 Good morning, beautiful friends, and welcome to a very unplanned episode. I'm not about to become a news channel, but I felt like this was very important to cover because it is happening right now here in my country of America. If it seems like I'm grinning like a kid in a candy store, I am, because I feel like this is so overdue and I'm so glad that it is finally happening. If you are a subscriber here, you know that I covered a topic relating to the opioid crisis a couple videos ago. I talked about the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma, and how they did really shady things that impacted the opioid crisis here and contributed to the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Rochester Drug Cooperative has done very, very shady things along the same lines, and its executives have had a direct hand in what it did. So for the first time in US history, they are facing criminal charges along with their company, which is very different from being sued, which is very different from civil charges, and the charges that they are facing are very serious. I'll talk about the company for two seconds, but then I want to focus on the people who are being charged in this as well. Rochester Drug Cooperative is being charged with defrauding the Drug Enforcement Agency and also failing to give, failing to provide information that was necessary. They have already agreed to a settlement paying many millions of dollars, I believe the number is 20, but let's talk about two of its ex-top executives, Lawrence Dowd and William Petroshevsky. They are also being criminally charged with similar charges. Lawrence Dowd, the former CEO, is in custody. Does anyone else watch John Oliver? And he always has like, he'll have like a big moment where he's like, we got him boys! And like, Betty will come down from the ceiling and everything like that. I feel like it's a moment like this where I'm like, we got him! He's in custody. I probably should not be so exuberant about this, but he personally directed and profited from what his company was doing, completely knowingly. Some of the charges that he is facing and he's expected in court later today, Tuesday, are conspiring to distribute fentanyl and oxy and conspiring to defraud the DEA. William Petroshevsky actually pled guilty to these charges on Friday and is cooperating. So what did they do that was so bad? Let's talk about Lawrence Dowd for instance. Rochester Drug Cooperative or RDC was required to report any kind of suspicious orders. Suspicious orders look like an order coming in from a pharmacy in all cash, customers traveling over state lines to fill prescriptions, large shifts in the order amounts from pharmacies. They were required to flag these and report them to the DEA. Jeff Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, came and spoke to the press about this today. RDC's internal compliance system flagged 8,300 orders from pharmacies as potentially suspicious. RDC reported just four suspicious orders to the DEA. Within their company they flagged 8,000 suspicious orders between 2013 and 2016. Now if I was a shady executive running a company or running a compliance division, I feel like 8,000 might be a little bit low because it's your own company checking these orders and saying whether they look suspicious or not, but 8,000 was the number that they found. Four of these were ever reported to the DEA. They were required to report all suspicious instances, but it was a very intentional direction not to report to keep selling to pharmacies that look suspicious to people that look suspicious. Also let's pause for just a second. Those graphics are fantastic. I know they had to like probably work them up really quickly, but I'm really glad for what they're doing. They are good at their job. Clipart is not their strong point. It's not my strong point either. Who am I to judge? I'm a terrible person. Moving on. Dowd was called the knight in shining armor for pharmacies that had been flagged and weren't allowed to sell prescription narcotics anymore because he would sell to them. Isn't that nice? From 2012 to 2016, their profits increased 800% from Oxy and 2,000% from fentanyl, and these were the years that the super very shady practices were in practice and that they were not reporting what they needed to report to the DEA. Dowd, Petroshevsky, and RDC consistently prioritized sales over compliance, and compliance is like such a boring word, I feel like, but when you think about what compliance actually means, when compliance means saying, hey, I think this pharmacy or this group might be selling drugs illegally when we're in the middle of an opioid crisis or epidemic and hundreds of thousands of people are dying, compliance suddenly sounds a little bit more important, which they were well aware of. The charges, I believe, span 2013-2017 when they shipped tens of millions of orders to places they should not have. I think this is a really important step forward because where companies have been made to pay money before, for instance, Purdue Pharma did pay a settlement for false advertising of Oxy as not as addictive as it was. I don't think money hurts enough when you're talking about the lives of so many people. I don't think just settling a case as an organization, as a company, is really satisfying, which is why I think it is really cool that people are individually being charged with heavy criminal charges this time, and hopefully something will come of it. I'm also going to link down below to articles that cover this topic and then we'll keep you more updated than I can. Like I said, don't worry, I'm not going to just start reporting a news to you all the time, but because I've covered this topic before and because I really care, like I really, really care about this, that it was important to talk about today because I think it's a really cool step forward. So that's what we did, let's cross our fingers that good things come of it and that more lives are saved in the future. Thank you for watching, guys, and spending a few minutes with me here today. I look forward to seeing you in my next video. I love you guys, I'm thinking about you, and I'll see you soon. Bye guys.