Open Thread For October 16, 2017
How Big Pharma Rolled Congress On Opioid Epidemic. Brilliant reporting, depressing reading. Oh, and the legislator who pushed the bill? He’s Trump’s drug czar nominee.
Austria Elects 31-Year-Old Right Winger As Their New Leader. Likely to form coalition government with another right-wing party. Yep, opposition to immigration and Islam were his calling cards.
AG Sessions Aids In Prosecution Of Killer Of ‘Gender-Fluid’ Victim. Man bites dog. Hey, we can all use a little good news.
Nobody Wants To Touch 666 5th Avenue. Kushner’s involvement is toxic. As was the purchase of this property.
Bannon’s Words Hang Over Trump-McConnell Lunch. I think the war is already over, and Trump/Bannon have won. Too bad the Democratic Party stands for nothing. Which reminds me…
…DNC Names Anti-Minimum Wage Advocate To Finance Post. As long as these Third Way millionaires and their corporations control the Party, there is no Party. And no winning, either.
The Nursing Home That Is The US Senate. They just don’t want to leave.
What do you want to talk about?
That big Pharma story is the scandal is the century. I wonder how much Carper and Coons both pocketed for selling out America so cravenly?
Re opioids. Apparently nobody, not even the non-crooks, understood what this law would do. It passed under Obama, and nobody from his administration would comment. This is how Carper and Coons, along with the rest of them, get away with this: The protection conferred by the flock.
Re Austria. We’re talking about a country that joined the Nazi regime enthusiastically.
RE DNC: Nobody in the restaurant business should ever be put in charge of anything that’s not a restaurant. The press release brags that he helped bring in the money that elected Obama, but neglects to mention that he also brought in the money that did NOT elect Hillary Clinton.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics only if politics stays an infant. We’re not fighting against infants anymore.
That opioid story — apparently “60 Minutes” also ran one last night about the same topic — has already drawn blood:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/congressional/sen-manchin-calls-on-trump-to-withdraw-marinos-nomination-as-drug-czar-in-wake-of-post60-minutes-probe-20171016.html
Over the course of his career, Carper has taken millions in big pharma cash.
Feinstein drew a primary challenger, why not Carper here?
Yet, they want to hose some guy with a felony who is in possession of a naturally occurring plant
This corrupt and backward little state will never change
In Austria, the two conservative parties won 58.5% of the vote between them.
When I was hospitalized for a flare up of my Crohn’s Disease, September 28, 2016, I was given morphine in the ER for some serious pain. When I was admitted to a regular room, the night nurse (I was admitted around 12:20 AM) asked me if I needed anything for pain (I had a morphine PRN prescription from the ER), I told her yes, but could she see if she could get me something non-narcotic for pain relief, and she looked stunned. She said I was the first person she’d ever seen who wanted off narcotics rather than on.
Opiates are just scary bad, and as much as I hate more government controls, that’s what is needed here. Opiate pill production must be limited at the source, and all outpatient prescriptions for opiates reported to the DEA or some other organization, with physicians required to support the reason for the prescription and the amount. Manufacturing inspectors need to be in place at every plant, and those inspectors need to be rotated every three months, to keep bribery possibilities minimized. Individual accounting, they way hospitals do things, has to be made for every last pill: that will keep pharmacies on their toes. Finally, any pharmacy presented with a prescription for more than a small amount of opiates on an outpatient basis must be required to report that prescription.
The penalties for physicians and pharmacists must be severe, including both jail time and loss of licenses, on the first offense.
From Wikipedia: “On the morning of 12 March,1938, the 8th Army of the German Wehrmacht crossed the border into Austria. The troops were greeted by cheering Austrians with Nazi salutes, Nazi flags, and flowers. … Hitler had intended to leave Austria as a puppet state with Seyss-Inquart as head of a pro-Nazi government. However, the overwhelming reception caused him to change course and absorb Austria into the Reich.”
Just sayin’.
