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Updates:
- Hosts Read Poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti Who Turned 100.
- Michael Smith Talks About New Book Lawyers For The Left: In the Courts, In the Streets And On the Air.
Attorney Chesa Boudin: Prison and Cash Bail Reform
Recently we have seen people who are progressives run for the office of prosecutor in cities across the country. This is an office which many people associate with police departments with whom they closely work. The new crop of reform minded prosecutors are saying that the criminal justice system is broken, that it is costly, classist, and racist. They say it is ineffective in keeping people safe and that 2/3 of the people convicted wind up back in prison in a few years.
Guest – Attorney Chesa Boudin who is currently an Assistant Public Defender in San Francisco. He is running for the office of district attorney in that city. The ideas for reform in the criminal justice system that he has put forward in his campaign are receiving wide attention and considerable support. Boudin was instrumental in getting the discriminatory practice of cash bail eliminated in San Francisco.
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OxyContin Epidemic And the Sackler Family
In March, the maker of OxyContin and the family that owns the company, reached a $270 million settlement with the state of Oklahoma over the painkiller’s role in the nation’s opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma is based in Stamford, CT and is controlled by the Sackler Family.
The money will go toward creating a National Center for Addiction Studies and Treatment at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa. The deal comes two months before Oklahoma’s lawsuit against Purdue and other pharmaceuticals blamed for the crisis was set to go to trial.
Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin more than two decades ago, marketing the highly addictive drug aggressively to physicians. It has made billions of dollars from the drug but faces approximately 2,000 lawsuits from state and local governments trying to hold the company responsible for deadly epidemic.
The Centers for Disease Control reports the prescription opioids like OxyContin were a factor in a record 48,000 deaths across the U.S. in 2017.
Purdue Pharma has settled other lawsuits over the years, and three executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2007. But this is the first settlement to come out of the current coast-to-coast wave of litigation that focuses on the company’s more recent conduct and threatens to drive it to bankruptcy.
Guest – Liz Whyte, an award-winning reporter for the investigation news organization the Center for Public Integrity. Politics of Pain Report. She is a reporter for the Consider the Source state politics team, where her investigative work has won awards from the National Press Club, Editor & Publisher, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the New York Press Club and local chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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