Trump 2.0 - Up is Down

 

Opioid crisis in court

As the state of Oklahoma’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson has unfolded over the past month, the company has struggled to explain marketing strategies its accusers say dangerously misrepresented the risk of opioid addiction to doctors, manipulated medical research, and helped drive an epidemic that has claimed 400,000 lives over the past two decades.

Johnson & Johnson profited further as demand for opioids surged by buying poppy growing companies in Australia to supply the raw narcotic for its own medicines and other American drug makers.

[...]

Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mike Hunter, is suing Johnson & Johnson for billions of dollars for its alleged part in driving addiction and overdoses in his state in the first full trial of a drug maker over the opioid epidemic. But Hunter’s lawsuit has put the wider industry in the dock, too, by laying out how opioid manufacturers worked together to drive up sales by using their huge resources to influence medical policy and doctor prescribing.

[...]

Purdue Pharma kickstarted the epidemic with its high-strength, long-lasting opioid, OxyContin, in the mid-1990s. The court heard how Johnson & Johnson quickly realized the potential and set about competing.

[...]

Johnson & Johnson hired the consultants McKinsey & Company to identify opportunities to sell more. McKinsey recommended sales reps focus on doctors already prescribing large amounts of OxyContin. McKinsey also proposed a strategy to keep patients on Duragesic even if they had an “adverse event”. The broader push was to get as many patients as possible off of lower strength opioids and on to Johnson & Johnson’s more powerful drugs.

[...]

Johnson & Johnson, which is already facing compensation payments of several billion dollars after asbestos in its baby powder caused cancer, strongly denies that it bears responsibility for the opioid epidemic.

At the core of its defense is the claim that the company was distributing drugs approved by federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, and that it sold a relatively small amount of opioids in Oklahoma that cannot be tied to any specific overdoses.

  Guardian

And that could be their ticket out of this case. We shall see.

Some of the most damning testimony has come from Dr Russell Portenoy, a pain specialist and influential early cheerleader for the wide prescribing of opioids who was a paid adviser to Johnson & Johnson, Purdue and other drug makers.

Portenoy told the court that painkiller manufacturers “understated the risks of opioids, particularly the risk of abuse, addiction and overdose” to boost sales. He accused the drug makers of distorting his research and that of other specialists by selectively quoting the results, including omitting information about the dangers of narcotics.

“Those messages about risk were neglected and de-emphasised,” he said in recorded video testimony shown in court. “I think the purpose of doing that was to improve the sales of their products. ”

[...]

The Oklahoma case is closely watched by other drug firms being sued by towns, cities and counties in nearly 2,000 lawsuits combined in a single action in federal court in Ohio, known as the Multi District Litigation (MDL).

Trump either needed more drugs or had too many

Another bizarre speech - this one on the drug epidemic in this country. 







Because he got applause when he said dogs, he rambled on and on saying dogs as many times as he could in one string.










"Just say no," eh Nancy?




"As one united nations..."

He tried to clean that up in a tweet later:



And what the hell is with that closing music?  Rolling Stones: You can't always get what you want. 



There are video clips attached to each of Rupar's tweets in this thread.



Indeed, that bothers me more than the speeches themselves.  Gaslighting ad nauseum.  Discussing hte merits of his speeches like he's making sense, when clearly he's not.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The politics of fear

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Pharma in the courts

The Massachusetts attorney general is targeting Purdue Pharma and eight members of the Sackler family who own the company, alleging in a lawsuit they are "personally responsible" for deceptively selling OxyContin [alleging] the Sackler family hired "hundreds of workers to carry out their wishes" – pushing doctors to get "more patients on opioids, at higher doses, for longer, than ever before" all while paying "themselves billions of dollars."

[...]

In one alleged instance, then-president Richard Sackler devised what [Mass. AG Maura] Healey describes as Sackler's "solution to the overwhelming evidence of overdose and death," writing in a confidential email, "we have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem."

[...]

Almost 400,000 people died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2017, according to the CDC.

  CBS

And counting. Purdue Pharma's written response to CBS is contained in the article if you'd like to read it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Dems finally act like they have options

When a federal investigation in the mid-2000s threatened [Purdue Pharma] executives with the prospect of felonies and jail time, the firm helped Purdue’s top brass get off with misdemeanor “misbranding” convictions and community service in 2007. Purdue Pharma’s parent company, Purdue Frederick, pleaded guilty to a misbranding felony that cost it $600 million, but [Rudy] Giuliani helped strike a deal that enabled Purdue Pharma to continue selling its blockbuster painkiller OxyContin. “Among Mr. Giuliani’s missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him,” as the New York Times put it that year.

