What’s driving Phil Weiser’s quest for justice

Some of us have a special radar for detecting injustice, and that radar is usually accompanied by a burning need to eradicate that injustice as soon as humanly possible.

Phil Weiser has that radar, and right now it is being trained full force on the opioid crisis in Colorado.

“This is a crisis that has shaken our community here in Colorado,” he said during a recent meeting at the Gazette.

The attorney general told us that one Coloradan dies of an opioid overdose every 17 hours.

In Alamosa county, 90% of prisoners in the jail are opioid users.

Across the state, we saw a 100% increase in the number of opioid prescriptions between 1999 and 2016, he said.

And during that time, the number of overdoses went up drastically: over 200 percent from 1999 to 2014.

“We have the need for more treatment, a need for more recovery programs, a need for more prevention and education,” Weisner said with urgency in his voice.

I wondered, while listening to Weisner, what inspired his fervor to right this particular wrong, and to right wrongs in general. Many of us are outraged when we see things we think are unfair or unjust, but Weisner is one of those people who became a lawyer, and an attorney general, so he could do something about them.

Listening to a speech of his to Air Force Academy cadets, I think I learned the answer.

He spoke a little of his family history

during that speech. His mother was born April 13, 1945, in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

That makes her one of the youngest Holocaust survivors in the world.

“We all have our stories,” he said. “My story is one of resilience.”

“Growing up, I would ask my grandmother, who I called ‘Bubby,’ how she could believe in a positive future when she confronted such a horrific experience. She answered simply, ‘It is easier to believe.’ That message resonates today and inspires my service to Colorado as our Attorney General.”

When Bubby found out in that concentration camp that she was pregnant, she felt a blaze of hope in that bleakest of settings.

“She was perpetually hungry and was weakened from typhus that killed many of her fellow inmates that spring,” Weisner said. “But she had a powerful wish to live. Even as my grandmother felt fearful, hungry, and tired, she was hopeful. Through the camp grapevine, she sent a message to my father, ‘You have reason to live.’”

Shortly after that, on a bleak, freezing January morning in 1945, during roll call, 6,000 women were forced to stand in the cold, wearing scratchy, striped cotton uniforms, as a communal punishment for news of women in the camp being pregnant, Weisner recounted.

“To relieve the communal shivering and tension, my grandmother was the first person to step forward and reveal her pregnancy,” he said. “The guard yelled, “You are out on the next transport.”

As luck would have it, though, there were no more transports that day, and before she could be put on another one, the camp was liberated by American soldiers. Weisner is only alive today because those soldiers arrived in time.

“I, and my family, are here today because of the compassion of the U.S. in welcoming refugees to enter this great land,” he told the cadets, “because of the bravery and service of your predecessors in uniform who liberated Europe; because of good people ... who saw wrong and defied it; and — above all — because of the positivity and resilience of my grandmother.”

“We can all draw important lessons from stories of survival from the Holocaust—lessons of where hate and demonization of others can take us,” Weisner added.

I’ve often wondered how such a civilized country as Germany could allow such evil as Hitler and the Holocaust to fester and spread in their midst. How could they not see right from wrong?

I think Weisner probably draws a parallel to the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical companies of our own country and how their actions led to the opioid epidemic. I imagine he sees a new kind of holocaust for our times in the 841,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. since 1999, a death rate that has quadrupled in the last 12 years.

How could these pharmaceutical execs not see the damage they were doing? How could these educated, civilized people not see right from wrong?

“This crisis was largely manufactured in the board room,” Weisner said. “Seventy-eight percent of the people who use heroin started with prescription pills.”

Earlier this year, Weiser and a coalition of attorneys general from 47 states won a $573 million settlement from one of the world’s largest consulting firms, McKinsey & Company, Inc., to resolve investigations into the company’s role in working for opioid companies, helping those companies promote their drugs, and profiting from the opioid epidemic.

“McKinsey contributed to the opioid crisis by promoting marketing schemes and consulting services to opioid manufacturers, including OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, for over a decade,” Weisner said after the settlement. “The complaint, filed with the settlement, details how McKinsey advised Purdue on how to maximize profits from its opioid products, including targeting high-volume opioid prescribers, using specific messaging to get physicians to prescribe more OxyContin to more patients, and circumventing pharmacy restrictions in order to deliver highdose prescriptions.”

To kill people in other words. “McKinsey turbocharged the distribution of opioids,” Weisner told me. “The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma all deliberately knew or were willfully blind towards the clear fact that opioids were highly addictive, and that when people became addicted, it railroaded their lives.”

Like his grandmother, however, Weisner keeps his eye on hope in the darkest of circumstances.

“These settlements against the perpetrators of this crisis are going to provide money that will provide a once in a generation opportunity for us to catalyze more treatment, recovery, education, prevention,” he said.

He’s counting on cities throughout Colorado to spend the state‘s share of that money wisely enough to bring an end to this current epidemic.

Weidner asks us all to remember “the bonds of Americans that unite us in a commitment to justice, fairness, and liberty for all.”

So how did someone in those boardrooms not stop this epidemic from happening in the first place? I think the answer is simply that they didn’t have as finely tuned sense of right and wrong as they should have. Their moral compasses were out of true.

Thankfully we have people like Phil Weisner who, through their own proximity to unimaginable suffering and pain, have that innate radar for injustice in spades.