The drug problem Atty Gen. Sessions should be paying attention to instead of marijuana

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‘Respectable’ Dope Pushers | The American Conservative

Rod Dreher

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Criminals!:

Over the past decade, out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers to two pharmacies four blocks apart in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people, according to a congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee cited the massive shipments of hydrocodone and oxycodone — two powerful painkillers — to the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, amid the panel’s inquiry into the role of drug distributors in the opioid epidemic.

“These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia,” said committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., in a joint statement.

The panel recently sent letters to regional drug wholesalers Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith, asking why the companies increased painkiller shipments and didn’t flag suspicious drug orders from pharmacies while overdose deaths were surging across West Virginia.

The letters outline high-volume shipments to pharmacies over consecutive days and huge spikes in pain pill numbers from year to year.

Note this:

The state has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation. More than 880 people fatally overdosed in West Virginia in 2016.

More about Miami-Luken:

Miami-Luken is among those wholesalers and had shipped 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012 and about 11 million wound up in Mingo County, with a population of 25,000.

The Springboro distributor also benefited from an industry campaign to get Congress to weaken drug distribution enforcement, according to a new investigation by Washington Post and 60 Minutes.

The investigation reported the pharmaceutical drug industry lobbied Congress to weaken the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments.

I strongly hope AG Jeff Sessions, or the West Virginia attorney general, has someone looking into this to see if there are any laws under which the government can charge these pharmaceutical executives. These guys wear suits and live respectable lives, but it looks like they are morally no different than street thugs who push heroin — and in fact, those street thugs depend on the suits to get people (especially poor people) hooked.

UPDATE: In my post a year or two ago about Sam Quiñones stunning book Dreamland, about the US opioid epidemic — really, you have to read this book; it’s incredible — I wrote:

[Quiñones] quotes one former Mexican heroin dealer saying that when he arrived in the US, the older manager who introduced him to the business warned him not to think about what the drug was doing to other people’s children. If you do, he said, you will think about your own children, and you won’t be able to do this job. The drug dealers distanced themselves emotionally from the consequences of their labors, focusing instead on all the good things they could provide for their families back home in Xalisco, and the way that money elevated them from social outcasts to men of status. They refused to allow the human cost to American families and communities get to them. In time, even the people back home who knew better than to think that selling dope in America was respectable work came to ignore the moral implications, because it felt good to have money.

Mexican heroin dealers had to force themselves not to think of the human toll of their business, so they could continue to do business. Same thing with drug company executives who made the decision to flood the markets with these pills.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/respectable-dope-pushers/

 

Let me put those numbers in perspective for you.  The drug companies shipped enough prescription painkillers (hydrocodone, oxycodone - strong opioids) over the last ten years for literally every man, woman, child and infant in that West Virginia town to consume 2 pills per day, 365 days a year, for 10 straight years.  That's how far 20.8 million pills go in a town that small.  Two million pills per year for ten years. 

There is no !@#$%^& way that the companies sending those drugs to those two drugstores couldn't see a red flag there.  There's no way a population of that size could reasonably use that many pills. 

Mr. Sessions, if you really want to do something worthwhile in your job, quit getting your knickers in a twist over a comparatively harmless drug like cannibis and go after this.  Go after the drug companies that sent them, go after the pharmacists and pharmacy owners who accepted them and distributed them.  Go after the peddlers that sell them to the end users with every weapon your office has at its disposal.  Your approach to the drug problem is the equivalent of raining the fire of God Almighty down on a 19-year old who had sex with a 15-year old while ignoring a multinational sex trafficking ring prostituting thousands of young girls right in your backyard.  It's called perspective.

 

 

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And the investigation should go include the roll of legislatures who empowered the drug companies to do this.  I am (still) so gobsmacked about this I feel numb.

 

Posted Oct. 16, 2017:

This was a 60 Minutes segment yesterday.  If you didn't catch it, it's worth your time to see or read about it.  Our own pharmaceutical industry - working through our own government  - have created this problem.

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/

Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi says drug distributors pumped opioids into U.S. communities -- knowing that people were dying -- and says industry lobbyists and Congress derailed the DEA's efforts to stop it.

In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed -- that according to Joe Rannazzisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes. Rannazzisi ran the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread -- aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.   