Recent developments cast a new light on the arrangement: Today, Giuliani serves as President Donald Trump’s lawyer, and Purdue Pharma is largely viewed as responsible for helping sow the seeds of the current overdose epidemic, which killed roughly 72,000 Americans last year.

On Wednesday, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent letters to the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration requesting information on the respective agencies’ contact with Giuliani Partners. The letters, shared with Mother Jones, draw heavily on a recent New York Times investigation finding that federal prosecutors knew about OxyContin’s widespread abuse and originally recommended that Purdue executives be charged with felonies, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. But top Justice Department officials in the George W. Bush administration pushed back—deciding instead to settle the case in 2007 rather than take it to trial.

[...]

In addition to asking for documentation of communications between the federal agencies and Giuliani Partners, the letters ask pointed questions about Giuliani himself, such as “What steps were taken to ensure that Giuliani’s other relationships with DOJ and its components did not improperly influence plea negotiations?”

[...]

“Given that Mr. Giuliani has emerged as one of the President’s closest advisors, it’s important that we determine whether his past work on behalf of Purdue, a company that misled prescribers and patients alike about the addictive nature of its drug OxyContin, will influence this administration’s actions in terms of holding Purdue accountable for the devastating impact of its aggressive marketing of this drug,” wrote Ricki Eshman, Hassan’s press secretary.

  Mother Jones

Also...

More on the squirrely tweet

The title of this video/tweet retweeted by the president is "The Crisis Next Door".    That's the perfect picture for it.

Ok, this is bad

Trump is now retweeting the White House official twitter account, which is apparently written by someone as dense as he is. Christ. I know Scavino got divorced, but did he also get fired and Trump is having to write both his own tweets and the official White House ones, too?

Or is some Russian hacking in? 

Don't share!  It's a trap!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

When will this nightmare end?

More than three months after President Trump declared the nation's opioid crisis a public health emergency, activists and healthcare providers say they're still waiting for some other action.

The Trump administration quietly renewed the declaration recently. But it's given no signs it's developing a comprehensive strategy to address an epidemic that claims more than 115 lives every day. The President now says to combat opioids he's focused on enforcement, not treatment.

  NPR

He was never focused on treatment. He can't focus on anything.

"People form blue ribbon committees. They do everything they can. And frankly, I have a different take on it. My take is you have to get really, really tough, really mean with the drug pushers and the drug dealers."People form blue ribbon committees. They do everything they can. And frankly, I have a different take on it. My take is you have to get really, really tough, really mean with the drug pushers and the drug dealers."

That would be the pharmaceutical companies and prescribing doctors. But I'm sure he doesn't mean those folks.

President Trump declared a public health emergency in October to deal with the opioid epidemic. The declaration brought no new money to fund the federal response.

In the 2018 budget, the President recommended cutting the Office of National Drug Control Policy budget by 95 percent, and may do so again this year.

[...]

"The 2018 budget had a $400 million cut to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration which is the lead agency that funds treatment in the United States," Humphreys says.

[...]

In November, President Trump announced he's donating his third-quarter salary — about $100,000 — to help the Department of Health and Human Services fight opioids.

Dear God! A whole $100,000!

Also this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced an operation using medical data to crack down on pharmacies and doctors that dispense suspicious amounts of opioids.

At least the Elf is on the right track. Of course an announcement is what Trump did in October, and that's gone nowhere.

Also this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced an operation using medical data to crack down on pharmacies and doctors that dispense suspicious amounts of opioids.

President Trump still hasn't nominated anyone to head the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The administration hasn't asked Congress for any new funding to address the opioid epidemic.

He's not thinking about the opioid crisis. He's thinking about the crisis of Mueller closing in on his criminal cabal.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Opioids dopes

President Donald Trump’s war on opioids is beginning to look more like a war on his drug policy office.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has taken control of the opioids agenda, quietly freezing out drug policy professionals and relying instead on political staff to address a lethal crisis claiming about 175 lives a day. The main response so far has been to call for a border wall and to promise a "just say no” campaign.

  Politico

How in the name of Sam Hill is a border wall going to address the opioid crisis? The opioid crisis is due to overprescribing and pharmaceutical companies dumping massive quantities of the drugs into local areas where addiction is rampant, along with DEA and Congressional complicity. The deadly shit that's coming over the border is a direct result of the demand for drugs created by the doctors and drug companies.

