The author was clearly sweet-talked by the company lawyers and PR people. It's so pandering in places it's embarrassing. If a company manufacturing amphetamine is discovered to have been keeping two sets of books I'd want them investigated pretty vigorously, especially considering the ongoing human hellscape of the opioid epidemic.
You can keep operations going while still investigating the company. Imagine if Marathon Oil was discovered to be smuggling crude oil from Russia into their refineries and splitting the difference with Putin so Russia could bypass international sanctions, and an agency completely shut down Galveston Bay and Garyville (the two largest oil refineries in the US) in response - as soon as the news hit, prices for gasoline, propane, LNG, new plastics, etc. would go through the roof and runs on gas stations would begin. The public outrage would be swift and Congress would force whoever shut them down to let them resume operations while the case was underway.
There's no such sympathy for people unable to function without their meds, sadly.
This. And this is tempered response is generally considered a mark of a good journalist. Someone who sees the whole picture. I can't call the journalist here (James D. Walsh) a good journalist though, because I personally don't know the track record. What's hard is that it is difficult to distinguish these two concepts of pandering or tempering. A track record is really all there is.
There's never a smoking gun. And this should be the big takeaway for a lot of people: if you're looking for smoking guns you'll find them everywhere. But if you're looking for killers, they hide in the shadows. Sure, there are some where you do clearly see them standing over the body in clear daylight with the smoking gun in hand and the dead still warm. But that is far more rare. The best way for these people to hide in the shadows is to make it difficult to distinguish good and bad. To create the shadows and fog. The reason this is often easy is because the good and right actions are nuanced and considerate of complexity.
Like truth and lies, truth has a lower bound in complexity but lies do not, they can be infinitely simple. We humans love simplicity and that's what they exploit. It's unfortunate but if everything was half as simple as we pretend they are, we wouldn't have 90% of the problems that exist in the world. We live in a complex world and humans have been solving problems for thousands of years, it's pretty reasonable that the vast majority of simple issues have been solved. So if you want truth, be wary of simplicity.
adderall use is pretty widespread in the media industry, a lot of journalists seem to think it's great stuff and find the shortage annoying. i think there's likely some natural sympathy here too.
> i think there's likely some natural sympathy here too.
If you take a look at the comments on this thread I think you'll see there's also a whole group of people who don't use the medication but have quite strong feelings about whether or not it should be used, why it's used, whether or not life is fair because people use it, etc.
Wouldn't be much of a stretch to infer that the author could also be in that camp.
No one said anything about keeping two sets of books. The issue is some stupid DEA form. And I don't think the DEA should even exist. So I am 100% on the company's side.
