A Liberal Sees the "Light" on a Wall

Today we do our civic duty and examine the border wall question:

1/16/19: Day 26: The government remains partially shuttered and the wall all Americans desperately want remains un-built.

Yes, I said it. I am a pro-wall liberal, all the way. We need a big, beautiful wall with electrified wire at the top and maybe machine gun towers. We need minefields! On the good side of the wall we could chain man-eating tigers to stakes in case “illegals” manage to scale the wall or dig under it or mail out prescription drugs to kill us all.

Build that wall in…Stamford, Connecticut.

There it is. We need a wall around the headquarters of Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Connecticut. In the immortal words of Rep. Steve King of Iowa, we need to stop these drug company execs with “calves the size of cantaloupes” from bringing OxyContin into our homes and medicine cabinets.

You’ve heard Trump talk about terrorists trying to sneak across our southern border. They are coming to kill and maim us and give us smallpox and leprosy. Well, that threat pales by comparison with the threat out of Stamford. In fact, recent court filings in a case against Purdue, show company owners long knew that OxyContin was easy to abuse and dangerous in the extreme.

So, what was a good money-making drug manufacturer supposed to do? Richard Sackler, company president at the time, wrote in an email in 2001 that something drastic had to be done. Namely: “We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

We’re just selling pain relief—because we care.

Meanwhile, court filings suggest that Mr. Sackler urged sales representatives to push doctors to prescribe the highest dosages of OxyContin possible because that meant higher profits for Purdue.

Trump can finally get his wall.

The more I think about it—when this kind of story isn’t pissing me off—the more I realize I need to write Trump a letter. I will share my brilliant plan. He can get his wall. The Democrats will pay. (I don’t think Mexico will chip in, however) Tens of thousands of lives will be saved. I am pretty sure I will be nominated for some key White House post, like Grand High Keeper of the Tigers. I will be asked to appear on Fox News. 

Sean Hannity will call me a “great American,” despite the fact I am a flaming liberal and think Hannity’s an insufferable ass.

We’re not talking about drugs smuggled in from Mexico, most of which come right through existing border checkpoints. We’re talking about drugs mailed out to pharmacies in towns like Kermit, West Virginia (pop. 400). In one ten-month period back in 2007, the town saw three million opioid pills pass through its doctors’ offices and pharmacies.

We’re talking Wilmington and Hickory, North Carolina, where, a decade later, 11.6% and 9.9% of adults, respectively, were taking prescribed opioids for pain.

We’re talking Ohio, which ranks second in opioid-related deaths per 100,000 population (46.3) and 24 additional states that experienced at least 21.0 deaths per 100,000 in 2017.

That’s the damn reason we need to build the right wall.

This isn’t actually funny.

This isn’t actually funny. We’ve tried other remedies. From New Jersey to California, we’ve revoked doctors’ licenses for pushing too many pills. We’ve indicted executives at Insys Therapeutics and charged them with paying kickbacks to doctors to push their fentanyl-based opioid brands. Federal prosecutors have fined McKesson, another distributor, twice. A decade ago, Purdue Pharma and three top executives pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of misrepresenting the dangers of OxyContin. Nobody went to jail—because these were “drug dealers in Armani suits,” and it would be wrong to throw rich, white collar guys in the slammer.

Purdue paid a fine of $634.5 million, instead, and still managed to pile up profits. The Sackler clan which owns the company, waxed fat, amassing a fortune of $13 billion.

Purdue (and other pharmaceutical giants) kept pushing doctors to push pills. Opioid-related deaths quadrupled. Yet, as noted by the Center for Disease Control, something else was going on—or not going on. The amount of pain Americans reported experiencing did not increase.

The need for more pain relief was all in our heads—or all in the slick advertising Big Pharma did.

These “pushers” of powerful narcotics kept touting their products’ virtues. Purdue sales reps were instructed to tell doctors OxyContin had an addiction rate of “less than one percent.” The company used “pharmacy discount cards” to goose sales. Purdue and others drug makers richly rewarded doctors who published scientific papers “proving” that these new drugs were safe and you should pop some pills for breakfast.

In 1995, the Food and Drug Administration allowed Purdue to claim that OxyContin was nearly impossible to abuse. Sackler was ecstatic, predicting that “the launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white.” 

Sales soon surpassed $1 billion per year.

The blizzard did result in a large number of burials, just not the kind Sackler was excited about.

The problem was simple. The company knew it. The pills were designed to offer long-lasting, slow-release pain relief. But teens quickly learned to crush the pills into powder, which allowed them to experience an immediate, powerful, and extremely dangerous high.

Still, Purdue and other companies with similar scruples (none) kept boosting these powerful classes of narcotics.

If we had to build only one wall, my wall would be best.

Now it comes down to this. While we know there are illegal immigrants who sneak across our border and murder good people, the scourge they represent pales compared to the scourge unleashed inside our borders. Each and every death of an innocent human being—from Kate Steinle, killed by an illegal immigrant on a San Francisco wharf, to the young woman run down in Charlottesville, Virginia by a white supremacist driving a car, each is a tragedy in itself.

But if we had to build one wall, my wall would be best. “From 1999 to 2017,” the CDC reports, “almost 218,000 people died in the United States from overdoses related to prescription opioids.”

That’s roughly equal to four times the death toll for American forces during the entire Vietnam War.