"Just say no." Are you fucking kidding me? How'd that work for Nancy Reagan? Maybe they could get Melania to push that, instead of the campaign she's not mounted against bullying, which was supposedly going to be her thing. Surely if Melania told people to just say no, they would. Maybe they'd even just say no to their doctors who are prescribing the drugs.

Idiots. Willful idiots. They know damned well what's causing this crisis. They either don't care or they're complicit in keeping it going.

"It’s fair to say the ONDCP has pretty much been systematically excluded from key decisions about opioids and the strategy moving forward,” said a former Trump administration staffer, using shorthand for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which has steered federal drug policy since the Reagan years.

The office’s acting director, Rich Baum, who had served in the office for decades before Trump tapped him as the temporary leader, has not been invited to Conway’s opioid cabinet meetings, according to his close associates. His schedule, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, included no mention of the meetings. Two political appointees from Baum’s office, neither of whom are drug policy experts, attend on the office’s behalf, alongside officials from across the federal government, from HHS to Defense.

I wouldn't give you a farthing (what's a farthing?) for the government's drug policy ever since Johnson started his infamous "war on drugs," but the fact that the head of the drug office has been replaced by two political appointees below him speaks volumes.

In Ohio just this week, it was first lady Melania Trump who attended an opioid event at a children’s hospital. The president toured a manufacturing plant and gave a speech on tax cuts.

Good god. They may actually put Melania out on this.

A White House spokesperson declined to disclose who attends the meetings, and Baum did not respond to a request for comment, although the White House later forwarded an email in which Baum stressed the office's central role in developing national drug strategy.

Yes, we can see.

A little documentary recommendation: "Death by Fentanyl" in "The Naked Truth" series on Netflix.

And, also: any one of NPR's several opioid crisis reports. This one - Pharmaceutical Founder Arrested In Alleged Nationwide Opioid Scheme - mirrors the Netflix story.

Or how about these two Washington Post articles:

•  Investigation: The DEA slowed enforcement while the opioid epidemic grew out of control
• The opioid crisis isn't just about negligence. It's about complicity.

Or this CBS report: "Ex-DEA agent: opioid crisis fueled by drug industry and congress"

Take your pick. Or google "opioid crisis" and see where it takes you.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jesus

American Drug Kings

You won't hear The Most Notable Loser talking about this.

I caught enough of this outrageous story about why there is an opioid crisis in this country (take a guess) on NPR early this afternoon to confirm that villainy is the correct term.

And here's the 60 Minutes report if you prefer video.

This is the story that caused Tom Marino - Trump's nominee for "drug czar" - to withdraw his name.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tell Us Why

Okay, then. NPR will tell us.

Marino is stepping back days after reports that a bill he sponsored hindered the Drug Enforcement Administration in its fight against the U.S. opioid crisis.

[...]

A joint report by The Washington Post and 60 Minutes found that Marino's bill "helped pump more painkillers into parts of the country that were already in the middle of the opioid crisis," as NPR's Kelly McEvers said earlier this week. The bill had been opposed by the DEA and embraced by companies in the drug industry.

  NPR

I don't get why he pulled out, though. Too sensitive? Because heaven knows the rest of Trump's nominees to agencies they are in complete opposition to didn't say no.

The opioid story was revealed by whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi, a former high-ranking DEA official, who told 60 Minutes, "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."

Of Marino's nomination, Rannazzisi said he was in "total disbelief" after the White House announced Trump's pick.

[...]

"As the [the Washington Post and60 Minutes] report notes, one such company shipped 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012. This included 11 million doses in one small county with only 25,000 people in the southern part of the state: Mingo County. As the number of pills in my state increased, so did the death toll in our communities, including Mingo County."

After Marino's name was withdrawn, [Sen. Joe Machin, D-W.V.] tweeted to Trump, "thanks for recognizing we need a drug czar who has seen the devastating effects of the problem."

No. No, he did not.  He's the one who wanted to put this manin charge.

In the Senate, the bill was sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah — who also saw it through the markup process. In Congress and on Twitter, Hatch has defended his role this week, calling the Post story "flawed" and "one-sided."

Go ahead and say it Orrin: Fake News.

Hatch also said the bill was supported by patient groups who "were concerned about DEA's unfettered enforcement authority."

Patient groups? Only if those patients are exclusively Congress whores.

And yes, folks, Obama signed the bill.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.