For more than a year, Drain had presided over the case, and periodically, he would pay lip service to the many victims of the opioid crisis, who existed somewhere outside the courtroom, like an abstraction. But now, when they broke into the proceedings asking to be heard, and he was confronted with the actual human beings whose suffering he had so frequently and casually invoked, he seemed unsettled, and eager to retreat back into the comforting obfuscations of the law.
