stuff for a bruised elbow or a broken toe.

Mother had a decade long benzodiazepines addiction, she understood her dependence and knew she will never come off it, she died in her late forties.

George, thank you for pulling all this together. It's an excellent and informative dive into the Oxy problem. I had heard some of this in previous reporting, but this really puts everything into context. I can only hope that the Sacker family and the corporate execs are justly punished for what they willfully perpetrated.

Just watched this entire series in one sitting. Very good content. Thank you so much for this

I never want to be on Georg's bad side. This is a brilliant indictment. Well done.

All three parts are exceptionally well done. The only thing missing are the music rights to put an Adam Curtis level soundtrack to it.

My goodness, that was grim. Makes you wonder, though, what other medical scandals are taking place...

One of the best channels on RU-vid. Love the production. Love the evolution. Love the atmosphere.

Thank you for this series 😌 As a recovered opiate addict, that began with an oc Rx. It's been informative.

This is my favorite thing to watch before going to bed. Despite the horrific yet fascinating subject matter, you are an amazing orator and I am now an expert in this crisis that is getting worse by the day. I am an addict myself, thankfully not for Oxy, but I speak to many survivors at my AA meetings.

Thank you for this series on the Sacklers. I learned a lot from this. A shame they can't get a taste of their own medicine, but then again, they can afford heroin as well.

I've lost a few friends and known many more who died as a direct results of Oxys, its truly tragic. Thanks for this in-depth series, Georg.

Nothing ever really changes, remember that before you trust a new product from one of these companies.

This has been an excellent series: great research, extremely well laid out, straightforward. It cuts to the nub of the matter. The work is must have taken is extraordinary even to contemplate. "All for the benefit of, and to protect the feelings of, the daughter of a drug lord." Says it all, really. Thank you, Georg. I think I, too, shall now find something to punch for a bit.

That was awesome! I watched Dopesick , and enjoyed it. I just got the book too. That’s how I found out about the Sackler’s. I want to read Empire of Pain, too. Then I found you. You have done a great job with your videos and this insane story! Thank you for your hard work. 😊

Gives you the chillz, enough horror material to make a survival psicological terror videogame.

What is so utterly horrifying about this is that all of all the people with control over whether the company continued or not - there's bound to be a large proportion of them with a conscience, who understood that what they were doing was wrong, causing deaths and misery, and yet they still went ahead with their decisions. Perhaps they were so far removed from the actual impact of the drug or so woven into the beaurocracy that they could easily say their actions were insignificant.

I've said it a billion times & gotten into many an argument online over this phrase: There are two sets of laws in the world. One for the super-rich & another set for you.

Yeah, I lived this shit. I was already a heroin addict when OC came along. It was bazaar watching heroine turn into a serious pill epidemic. And when they took the pills away, we collectively landed in the outstretched waiting hand of heroin. It was either that or land back on our feet and shit just doesn't work like that. Oh, and with minimal effort, you can defeat the "new" OP style. People did but at that point we all just said fuck it, bought a bag of dope and shot it in our veins. No middle man, no fucking with a pill that doesn't wanna be fucked with.

9 months later and this insightful, thorough piece of journalism still only has 60k views. I can only imagine RU-vid is suppressing it for thought crime

I live off I-95 (one if the main highways for the non east coast Americans,) in Florida, shit was wild through the 2000s and 2010s. Really it's never stopped, but it was really fucking crazy. I still have to dodge syringes around the building at work.

Great segments Georg, this case is probably going to the Supreme Court, but at least the Court of public opinion has detractors like this and the Books author. Keep it coming.