Der Führer was very popular in 1938, having dragged Germany out of the Depression, greatly reduced unemployment, and giving the Germans respect that they thought they had lost following the humiliation of Versailles. The Nazi’s anti-Semitism was well known, but notion of the extermination camps was something too far-fetched for anyone to believe. There were a couple of concentration camps in Germany, but they were for political prisoners; if you kept in line, you had little about which to worry. The ineffectiveness of the Austrian government — which not only was doing a poor job domestically, but was knuckling under to most of the Nazis’ demand anyway — cost it a lot of domestic support.
We look at Naziism as a huge world disaster, but in 1938 it looked strong and ascendant. Alby’s ‘reminder’ that the Austrians accepted the Anschluss in 1938 doesn’t really pass muster, because no one knew, in 1938, what Naziism would lead to.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis didn’t create anti-Semitism; that was an old, old European bacillus, much used in the Austrian press even when Hitler was a vagabond in Vienna. He assimilated it, took advantage of it, used it, and then pushed it far, far beyond anything the Europeans ever imagined, but it had been part of Europe for centuries. Remember: the Nazi leaders personally killed very few people, and it took the cooperation of millions of good Germans to get the Holocaust going.
Hillary, also took money from big pharma. Their in everyone’s pockets! https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-pharmaceuticals/clinton-outpaces-rivals-in-drug-company-donations-idUSKCN0Z22F1
Opiates should be safe, legal, and available. It is the fentenyl-laced heroin that is the biggest problem as far as OD’s go. People don’t generally accidentally overdose on prescription opiates under a doctor’s supervision. Besides, people need something to ease the pain of living.
Stop fighting the war on drugs, and put the funding into education and rehab.
The war on drugs was really only a war to criminalize, incarcerate, and take away the civil and human rights of black men, anyway.
“Alby’s ‘reminder’ that the Austrians accepted the Anschluss in 1938 doesn’t really pass muster, because no one knew, in 1938, what Naziism would lead to.”
Idiot, Mein Kampf was first published in 1925. By 1938 everyone had over a decade of hearing about where Nazism was headed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/world/middleeast/isis-syria-raqqa.html
Raqqa falls. As I am a leftist but not a pacifist I will celebrate this. It had to be done.
Our esteemed host wrote:
Trouble is, no one believed that Adolf Hitler would try to do what he said that he would do. The Germans who voted for him didn’t believe it, Chancellor Franz von Papen, who got President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as the next Chancellor, didn’t believe it, President von Hindenburg didn’t believe it, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier didn’t believe it, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t believe it, and I’d guess that even Benito Mussolini didn’t believe it.
I’m Disappointed that someone wrote this:
I invite you to eastern Kentucky, where opiate addiction has ravaged communities and destroyed families. Thousands upon thousands of babies are being born addicted to opiates. People can’t keep jobs due to drug abuse.
Personal responsibility, Dana. Why should we help the opiate-addicted ahead of others who need help?
The point about Austria is that it’s never been anything but a backward country full of hicks who loved the idea of a “greater Germany,” which was their time and place’s version of making America great again.
We’re told the same thing about Trump, BTW. Lots of the turd-eaters who for him didn’t think he’d build the wall, etc. The problem with the notion that people “didn’t think he meant it” was that they still wanted him to, whether they thought he’d be able to or not.
Everybody knew what Hitler was about — certainly in Austria. You’re referencing the fact that lots of people hoped he wouldn’t. That’s a lot different than they thought he wouldn’t.
Dana wrote “I invite you to eastern Kentucky, where opiate addiction has ravaged communities and destroyed families. Thousands upon thousands of babies are being born addicted to opiates. People can’t keep jobs due to drug abuse.”
I am not saying opiods are not a problem. What I am saying is that it is a problem that must be solved by the healthcare and educational systems, not criminal just-us.
