Had that been the end of it, there would be good reason to doubt whether the “strong message” would be heeded. As the journalist Barry Meier pointed out, if the DOJ sent a strong message in its case against Purdue Pharma in 2007, why did drug distributors—beginning that same year—send enough pain pills to West Virginia over a five-year period to supply every man, woman, and child with 433 of them? Why did Purdue itself keep committing crimes for another eleven years, by its own admission? If the Justice Department sent a strong message in its prosecution of Cephalon for off-label promotion,
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