John Oliver Creates Anti-Opioid Site to Blast Purdue Pharma President for Fueling the Opioid Crisis
John Oliver has dedicated another segment to the opioid crisis — blasting Purdue Pharma president Richard Sackler for his role in the epidemic.
“We want to focus on just one company tonight, Purdue Pharma, whose rollout of OxyContin arguably fueled the opioid crisis,” Oliver said on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, referring to the company’s part in boosting the nation’s Oxycodone addiction.
While Oliver has covered the topic before, the host addressed it again as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were more than 93,000 deaths from drug overdoses last year. The number has jumped from the 2,151 deaths recorded in 2019.
“In recent years, both the company and the family have found themselves being investigated by the DoJ and facing thousands of lawsuits filed by state and local governments, Native American tribes, hospitals, and individuals,” said Oliver. “And they’ve spent years working with an army of lawyers attempting to negotiate their way out of all of it.
The host went on to note that while Purdue Pharma pled guilty to three felony charges in November 2020, and agreed to pay a $8 million fine, the company also filed for bankruptcy in 2019 and reached a settlement allowing them to pay $4.5 billion in exchange for immunity from any future legal issues regarding their role in the crisis.
Oliver explained that while the Sackler family has given up all ownerhsip over Purdue, the bulk of their wealth remains untouched — also revealing that $11 billion was transferred from the company to the family from 2008 to about 2018.
The Sackler family even launched a the website Judgeforyourselves.info to protect their image amid all the legal issues and negative press.
Oliver noticed, however, that, “Despite spending millions of dollars in creating a website filled with legal propaganda, they still somehow couldn’t scrape up the $2,500 required to buy the .com for it.”
“I happen to know exactly how much it costs it because that is how much we spent to buy it,” Oliver added, sharing his new site Judgeforyourselves.com, which he made hoping to redirect those looking for the Sackler site.
“I know that it does absolutely nothing to even the scales here, but it does give me the tiniest bit of comfort to imagine it might irritate the Sacklers a bit to know when people go to that site, this is what they’re going to see,” he said. “All of this will be up as long as we own the domain, and this is at least something the Sacklers cannot throw their dirty at and make it go away.”
Oliver also enlisted actor Richard Kind to, once again, roast the Purdue Pharma owner by throwing on a suit and claiming to be “the real Richard Sackler.”
“Welcome to the premier source of information on the Sackler family that you can find on the internet,” he said. “It’s called judgeforyourself.com, but you’ve got to get the .com! What kind of fucking idiot would set up an important website and not buy the .com? I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Anyway, if you want the truth, you’ve come to the right place,” he continued. “So poke around, get a sense of what my terrible family has done.”
Watch above, via YouTube.
