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!

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Build that wall in…Stamford, Connecticut.

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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.

March 27, 2019: Bad News for Humans, Also Bird and Bees

 

3/27/19: You know what America needs? Less government regulation! More opioids! And more toxic chemicals in our water! 

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What could go wrong for humans!

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We get another wakeup call regarding business ethics this week when we learn that there is always a company out there that lives by one guiding rule. If customers will buy it, and it might harm or kill them if they do, that company will still gladly sell it if it reaps a fat profit. 

First, a bit of good news: The State of Oklahoma (not exactly known to be crawling with socialists who want to cut the nuts off capitalists) wins a $270 million judgment against Purdue Pharma. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter had sued Purdue and others, including Johnson & Johnson, for fueling the opioid crisis “with aggressive marketing of the blockbuster drug OxyContin and deceptive claims that downplayed the dangers of addiction.” 

Then the bad news: No court settlement will bring back the 200,000 Americans who are estimated to have died from opioid overdoses in the last twenty years.

 

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IF OPIOIDS don’t get you, maybe pesticides for breakfast will. David Bernhardt, Trump’s new choice to head the Department of the Interior, has stepped in and blocked regulations to control use of two pesticides: malathion and chlorpyrifos. It turns out, after years of study, that scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service determined those chemicals were so toxic “they jeopardize existence [emphasis added]” for 1,200 species of endangered birds, fish and other animals. You know. First you spray the crops to kill pests. Then the chemicals get into the food chain. 

What could go wrong for humans!

 

Dow, which makes the pesticides, insists they’re perfectly safe, just like cigarettes used to be. Or opioids! Just to boost that narrative along Dow donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration. 

Bernhardt then stepped in (you get what you pay for) and with pretty much zero knowledge of the science, killed the new regulations. 

So have some pesticides for lunch too! 

 

FUN FACT: In a new book about Barbara Bush, we learn that she kept a Trump countdown clock next to her bed until the day she died. The red, white, and blue clock, which kept track of the time left until January 20, 2021, was a gift from a friend who knew how deep the former First Lady’s disdain was for our current president. 

In fact, her disdain goes back to the 90s, when she wrote in her diary, “Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly.”

Bad for the birds and the bees and for you.

August 27, 2019: Guess Where Trump Wants to Hold Next G-7!

 

8/27/19: Americans learn this week that the United States will be responsible for holding the G-7 summit in 2020. Well, then, where, oh where, would the best place to hold that meeting be? 

If you said: “Trump National Doral Miami,” you win the prize. 

According to the owner of said property, Doral would be perfect for such a gathering. Let’s have the Commander-in-Chief explain the joys that would await leaders of the G-7 (or the G-8, if he can invite Putin): 

Everybody’s that’s coming, all of these people with all of their big entourages come. It’s set up so — and by the way, my people looked at 12 sites. All good, but some were two hours from an airport, some were four hours from, I mean they were so far away. Some didn’t allow this, they didn’t allow that.

 

Yeah, imagine. Trump’s people looked at a dozen sites. And they realized, hey, Doral is the best!!! 

With the world watching with amaze, and the G-7 in France wrapping up, Trump continued with his sales pitch. 

With Doral, we have a series of magnificent buildings, we call them bungalows. They each hold from 50 to 70 very luxurious rooms, with magnificent views. We have incredible conference rooms, incredible restaurants. It’s like, it’s like such a natural. ... And what we have also is Miami, and we have many hundreds of acres so that in terms of parking, in terms of all of the things that you need, the ballrooms are among the biggest in Florida, and the best. It’s brand new. 

 

Plus, if hurricanes threaten – we have the nukes. (See: 8/25/19.)

Trump at G-7, and of course he wants to lean into the picture.

 

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SPEAKING OF THREATS to the safety of millions of Americans, a judge in Oklahoma penalizes Johnson & Johnson $572 million for its role in marketing opioids and claiming they were perfectly safe. That judgment won’t bring back the tens of thousands who have died, of course. 

News of that judgment spooks other pushers. Purdue Pharma, which marketed opioids most aggressively, and claimed they were the safest, has offered to settle in federal court and pay $10-12 billion in damages. 

The victims of greed still won’t rise from the dead.

 

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PRESIDENT OBAMA may be gone. The imaginary “War on Coal” he supposedly launched, continues to be fought. 

U.S. coal demand fell in 2018 to the lowest level since 1979 and is expected to drop further this year. 

Must be Obama’s fault!

 

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“They picked winners, and they picked losers.” 

WE MIGHT NOT be getting hurt in the tariff war, according to President Trump; but lobster fishermen would choose to disagree. In the first six months of 2018, the Chinese bought 12 million pounds worth of the crustaceans from the U.S. And then Trump raised tariffs. 

China retaliated as anyone could predict. 

In the first six months of this year, U.S. sales of lobster to China fell 80 percent, to 2.2 million pounds.

 

Stephanie Nadeau, owner of The Lobster Company in Arundel, Maine, explains how tariff wars turn bloody in the real world. “They picked winners, and they picked losers,” she says of Trump and his economic advisers, “and they picked me a loser. There is no market that’s going to replace China.”  

Loss of market forced Nadeau to lay off seven of the fourteen people she once had working in wholesale. 

Nadeau is hardly alone in her pain. One trade group estimates that Trump’s tariffs cost U.S. businesses $3.4 billion in June.

December 16, 2019: Trump Wins a Big Award for the Fifth Year in a Row

 

12/16/19: The votes are in and Donald J. Trump, without help from any foreign country, has won for a fifth year in succession. Politifact, a non-profit fact-checking site, recognizes him for telling the “Lie of the Year.”

This year, his winning whopper, oft-repeated, was saying that the whistleblower got his July 25 phone call “almost completely wrong.”

 

This was not Trump’s first win. In 2018 he shared the award with other liars on the right, after claiming that Parkland High School students who were calling for stricter gun control were “crisis actors.” 

The year before that he swept to victory by insisting that Russian meddling in the 2016 election was a “made up story,” a “witch hunt” and “a hoax.” 

That followed his epic win in 2016, when he repeatedly labeled any news story he didn’t like “fake news.” 

That win was part of what would become an impressive streak, since he also won in 2015, for his body of work (Politifact rated 76% of all of Candidate Trump’s claims partly false, false, or “pants-on-fire” false).

 

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IN A COURT FILING this week, lawyers for Purdue Pharma admitted that the Sackler family, which owns the company, had transferred at least $1.36 billion in profits to overseas accounts or affiliated companies. 

The parent company has filed for bankruptcy, to shield itself from 2,600 lawsuits. But the family will always have their memories. 

And at least $1.36 billion.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (4/21/22): Technically, Trump didn’t win in 2020, for “Lie of the Year,” but contributed mightily. The winning whopper was the “infodemic” surrounding the outbreak and spread of COVID-19. All the, “don’t worry, it’s only the flu,” “use hydroxychloroquine and you’ll be fine,” “don’t get the shots, your body will become magnetized,” lumped together, in what the site fact checkers called “junk science.” 

Still, Politifact wasn’t letting the president off the hook. “It was a symphony of counter narrative,” they noted, “and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer.” Trump and others contributed to the deaths of (soon to be) more than a million Americans. 

In 2021, the “Lie of the Year” went not to Trump, although “the election was stolen” lie seeded the field from which the winning lie bloomed. 

This time, the “Lie of the Year” was a collection of falsehoods related to the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6. For example, “it was really a false flag,” operation, or “FBI agents tricked the mob into going on a rampage,” or the people who attacked were really no worse than a group of ordinary tourists.