I'm disabled and chronically ill. I was born with a rare genetic disease that made me prone to accidents, and an accident as a young teen decided my future and made me disabled. Since then, I've suffered from debilitating chronic pain, to the point of being unable to speak or get out of bed without medication. I'm also, and that's very important to the point I want to make, not American. I was born in France, and have lived there all my life. I benefited from free healthcare and a system surrounding opioid that, from what I understand thanks to this series of video, is very different from the one in the US. In my country, morphine and all its derivatives are *last resort*. I am taking a derivative called Oxycodone and have been for a couple years, which is the only reason I can even have a semi-normal life. But before getting to that point, there are 10 years of different painkillers, physical therapy, experimental treatments and, in sheer desperation, all manners of alternative medecine that stand between the accident that crippled me and the 24-yo I am who lives with opioids. In France, these meds are so firmly regulated it makes them hard to access even for people like me who are recognised by the government as being disabled, suffering from chronic pain, and very much in their line of classification for who gets to take these meds. I'm very interested in knowing what the rules are in the US, if you're someone who takes these for the same reasons I am. 1. You need a doctor's prescription, but not just any prescription. Opioid prescriptions are written on a special pad of paper that have imprint paper underneath, which creates a copy of whatever the doctor writes. Each sheet has a unique barcode. The entire prescription must be written in cursive, spelled exclusively in letters (including the date, grams of each pill, so it takes a while to write. Something like "done on the twenty-second of January, two thousand and twenty-two" you get the idea). The idea being, it's much harder to sratch off ink and rewrite over the doctor's words if it's not numbers, but a long string of letters. For the same reason, the doctor needs to write down at the bottom of the sheet how many different pills you take, so that you can't just add another line of text after. Also, the prescription contains the exact name and address of the pharmacy where you get your meds so that you can't just go to another one and pretend you can get new pills, for the following reason: 2. You can't get a prescription for more than 28 days at a time. Precisely 28. So when you go to the pharmacy, no matter what your prescription says, if you went to another doctor to get it quicker than 28 days, etc. the pharmacy won't give you anything until the 28 days of the current prescription are over, which is why you need to always go to the same pharmacy, so they can check 3. The meds are kept in a literal safe in the pharmacy, with a code only the head pharmacian has, and when you come to get your meds, they input the barcode on your prescription sheet into the safe's system. Each box of meds has a unique barcode too, and they link your prescription's barcode to the med box's barcode. The reason is that if you decide to sell your meds on the black market or something, and they're seized by the police, they can just input the box's barcode and see who got the meds, what their prescription was, what pharmacy they got it from, etc. It prevents people from selling their meds. Same thing if you loose your meds and they turn up somewhere and you go to your pharmacy to get replacements, if they've been found it means you're telling the truth and they might give you replacement All these measures mean it's really fcking hard to fake a prescription and get pills, or to sell them off, or to even become addicted. Because even to get to the point where they prescribe you this, it means you've exhausted every other possibility. In my case, I was having severe reactions to ixprim and tramadol, which are other morphine derivative a bit less violent than oxycodone, and my body couldn't assimilate codeine. But at least in France, before you get to the stronger morphine derivative, they're going to make damn well sure there's nothing else you can take. And they're never going to give you true morphine. That's reserved for hospitals and people with terminal illnesses. I'm interested to talk if you also have a chronic illness or disability and take these things in the US, what the rules are. Because I have a feeling it's not as strict as we get it.

It is depressing, but it needs to be said. Thanks.

there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East…

Thx you for making this video. I've been an addict for 20 years because of these drugs. Every doctor I asked for help, starting when I asked to be wheened off my script and not just stopped suddenly, told me no, they don't do that. I've been to all types of clinics which destroyed my teeth and where I was just 1 of tens of thousands of people who they just strung along and then strung out. I've been to more funerals than weddings for Christ sake. What the Saklers did was evil incarnate. I'm a good person, I have a good work ethic, I've owned my home and business. I'm by not means at a lack for morals. But due to how the united states and many other cluntries treats drug addicts it makes it near impossible to get out of the system once your in it. The solution to drug addiction and the war on drugs is right in front of us. Dr. Corey Hart, who has tenure at Columbia University and has his degree in the field of understanding the effects of drugs on the brain. All that needs to happen is to legalize all drugs and spend the money usually spent on jail, police policies on drugs, and the medical industries money made from drug addiction, and spend it on education, therapy, and empathy for addicts. Legalization would be so profitable it could end crime as we know it. Fund betters lived for those in horrible situations, improve infrastructure, lower other expenses. It's right there with several police, judges, doctors, and politicians agreeing with it. But nothing ever gets done. Look at the loss of production every year. And the crazy thing Portugal proved this approach works. The very first modern police chief in the UK hundreds of years ago saw this problem then and famously said they would never be able to police their way out of what people put in their bodies. His words stay true today. But the exact opposite happens and is the purveyor of death, destruction, rampant crime, and corruption....

