In the midst of this finger pointing, Thomas fails to acknowledge that the court has bastardized the Supremacy Clause to allow for a legal blind spot.  These justices have created an ‘international waters’, placing the welfare of millions of Americans in unarmed life rafts.

Doubtlessly, this experience has changed me.  Medicine saved my life, but it can’t reverse the damage that was done.  Some soldiers never come back from war, and some that do come back changed.  I don’t claim the bravery that soldiers exhibit on the battlefield, but I will claim a single similarity: The scars on our bodies cover the deeper wounds inside.  Even amidst the strength I am determined to find in this experience, there is something else.  It’s a lingering, of sorts.  A sense of never going back.

Would a seven-figure settlement fix everything?  No.  This is not about money, but responsibility.

So, what to do?  A federal law that established a minimum standard of responsibility for generic drug companies would solve much of the problem.  It may not be feasible to demand generics have the same safety trials as their brand name counterparts, but mandating that safety concerns be reported to the FDA could be a reasonable compromise.  There is no reason why Congress should let a story like mine be told again.

It is an inverted justice that protects businesses over citizens.  I have come to believe that empathy is a faculty of humanity that must be learned through suffering.  That is the only reason I can comprehend for the indifference to wrongs exhibited here.  Whatever normative calculus it was that governed these choices–surely, someone just forgot to carry the one.  Surely, they just didn’t understand.

Surely.  I have to believe that.

Gabriel N. Drapos ’13 is a philosophy concentrator living in Lowell House.