The Dark Side of America’s Gleaming Skyscrapers
“Gruesome stories such as these are hardly unique to New York City. In October 2019, a building that was to be a new Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans collapsed while under construction, killing three workers and injuring dozens more. Two of the bodies were so thoroughly trapped inside the unstable wreckage that officials initially deemed them impossible to retrieve. A tarp was strung up to shield the bodies from view. Months later, high winds loosened the makeshift shroud, revealing to passersby on the streets of the French Quarter the decaying cadaver of one of the two men still entombed in the site. The bodies were finally retrieved in August, 10 months after the collapse.”
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The Opioid that Made a Fortune for Its Maker — and for Its Prescribers
"Selling drugs is a relationship business. It’s best to do it in person. That is why, on a summer evening in 2012, Alec Burlakoff was out for dinner with Steven Chun, the owner of Sarasota Pain Associates. Burlakoff was a sales manager for Insys Therapeutics, an Arizona-based pharmaceutical company with only one branded product, a new and highly potent opioid painkiller called Subsys. Chun was a doctor who prescribed a lot of opioids."
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The Family That Built an Empire of Pain
"Since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. Many addicts, finding prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five people who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers. The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that a hundred and forty-five Americans now die every day from opioid overdoses."
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