Wrong. The pharmaceutical companies conspired to push for the mass prescription of opiates, even after they knew the consequences. The lies they pushed resulted in that disastrous piece of legislation that let them off the hook. Along with the deaths and destruction of hundreds of thousand lives.
@Dana: I give you a lot of credit for coming to this site to argue (in a nice way) these issues, and I don’t mean any personal ill toward you in saying this. You know how they say a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged? The same thing happens in both directions. You are taking this issue a lot more seriously now that you’ve seen it with your own eyes.
I don’t think your proposed solution of draconian sentences will do anything to stem the flow of drugs. Of a particular drug, sure. But keep in mind that rural America turned to opiates only after a long period during which the drug of abuse was methamphetamine, which had the benefit of being locally manufactured. It was when the supplies for making it dried up that they turned to opiates. If the opiates are cut off, they’ll go back to their original interests, marijuana and moonshine.
El Somnambulo says, “Wrong. The pharmaceutical companies conspired to push for the mass prescription of opiates, even after they knew the consequences. The lies they pushed resulted in that disastrous piece of legislation that let them off the hook. Along with the deaths and destruction of hundreds of thousand lives.”
Question: Then why aren’t they in jail?
Answer: Because the “war on drugs” was only about mass incarceration and taking away the civil rights and economic hope of black men. It was never about solving the drug problem as a health issue because you can’t help people with drug problems by putting them in jail.
It will only be solved through the healthcare and educational system, and even then never completely solved. Drug addiction and possession should not be a criminal offense. Opiod addicts should have access to drugs that are safe and of known quality and strength to put heroin and fentanyl dealers out of business. The money being spent on mass incarceration (and more) should be spent on education and healthcare.
On a much larger view, part of what drives people to drugs is trying to ease the pain of economic hopelessness and powerlessness. That is the big problem the rich and powerful are loathe to address.
Fentanyl has been around since the 60’s. Oxycodone has been around way longer than that -1920’s. Ever heard of percocet? Well that’s oxycodone.
The reason they’re not in jail is for the same reason why bankers and other corporate criminals are not in jail. And for the same reason that Congress unanimously passed legislation that came right out of Big Pharma’s shop.
What I think you’re missing here is how so many people got addicted in the first place. Due in large part to misrepresentations of medical findings, pharma convinced doctors that there was little to no risk of opioid dependency in the treatment of pain, regardless of how powerful the dosage. They KNEW that what they were saying was not borne out by scientific evidence. Few doctors, at the time, had sufficient knowledge of the impact of these painkillers to make independent judgments.
It was nothing short of a criminal conspiracy by Big Pharma to create millions of addict-clients. As I’ve done in the past, I highly recommend ‘Dreamland’ by Sam Quinones, which is the best and most readable history of how we got here.
Re: the Austrian elections: Andrej Babis, “who vows to drain the swamp of this capital city’s politics, run his country like a business and keep out Muslim immigrants,” is considered the probable winner in the Czech Republic’s elections this coming weekend.
Alby wrote:
Not exactly: I’ve always taken the drug abuse issue seriously; I just haven’t commented on it here previously (that I can recall.)
The libertarian part of me says, ‘If people want to f(ornicate) themselves up with drugs, it’s on them, and I don’t care.’
But that is tempered by my being married to a pediatric nurse, who has told me that she has never seen a case of child abuse — and, as a hospital nurse, she only sees them once things get really bad — in which drugs and/or (usually and) alcohol were not involved. Drug abuse is not a victimless crime: almost all adults wind up caring for a child at some point, and drug use puts children at risk.
Were God to come down and say, ‘Dana, you get my power to change one thing about humanity,’ I would use that power to render the human brain impervious to alcohol and drugs. I would choose that before eliminating Hitler, before eliminating Karl Marx or Mao Tse-tung or Josef Stalin or the bubonic plague.
And yet those drugs help many, many people who would suffer horrible pain without them.
