WHY I AM SUING PURDUE PHARMA FOR 10 TRILLION DOLLARS

And Why I Don't Really Want "Their" Money

A couple of months ago I got a legal notice from Prime Clerk LLC “In re: Purdue Pharma L.O., et al.”

This notice requested those with claims against Purdue Pharma (who I think of, and often refer to, as Perdition Pharma) to state the settlement amount they feel is due them as a result of damage they have suffered as a result of actions and inactions by that pharmaceutical giant, the makers and promoters and pushers of their flavor of Oxycodone, which they call Oxycontin.

Oxycontin has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

One of them was my son, Kelvin Caleb Mordecai Shannon, shown below.

Kelvin died at the age of 28 on March 17th, 2012, in New Berlin, Wisconsin. A moderate amount of Oxycontin coupled with a moderate amount of alcohol culminated in his death.

There is a lot of blame to go around for Kelvin’s death. He is partially to blame himself, it’s true. After all, nobody forced him into simultaneously ingesting those substances, right?

Nevertheless, I place a large portion of the blame on Purdue Pharma. They knew how addictive their drug was, and still aggressively promoted a widespread adoption of its usage without doing anything to address the problems it was causing. In fact, Purdue Pharma deliberately took steps to ensure that their product was as addictive as possible. I’m not going to write a 50-page treatise here. One reason for that is because a good-sized body of exposés against this company and its heartless and heedless practices has already been written. By way of example, early this year Gerald Posner’s book Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America was published.

A little over a year ago there was Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy, which has become a National bestseller.

Before that there was Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier, which is an update of his 2003 book of the same title (albeit with a different subtitle).

There are others, too, such as National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones (2016), and Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic by Eric Eyre, which was published on March 31, 2020, on the 8th anniversary of Kelvin's funeral.

And those are just the first half-dozen you will find on amazon when you search the Books category for “oxycontin purdue pharma.” So it is plain that investigative journalists have been exposing Purdue Pharma and their highly irresponsible – to say the least – promotion and pushing of their powerfully addictive and deadly drug, Oxycontin.

2003. Did you notice that was when the first edition of Barry Meier’s scathing book “Pain Killer” came out? Almost a score of years ago! Almost two decades have gone by since Mr. Meier’s outrage over the unconscionable and indefensible predatory practices of these inhuman fiends, which caused him to raise a clamor and a call to action against them! Why were so many years and lives wasted before action against this manufacturer of mayhem and pitiless purveyor of pain and death and heartbreak was finally taken?

It seems that Purdue Pharma has finally – finally! - been reined in, now, after amassing tens of billions of dollars of illicit profits and being culpable for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And the deaths of those hundreds of thousands is just the easily quantifiable part of the damage done. Who can estimate the degree and amount of anguish and extreme agony of the millions of so-called “survivors” – the parents and grandparents, spouses, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and close friends of those who have died as a result of the rabid greed and fierce carelessness of this corporation.

UPDATE: There is another story that came out November 24, 2020 about Purdue’s legal problems, which contains the following:

Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty Tuesday to three criminal charges, formally admitting its role in an opioid epidemic that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past two decades.

In a virtual hearing with a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, the OxyContin maker admitted impeding the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's efforts to combat the addiction crisis. Purdue acknowledged that it had not maintained an effective program to prevent prescription drugs from being diverted to the black market, even though it had told the DEA it did have such a program, and that it provided misleading information to the agency as a way to boost company manufacturing quotas.

It also admitted paying doctors through a speakers program to induce them to write more prescriptions for its painkillers.

For the rest of the article, click here.

So, back to the implied question raised in the title of this piece: Why am I suing Purdue Pharma for 10 Trillion dollars?

That is the amount I submitted on answering the legal firm’s question as to what I calculated my monetary claim against Purdue Pharma should rightly be. A few things are self-evident (or should be), namely:

1) I am aware that I will never get 10 trillion dollars from Purdue Pharma. After all, they were only fined 8 billion dollars. And they are filing for bankruptcy, so they will probably find a way to weasel their way out of even paying that amount.

2) Even if I did receive 10 trillion dollars, that wouldn’t bring Kelvin back to me – so what good would it do me, really?

Therefore, since I know I will not be receiving 10 trillion dollars – or anything remotely close to that figure – why did I ask for that amount?

