Connecting Central Appalachia to Los Angeles and Beyond

Harlan, Kentucky

Several important court and legal cases have been on mind for the last week or so. You may or may not have the heard of them, and you may or not agree with me that these cases are potentially related to one another.

I have been thinking much about the $83 million opioid settlement reached between the State of West Virginia and Walgreens. You can read about it here. As the article says, "The settlement resolves a lawsuit that alleged many pharmacy chains failed to maintain effective controls as a distributor and dispenser that contributed to oversupply of opioids in the state." West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey office claims to have won over more than $950 million in opioid litigation. Next on the chopping block is The Kroger Company and its pharmacies as they likely did not monitor their sales of opioids and sound any alarms so long as they were making profits from misery and substance abuse.

If you ask me, Kroger is making a big mistake by not trying to avoid the courts. Walmart, CVS and Rite Aid have reached settlements with the state totaling about $175 million since last August. CVS, Walgreens and Walmart have agreed to pay $10 billion in order settle similar lawsuits with state and local governments and Native American tribes elsewhere in the United States. Kroger looks like a vulnerable bad neighbor right now.

It's hard to keep the settlements and the court cases straight. The settlement that has gotten the most coverage was the one that included the OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. The family has to pay something like $6 billion and. Their company is supposed to be taken over by another company that will put its profits into combating the opioid crises. None of this would have happened had there not been activists on the ground forcing action against the Sacklers. There are also the lesser-known settlements involving Johnson & Johnson, Amerisource Bergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson and twelve states that put $26 billion in corporate money into state hands and obligate these companies to put some safeguards in place regarding opioid distribution. Some counties in Ohio won $650 million from Walgreens, CVS and Walmart over additional opioid-related claims.

These billions of dollars are spare change when you balance it out over the companies that have to pay and consider the damage done and the callous attitudes and the corruption that brought all this to pass in the first place. This all sounds like lots of money, but remember that West Virginia led the nation in overdose deaths per 100,000 people, with 81.4 per 100,000 people just three years ago. Kentucky ran a distant second, with a death rate of 49.2 per 100,000 people. Heck, more than 564,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2020.

But it doesn't stop there. The Sackler family will not acknowledge that what they did was wrong, and they have no legal obligation to do so. Walgreens gets to pay their $83 million over an eight-year period, staggering their costs. The company contributed to an “oversupply” of prescription opioids in West Virginia and across Central Appalachia. At some point, either by accident or lack of oversight or callous disregard for human life, the drugs were being diverted for street and holler use. State medical, treatment, adjudication and imprisonment and costs hit hard. Communities were divided, families suffered, and people died. We are living with synthetic opioids like fentanyl poisoning our communities. I heard in church yesterday that dozens of houseless people in my community have died from overdoses since the beginning of the year. I often wonder why the companies involved and the Sackler family and the investors and salesmen and the bought-off "researchers" and doctors who front for these companies are not being prosecuted for running multi-state criminal rings and conspiracies. Once their payments are made the companies will try to walk away from the great damage they have done. In the meantime, they are positioning themselves as caring community partners who want what is best for us and are cutting jobs and raising prices.

The other legal case that is weighing heavily on my spirit is the City National Bank-Los Angeles County redlining case. Here the Department of Justice found that the bank engaged in discriminatory practices by refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominately Latino and Black communities between 2017 and 2020. These practices discouraged or prohibited home ownership and undermined community stability. A sort of "banking desert" was created in the Latino and Black communities as well. These communities were underserved, disregarded, ripped-off, and destabilized. City National will have to pay over $31 million dollars. The bank will create a $29.5 million fund to subsidize loans to Black and Latino borrowers. City National will also spend $1.75 million on advertising, community outreach and financial education programs in Black and Brown communities. The bank is not admitting fault or guilt but is giving in nonetheless. The settlement only covers what the Department of Justice could prove took place between 2017 and 2020. Mr. Mark Alston did an excellent interview with National Public Radio on the issues involved in the settlement.

Redlining and housing discrimination are not news in Los Angeles. City National Bank is just one institution of many that have engaged in these outrageous practices and profited from them, and this way of doing business goes back many generations. Richard Rothstein can give you an eight-minute lesson on how discrimination in lending has been linked not only to residential segregation and the deterioration of communities but to environmental disasters as well. A report by Ailsa Chang, Christopher Intagliata, and Jonaki Mehta will explain this to you in the most engaging ways possible. But whatever the history and tricks involved, systemic oppression and discrimination draw much of their power from the ability of elites to discourage, disappoint, divide, frustrate, and rip people off over time. Patterns arise and poverty and trauma are passed on from one generation to the next unless a healing and activist social movement arises and can counteract some of the damage done. The Department of Justice settlement is huge by their standards, but it cannot, by itself, reverse the traumas associated with discrimination and oppression. 

And that brings me back to my point that these cases, the ones from Central Appalachia and the most recent housing discrimination case from Los Angeles, are potentially related to one another. How so? Notice the patterns of corporate greed and the assumption that corporations will rip us off, even to the point of causing deaths, and they will continue to do so until they are caught. They arrived to where they are with an Us vs. Them way of thinking. They will fight having to pay for the damage done or will lowball the costs of that damage and will fight having to accept legal responsibility for their actions if they are caught. Racism figures mightily into their thinking, but they also see great opportunities for profits where large companies and industries have shut down and where people are desperate and where part of the population can convinced to support get-tough-law-and-order barbaric policies and take employment in law enforcement and the prison industrial complex. The Us vs. Them becomes Them vs. Them.

Something else ties what happens in Los Angeles to what happens in Central Appalachia and the so-called "Rust Belt." Mark Alston, mentioned above, has much that is helpful to say about housing discrimination in Los Angeles. He makes a good point that the money is too little and comes too late for many and that whatever advancements are made from this point depends much on who is designing and administering the next steps, but that the settlement may do some good. The Biden administration has done the right thing by prioritizing stopping and punishing redlining. But at the local and grassroots levels the settlements mentioned above will hit particular walls besides what Mr. Alston and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey talk about.

Houselessness in Los Angeles and the conditions that are creating it and enabling it are swamping the region. Attorney General Morrisey has said that the money won in the West Virginia settlements will “provide help to those affected the most by this crisis in West Virginia,” but syringe laws and the state laws covering how naloxone is administered and paraphernalia laws and licensure requirements for harm reduction programs---all of them based on a fear-driven law-and-order worldview and the rejection of the idea that substance abuse is a disease or disorder---really limits the reach and the effectiveness of anti-drug and lifesaving efforts. In both L.A. and Central Appalachia, the money is there for companies or non-profits or state or local governments to administer programs, but the money is not there to empower people and give them the means of determining their own needs and destinies.

Now, imagine if a national peoples' movement came together and took on Big Pharma, the real estate industry, the banks, and all of the destructive and oppressive forces that destroy our communities and divide us. Imagine if people in Central Appalachia and L.A. and elsewhere were working from the same playbook and could see themselves and one another as leaders and if we operated from a point of solidarity with one another. If the small harm reduction efforts in West Virginia, the volunteer activists who pushed the Sacklers to the walls, and the leading poor and working-class Brown and Black activists in L.A. could win the kind of ground that they have then even stronger regional and national movements can win more, and they can win even more by being in solidarity with one another. 

 Los Angeles