January 16, 2019: The Liberal Blogger Says It's Time to Build that Wall!

 

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’m a pro-wall liberal! We need a big, beautiful wall with electrified wire at the top and 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. 

Wall off the Sackler clan!

____________________ 

Build that wall in…Stamford, Connecticut.

____________________ 

 

There. I said it. 

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. 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. 

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. 

The more I think about it, the more I realize I need to write Mr. 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 fairly 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 find Hannity to be 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 drugs mailed to pharmacies in towns like Kermit, West Virginia (pop. 400). In one ten-month period 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 reason we need to build the right wall. 

“Drug dealers in Armani suits.” 

This isn’t actually funny. We’ve tried other remedies. From New Jersey to California, we’ve revoked doctors’ licenses for pushing 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 monster 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. 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 created.

 

These “pushers” 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. 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. 

Artist places drug spoon sculpture outside Purdue Pharma HQ.

 

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

Now it comes 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 four times the death toll for American forces during the Vietnam War.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: The New York Times later compares the treatment of an ordinary drug dealer, Darnell Washington, with the way members of the Sackler clan were handled. 

 

Sledgehammers vs. velvet gloves.

 

Washington sold what he thought was heroin to a customer. It was fentanyl, instead. The customer shared it with a friend, who died. Washington, an African American man, ended up getting sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The Sacklers, with all their money and their hotshot legal team will never go to jail.

 

Patrick Radden Keefe, author of The Empire of Pain, the story of the Sackler family, explains,

 

Though they are widely reviled for profiting from a public health crisis that has resulted in the death of half a million Americans, they have used their money and influence to play our system like a harp. It is hardly news that our society treats people like Mr. Washington with sledgehammer vengeance and people like the Sacklers with velvet gloves.