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The Benton County Budget Committee has recommended a $363 million spending plan for the 2021-23 budget cycle. The plan will be reviewed by the Benton County Board of Commissioners at its June 15 meeting, and commissioners can choose to amend it at that time. The budget is more than $50 million more than the 2019-21 two-year cycle, with federal funding and higher property tax revenue the key drivers, said Mary Otley, the county’s chief financial officer. Now to the fight against the coronavirus.This week, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve Pfizer's vaccine for 12 to 1...

The seal was “a phrase that gives rise to the opioid epidemic,” says Patrick Radden Keefe, a New Yorker journalist, author of the book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, in the HBO documentary The Crime of the Century, film-maker Alex Gibney’s expansive four-hour dive into morally bankrupt businesses which fueled the crisis. It was also a lie, one Purdue used as a catch-all shield to aggressively market OxyContin to doctors across the country as a safe prescription for chronic pain sufferers. Depositions from subsequent lawsuits revealed that Purdue Phar...

Discovering anything about the Sackler family, let alone the innermost workings of its privately owned companies, is not easy. The earliest investigations into OxyContin and the emerging overdose crisis did not mention the Sackler family by name at all. Even a front-page story in The New York Times, “Cancer Painkillers Pose New Abuse Threat,” did not use the Sackler family name. This gets to a paradox at the heart of their story. The Sacklers donated lavishly to art museums and galleries, insisting in return that the family name be plastered prominently on the walls of institu...

The war on drugs in the United States has been a failure that has ruined lives, filled prisons and cost a fortune. It started during the Nixon administration with the idea that, because drugs are bad for people, they should be difficult to obtain. As a result, it became a war on supply. As first lady during the crack epidemic, Nancy Reagan tried to change this approach in the 1980s. But her “Just Say No” campaign to reduce demand received limited support. Over the objections of the supply-focused bureaucracy, she told a United Nations audience on Oct. 25, 1988: “If we cannot stem the ...

In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe methodically and meticulously chronicles this tale of woe and crisis, indifference and corruption. His Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty lays bare the price exacted by the family’s drive for wealth and social mountaineering. The Sackler name came to dot the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, Tate Modern and the Louvre. They rose – others paid dearly. Keefe is a veteran writer at the New Yorker. His 2019 bestseller, Say Nothing, chillingly examined the convergence of youth, zealotry and destruction in Northern Ireland. He even solved th...