April 22, 2019: Is John H. Hammegren More Dangerous than any Illegal Immigrant in the Land?

4/22/19: Most people have probably never heard of Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, but those three corporations rank among America’s top fifteen for revenue.

 

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Profits piled up and so did the corpses. Did we mention profits piled up?

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What do they do? They are middlemen, distributing medications of all kinds, lately opioids, especially. 

A consortium of state governments has accused the companies of evading regulations in various ways, even warning pharmacies that were selling suspiciously high amounts of the drug that they were about to be audited by Drug Enforcement Agency officials. The distributors continued to send tens of thousands of pills to doctors who were later indicted for drug trafficking.

 

And why not? The distributors were making a killing. Between 2010 and 2018 the three companies passed out 1.6 billion opioid pills – in just the State of New York. During a five-year stretch McKesson filled 1.6 million orders for opioids, but despite laws requiring distributors to flag suspicious orders, flagged only 16. The company paid a $150 million penalty to the federal government for lax oversight from 2008 to 2013. But profits piled up and if 218,000 Americans died over twenty years as a result of opioid overdoses – well, the profits did pile up!

 

That meant when CEO John H. Hammergren retired in 2013, McKesson could give him a $159 million severance package. 

It was later “slashed” to $114 million.

You could argue that Mr. Hammergren has been more dangerous
 than any immigrant who ever snuck across the border into the U.S.

 

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IN OTHER NEWS: Proof that many Republicans are walking around with bushel baskets over their heads. Or watching too much right-wing news, which is pretty much the same. Asked if anyone in the Trump 2016 campaign had committed any crimes, 47% said “nope.” 

At the very least, you’d think they might remember that Trump’s former personal attorney has been sent off to jail. 

And that Trump was cited, but not named in that same case, as unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1.” 

Or that Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort has been sentenced to spend a significant portion of his future behind bars.