Answer: To send a message. I deliberately made my claim an outrageously excessive amount, more than even those deep-pockets greedy-guts shysters have, similar to the outrageously excessive amount of anguish and agony I and my family, and hundreds of thousands of other families, have had to experience as a result of their immoral -- or at best amoral -- course of action, and inaction; their sins of commission as well as their sins of omission.

Even if I were to receive a large amount of money from Purdue Pharma at some point, what I would want to do is this:

Rip it to bits before their eyes and throw it in their faces. I don’t want their money. There is no amount of money that they could give me that could compensate for what they have taken away-- from me, from us (my family), and from so many others. I refuse to negotiate with terrorists, and that’s what they are. I consider them to be mass murderers. Over the top? Strident? Extreme? “Oh, no, they’re only mass manslaughterers,” their apologists might say. But ... What I have written, I have written.

Purdue Pharma is not simply guilty of willful ignorance and negligence. Hundreds of times more people have been killed by Oxycontin than those who died from the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and they knew how to solve the problem, or at least alleviate the problem. They consciously and very deliberately chose not to.

Although I don’t want “their” money myself, neither do I want them to be able to retain their ill-gotten gains. So I do want them to (literally) pay. Here’s what I would really do, were I to receive a sizable “settlement”:

Donate the money to whichever organizations are doing the most to not only alleviate the suffering of the victims (those addicted who are still living) but also compensate families of those who lost loved ones and are also negatively impacted financially. Especially, though, would I favor donating money to groups and organizations who are working at ways to prevent such an immense tragedy from ever happening again.

Money has power. That’s all that corporations like Purdue Pharma understand, or care about: Money. $$$$$. They’ve got money in their eyes, and money in their hearts. They killed people for profit. They knew they were doing it. It didn’t bother them a bit, as long as the revenue kept flowing in. So that’s how to hurt them: To “hit them where they live” – divest them of as much of their pirated booty as is legally possible.

Hoyt Axton’s mother co-wrote “Heartbreak Hotel,” a song made famous by Elvis Presley. Hoyt himself later wrote several well-known songs, including “Joy to the World,” which was a big hit for the band Three Dog Night. Axton also penned, in 1968, a song he entitled “The Pusher,” which was covered later by Steppenwolf (and others). Among the lyrics of that song are the following:

But the pusher don’t care, ah

if you live or if you die

. . .

Ah but the pusher is a monster

good god he’s not a natural man

The dealer, for a nickel lord

he’ll sell you lots of sweet dreams

Ah but the pusher’ll ruin your body

. . .

Well lord if I were the president

of this land you know I’d declare

total war on the pusherman

I’d cut him if he stands and

I shoot him if he’d run and

I’d kill him with my bible

and my razor and my gun

god damn aww the pusher.

god damn ... the pusher.

I said god damn, god damn the pusherman!

Strong words, yes. “To damn” means to vigorously condemn to punishment. Purdue Pharma, “Perdition Pharma,” or “Pusher Pharma” -- however you want to think of them or refer to them -- certainly deserves whatever damning they get, from any corner of the universe.

My son Kelvin has been described as “a beautiful man.” It was also said of him by many that “he didn’t have a mean bone in his body.” Perhaps you perceive that the same cannot be said about me.

VENOMOUS VIPER OIL (Hail to the Evening Star of Poughkeepsie)

These snake oil salesmen of the pharma profit-at-all-costs-to-others industrial complex are nothing new. In its November 4, 1905 issue, Collier's magazine printed "Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against the Freedom of the Press" by Samuel Hopkins Adams (part of his "Great American Fraud" series). It can be read here.

You can listen to a recording of this article at:

Is it going too far to say that Purdue Pharma are mass murderers/serial killers? Before you scoff at that notion and dismiss it, watch the Netflix series The Pharmacist here. One of the things that the show reveals is that Purdue Pharma has gone into the addiction treatment business, thereby tacitly admitting that their product has resulted in large-scale addiction problems. What unmitigated gall, temerity, and audacity (not to mention insatiable greed) they have! That would be like Exxon parading forth their expertise at oil spill cleanup and charging the residents of Valdez top dollar to come in and clean up the oil spill that they themselves caused!

The wickedness of Purdue Pharma is borderline unbelievable. I only have three words to say to them, and they are not “I love you.”

Clay Shannon is also the proud father of Kelvin’s “little” brother, Morgan Tell Mackenzie Shannon