“The dividends may go slightly down, but nobody cares because nobody who made the product goes to jail. If the government were serious, they’d put people in jail, and [others would be] fearful,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Bassford, who would spend most of the next decade prosecuting heroin dealers as a direct consequence of the OxyContin epidemic, down the hall from the office where Brownlee worked. “But you can’t put a corporation in jail; you just take their money, and it’s not really their money anyway. “The corporation feels no pain.”