Georg you are doing such important wprk, wow, I wish you soon gain 1M subscribers and news articles start respectfully quoting your work! The world needs to know

I herniated 3 disks at the age of 22, in 2002. I was not a good candidate for surgery. I had to continue to work and look after my 71 year old father, who had fallen ill with cancer. It was just the two of us. Thus began 13 years of addiction hell. It cost me everything. I take full responsibility for my poor choices, I'm paying for them now. My child is paying for them now. Still, there's a part of me that wants to see the Sacklers rot in prison. If I must pay for my moral failings, so should they for theirs. I'm so sorry, son. I tried.

Fantastic reporting Georg. This is truly a masterpiece.

Cool video. I'm guessing we all know people who have been affected by the sacklers. I'm still dealing with being prescribed hardcore opiates for years and years. I had a bone infection which was due to an open fracture. Obviously this was causing pain, it took many doctors many years to identify and treat. But they were real quick with the pain killers. I now live without agony every day thank goodness, but I am still taking opiates because instead of treating the underlying cause of the pain, they just gave me fists full of chemical hug happy dream time pills. Oy gavelt... I had been on them so long that I get quite bad withdrawal symptoms, and have been slowly working my way down over the past year. It's a brutal process, and I must say, you abuse them because they're there. And I have never met a person who was regularly prescribed opiates who didn't abuse them at some stage. The only people I have met who did fine with opiates had small amounts with short term prescriptions after a surgery or something.

I used to have uterine tumors. No doctor would take it out cuz I don't have kids, and apparently imaginary, non-existent baby-waby takes precedence over my actual self and my life. But they were more than happy to give me hardcore painkillers instead. That was eleven years ago. I'm still struggling, still on a self-imposed taper. I'm down to just a sliver of what I used to take, but still not down enough to avoid severe withdrawal if I quit cold turkey. Hopefully I'll hit that point in just a few months.

This series has been fantastic. Thanks!

This channel is easily in the top 100, and probably in the top ten, of the best RU-vid creators. Watching this dude restores some faith in humanity. zaRDoz!!

thanks so much for all the hard work you do for these videos georg

Pain is not a disease. Pain is the body's way of protecting an injury from further damage by reminding you that the area already has damage, so you take care to not further damage it.

Fantastic series of videos, appreciate the hard work.

Well done Georg! Thanks for all your work bringing this to light.

Good work Georg!

Bravo to this little series, and your channel in general.

Finally, been waiting ages for #3 to drop. Cheers ..

Splendid stuff from you, as always! Love these documentaries that you make!

Well done Georg. I’ve been a fan of your work for some time, but this trilogy IMHO is your masterpiece so far. Thanks for putting on all that work to inform people like me (who knew very little) of the OxyContin crisis. I will share as widely as I can. 👍🏻

Essential viewing. Incredible series

Well done. Excellent work Georg

Thanks Georg! This has really given me the rage I needed to start my day

Superb work on this trilogy of videos.

I punch my pillow too Georg. 😂 I won't retype the comment RU-vid deleted, but I will say this. Why people think "trust the science" entails putting blind faith in these industries, is astonishing to me. Especially when safe and effective treatments get banned in Australia, primarily because they are generic and therefore unprofitable. Thanks for this series Georg, love your work ❤️

Manipulating people into becoming opiod addicts is worse than being a street heroin dealers. At least their buyers know the risks. This is insane.

I'll sum this up in three words: Greed destroys everything.

Georg, a superb series. This is prize-winning stuff. Keep it up.

You’ve done great work with this series

I watched all 3 of your videos about the Sacklers. Good work!

I've been looking forward to the sequel!

A very moving and brilliantly presented film. Thanks for making it. Looking forward to the next.

Fantastic work, this has been an epic series, well done.

Georg, you are a monster, great work mate!

Superbly well done. Horrific and tragically mesmerizing.

thanks Georg. you're the shizzle. this series has been exhausting but totally worth it. since 2018, i got into the american hillbilly folk music (the new stuff). the songs about drug related misery are just heartbreaking. i need to read that book.

Incredible work, sir.

I'm still too lazy to watch the Michael Keaton miniseries, glad Georg can sum this stuff up

Thanks for covering this topic and introducing us to the book.

Thank you for the great report. Well done.

This is a fantastic series of videos. Thanks for that.