JOE RANNAZZISI: This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors' offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs.

BILL WHITAKER: Who are these distributors?

JOE RANNAZZISI: The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85 or 90 percent of the drugs going downstream.

BILL WHITAKER: You know the implication of what you're saying, that these big companies knew that they were pumping drugs into American communities that were killing people.

JOE RANNAZZISI: That's not an implication, that's a fact. That's exactly what they did......

 

Read the full article, or watch the 60 Minutes segment at:

 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/

 

 

 

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Meanwhile, Trump appointed one of his top people to lead the effort in addressing the problem.  One of the aholes who helped to foment the problem in the first place:

Trump’s Drug Czar Pick Tom Marino Withdraws Following Explosive Report

by ADAM EDELMAN

 

Rep. Tom Marino has withdrawn from consideration as the White House’s pick for drug czar following a report that he championed a bill that hindered federal agents from going after the Big Pharma firms that flooded the country with addictive opioids.

President Donald Trump made the announcement Tuesday morning on Twitter.

“Rep.Tom Marino has informed me that he is withdrawing his name from consideration as drug czar,” Trump wrote. “Tom is a fine man and a great Congressman!”

Trump had nominated Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

But Marino came under fire following an expose by The Washington Post and CBS' “60 Minutes” that revealed Marino’s role in pushing through the drug industry-backed Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act.

Later Tuesday, Trump called Marino a "fine man" in a radio interview and described him as "gracious" for not wanting to have any conflicts of interest.

"He didn't even want to have even a perception of a conflict of interest," Trump said.

An early Trump supporter, Marino has not yet responded to the findings in the report.

The pharmaceutical industry pitched the bill as a way to prevent painkillers from falling into the wrong hands while protecting reputable pharmacists and drug distributors. But what it actually did, according to the report, was defang the DEA by curbing their power to stop drug distributors from sending millions of opioids to doctors and pharmacies suspected of supplying addicts.

The bill was passed by Congress through unanimous consent in 2016 after Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, negotiated a final version with the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was later signed by President Barack Obama.

Trump's announcement Tuesday was met with praise.

"@realDonaldTrump — thanks for recognizing we need a drug czar who has seen the devastating effects of the problem," tweeted Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., whose state has been among the hardest hit by the opioid crisis.

"I look forward to working with @realDonaldTrump to find a drug czar that will serve #WV and our entire country," added Manchin, who on Monday demanded that Trump withdraw the nomination.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called Marino's withdrawal "the right decision," but added that "the fact that he was nominated in the first place is further evidence that when it comes to the opioid crisis, the Trump administration talks the talk, but refuses to walk the walk."

On Monday, Trump said he was taking the expose "very seriously," following further criticism of Marino by Manchin and other lawmakers.

Trump also told reporters he would formalize his Aug. 10 national emergency declaration by signing it and sending it to Congress this week. That would enable the executive branch to direct millions of federal dollars toward things like expanding drug treatment facilities and supplying police officers with the anti-overdose remedy naloxone.

Meanwhile, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., announced Monday she would introduce legislation that would repeal the law Marino championed, saying it has "significantly affected the government's ability to crack down on opioid distributors that are failing to meet their obligations and endangering our communities." 

[AUFAN78 3,926]

Looks like he took your advice. 

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/jeff-sessions-dea-crackdown-pharmacies/2018/01/30/id/840376/

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50 minutes ago, AUFAN78 said:

Looks like he took your advice. 

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/jeff-sessions-dea-crackdown-pharmacies/2018/01/30/id/840376/

The pharmacies and prescribers are at the distal end of the system.  It's only the first step above going after individual users.

I'd like to see some focus on the people actually profiting from the production of these drugs and how they used our political system to accomplish that.

[AUFAN78 3,926]

17 minutes ago, homersapien said:

The pharmacies and prescribers are at the distal end of the system.  It's only the first step above going after individual users.

I'd like to see some focus on the people actually profiting from the production of these drugs and how they used our political system to accomplish that.

No question more needs to be done. Much more. It's a start.

[TitanTiger 20,511]

You don’t hammer the small fry. Cut the snake’s head off at the top. 

[homersapien 11,453]

2 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

No question more needs to be done. Much more. It's a start.

I really don't trust Sessions to do what needs to be done.