Earlier this week, a Hudson Falls man pleaded guilty to selling a drug used by opioid addicts. He is expected to serve two years in state prison.

I doubt anyone feels sorry for him.

I doubt anyone wants to know his story about how he got into the drug trade and why.

I suspect that most people who read about his sentencing were inclined to the “good riddance” line of thinking.

But I couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with Richard Sackler and his family.

Here’s how the English newspaper The Guardian described the family earlier this year:

“The Sackler family, a sprawling and now feuding transatlantic dynasty, is famous in cultural and academic circles for decades of generous philanthropy towards some of the world’s leading institutions, from Yale University to the Guggenheim Museum in the U.S. and the Serpentine Gallery to the Royal Academy in Britain.”

They are the beautiful people.

They run with the rich and famous.

Forbes says their company, Purdue Pharma, is worth $13 billion, most of it from selling the opioid OxyContin.

They are drug pushers.

If you think that is harsh, that is the gist of a couple thousand lawsuits filed by municipalities and states across the country. Consider that for a second — 2,000 lawsuits. Purdue Pharma is the poster child for how corporate greed can supersede public health responsibility.

While I doubt Richard Sackler ever peddled his wares on a street corner, he is accused of knowing that the pills were far more addictive than originally believed and marketing them in stronger doses to collect higher profits.

Sackler was a key player in the development and marketing of OxyContin for Purdue Pharma in the 1990s.

The New York Times reported a confidential Justice Department report found that Sackler was told in 1999, when he was president of Purdue Pharma, that drug abusers were crushing and snorting the drug and stealing the pills from pharmacies, and doctors were being charged with selling prescriptions.

Other corporate executives knew as well, but did nothing.

Purdue Pharma eventually pled guilty to a felony charge of “misbranding” OxyContin in 2007, and the Justice Department recommended three executives be indicted on felony charges.

They were going to be held accountable. They were going to see the inside of a prison cell. But that didn’t happen.

It has been reported that officials within George W. Bush’s administration weighed in with the Justice Department, and each of the Purdue Pharma executives pled guilty to a misdemeanor “misbranding” charge and the company and executives paid a combined $634.5 million in fines.

Then, they went back to doing exactly what they had been doing.

Nothing changed.

The opioid epidemic continued and deaths are estimated at 300,000 and counting since Richard Sackler first heard about the street demand for his product from drug addicts.

Over the past two years, states and communities around the country have been signing on to lawsuits to hold Purdue Pharma accountable, including Warren County.

This past week, the Sackler family agreed to relinquish ownership of Purdue Pharma — valued at $10 billion — to settle with 24 state attorneys general while also including $3 billion in cash and future revenues from OxyContin to help communities hit hardest by the drug problem.

On Sunday night, the company also declared bankruptcy. One of the states not to settle was New York. The New York attorney general’s office said it had tracked about $1 billion in wire transfers by the Sackler family, including some through Swiss bank accounts, and believed the Sackler family was hiding an undetermined share of their assets.

But what I find more disconcerting is that, unlike the man from Hudson Falls who will spend two years is state prison for selling opioids, nobody is talking about sending the Sacklers to jail.

That’s the way it works in this country. The rich rarely go to prison.

I did a quick search for “billionaires who went to prison” and I had to go back to the 1990s to find a reference to an American billionaire going to jail.

In a story in the Wall Street Journal chronicling the internal turmoil these lawsuits have caused the Sackler family, Kathe Sackler, who previously served on the Purdue Pharma board of directors, was quoted as telling a family member about the problems they face:

“And worse, it dooms my children. How is my son supposed to apply to high school in September?”

Ken Tingley is editor of The Post-Star in Glens Falls.