That’s just it, Dana: Nothing in life is all that simple. The people who like Trump because he’s destroying the rotten culture of Washington aren’t wrong, they have simply chosen the worst way to change the culture of Washington (many of them probably believe this was the only way, and I can’t prove they are wrong). I pity them, just as I pity Trump, surely the unhappiest man who ever lived. it’s the assholes — Ryan, McConnell, the whole fucking bunch of maggots who make up Republican leadership — who brought this on in hope of profiting by it who earn, and deserve, my hatred.
SEe, the thing is, I (and most American men) are susceptible to the libertarian idea because it matches up with the western ideal of male stoicism and individuality. But, like Republican economics, libertarianism applied widely fails every time it is tried. Reality teaches us that selfishness, contra Rand, is not a virtue.
I know you don’t really wish that people with bone cancer should have no way to relieve their pain, which is what would happen if your wish were granted. And neither would anyone who watched someone die of it, which illustrates the value of seeing things with your own eyes.
The biggest lie our simpleton Christianity tells is that good and evil are separate forces. The obvious truth is that neither one exists outside of the human brain.
Also, too, on drugs/alcohol and abuse: If only drugs and alcohol caused child abuse, there would be no abuse among the Mormons. Yet there is.
alby wrote:
Yes, that is exactly correct. Trouble is, when it comes to drugs and alcohol, the bad far, far outweighs the good. If we had no drugs or alcohol, there would be people in real pain in medical situations, but we’d also have a vastly lower murder rate, vastly lower rape and assault and other crime rate. We’d have far fewer unintended pregnancies, a much lower illegitimacy rate, a much lower divorce rate, far fewer people would be on welfare or be unemployable. Arguably we’d even have fewer wars.
The human mind is a marvelous thing, yet so many people go to so much effort, and do so much damage to society, by deliberately impairing the function of the mind.
Alby pointed out:
First of all, having lived (very briefly) in Elko, Nevada, I can tell you that a whole lot of those good Mormons came over from Utah to patronize the brothels and casinos!
But elimination of mind-altering substances would vastly reduce our problems, even if it wouldn’t eliminate them completely. There will always be [insert plural slang term for the rectum here] in the world, but even those [insert plural slang term for the rectum here] can control their behavior a bit better — if for no other reason than to stay out of jail — when they’re sober.
Misplaced confidence amuses me.
@Dana: Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t questioning the ability of drugs, especially alcohol, to make any situation much, much worse.
I lack the proper scales to measure whether the bad outweighs the good or vice versa. Since I can’t enact your wish anyway, I don’t much worry about it. Some cases, like Trump, are obvious — the bad outweighs the good. Most other cases, not so clear.
Alcohol causes more misery on a given Friday night than marijuana has in all of human history
El Somnambulo I don’t disagree with anything you wrote there. My main concern is that the pendulum is going to swing hard back to escalating the “war on drugs,” which has been a miserable failure at stopping drugs, but an overwhelming success at criminalizing and incarcerating black men.
It is a health and human services issue, not a criminal issue.
I’ll check out the book, thanks.
It’s an amazing book. The other side of the equation was a group of Mexican drug dealers who used best business practices, did not carry guns, and specialized in high quality customer service. The business was so grassroots that it largely fell below the radar screens of the DEA, which was looking for big fish, instead of hundreds of little fish.
Here’s just one review of this book, which won the National Critics’ Award For Best Non-Fiction Book Of the Year:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2015/0428/Dreamland-is-the-must-read-book-about-America-s-heroin-crisis
I’m not gonna lie. I wish I could convince EVERYONE to read this book.
how about this?
http://www.wdel.com/news/environmentalists-confidential-meetings-trump-transparency-in-st-phase-of-updating/article_b09996e6-b2bf-11e7-acf4-9745b87afa65.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=user-share
I posted it in today’s Oct. 17 Open Thread. Dave Carter is performing a public service. We’ll see about everybody else.
El Som is correct. Dreamland is excellent. Also, this book from Johann Hari is helpful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/books/review/chasing-the-scream-by-johann-hari.html