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To express the ambient feeling that “things are getting worse,” there exists, of course, a meme. It plots iterations of a chart, and on its x-axis floats the disembodied, smiling face of President Ronald Reagan. After his inauguration, watch the data veer up and off into oblivion: from health care spending, executive pay, and the size of the federal government, to the privatization of public services, social isolation, and economic inequality. The bottom line: Only half of babies born in 1980—today’s 44-year-olds—will make as much money as their parents did.

Surprisingly, publicists for the Sackler family—the owners of Purdue, which manufactures OxyContin, and, as the purported architects of the “opioid epidemic,” the epitome of contemporary capitalist villainy—presented a Reaganesque chart in a 2021 PR offensive called “Judge For Yourselves.” The project aimed to “correct falsehoods” and push back against a tidal wave of press that presented OxyContin as the epidemic’s singular culprit, Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler explain. Purdue, to be sure, did not literally present a chart with a smiling Reagan, but they might as well have.

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