This is a depressing but not surprising story:
In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.
[…..]A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.
[….]The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar.
Baud
Deleted.
Steeplejack
Damn, Trump’s nominees are reaching slapstick-comedy levels of craziness. Looking forward to a convicted bank robber being nominated to head the FDIC.
Baud
Sneaky.
debbie
Money trumps all.
JR
Gats in my holsters girls on my shoulders
Barbara
I couldn’t read it without coffee. Thanks David.
mai naem mobile
It’s like Dolt45 sits down and orders his underlings to find the most unsuitable candidates for a position and they find them.
Barbara
@Barbara: oops. Posted in response to the wrong post. The staggering hypocrisy surrounding opioid drugs and drugs in general is hard to fathom. I won’t take opioids anymore. I have arthritis pain and I made a decision to just endure it most of the time.
Doug!
@JR:
Always loved that line too.
Ladyraxterinok
When will child labor laws, the Pure Food and Drug Laws and the FDA be abolished?? And other measures passed in early 1900s largely thru work of newly empowered women.
And buildig codes to protect vs earthquakes?
Eliminate every law/regulation but those dealing with military. And why should corporations meet any standards for weapons? Let the free market reign!!
Nora
Aren’t many of the communities most devastated by opioid drugs the staunchest supporters of Trump? Once again he shits on the people who support him, basically playing them for chumps. Not that they’ll change their minds, god forbid.
chris
@Nora: Yep.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Meanwhile, strident new laws punishing opiet addicts. It’s always of the victims fault with these useless, intellectually corrupt twats.
satby
@Nora:
And it’s this stubborn refusal to change course for a better future that has me eyeballing leaving the country. Because at some point you just have to accept that this is what they want, the voters who show up and the nonvoters too apathetic to bother. I know all the reasons people might not vote, or might be loyal to their tribal affiliation, but they have the same agency we do to figure out who would better represent them, and laziness, racism, and spite rule. And like the Jews who recognized that they weren’t safe in 1930s Germany, sometimes you have to vote with your feet.
SiubhanDuinne
@debbie:
…and vice versa.
A Ghost to Not
Ignore the opioid epidemic, and concentrate on wrecking the burgeoning MJ industry.
The Rs are under orders to wreck America any way they can.
A Ghost to Not
@satby:
I’m going nowhere. I intend to fight.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
These fucking people…
debbie
@A Ghost to Not:
And who knows how Americans will be received anywhere in the world, after Trump’s wrecked his havoc?
d58826
Makes sense. Profit before people and big pharma just has to pay its executives those big bonuses.
Watching the tube and all of the ads for the various miracle drugs. They spend 1-2 minutes showing happy people restored to health by the drug being advertised. Then they run very quickly thru possible side affects ranging from the sniffles to death. I sometimes think it is smarter to take your chances with the disease.
satby
@A Ghost to Not: I would still be a citizen who voted in elections here, but I am getting old and tired. My adult life has been almost constant struggle, and I’m sick of that. I’m passing the torch and supporting in the background.
But I intend to see if I can help resettle some of our fellow citizens from Puerto Rico in my area, maybe in my house, first. ?
geg6
@A Ghost to Not:
Yup, me too. Some days I get depressed and angry and think about an exit plan, but I always decide that’s bullshit. This is my country and I love it. These people are traitors and must be crushed. And that can’t happen if I run. I have have a Jewish friend, however, who is freaked by the rise of the Nazis here. Her daughter, SIL and grand kids live in Singapore and she visits every year for several months. She’s about to go again and she has sold her house and is liquidating some of her belongings. She doesn’t expect to come back this time unless current conditions change.
charluckles
@satby:
Would have to argue that one truism out of 2016 is that the right wing in every country in the world sat straight up and took notice when Donald Trump won. Autocracy, ignorance and fasicm are on the march. Where would we go where that’s not going to be a problem?
Ksmiami
@satby: yes exactly
Betty Cracker
The Trump voters who are about to fall victim to their idol’s Obamacare sabotage are giddily lining up for their fleecing and eventual conversion into lamb chops (if the folks I read on Twitter are actual Trumpsters rather than Russian trolls). They’re convinced the reason their insurance costs so much now is that Obama personally jacked up the rates to redirect funds to cover legions of lazy welfare queens and their 10 MS-13 gangster-children by 10 different baby-daddies.
According to these people, pre-2009 insurance coverage was a paradise of low, stable premiums and uninterrupted personal relationships with heroic, patient-centered physicians. They are impervious to facts that suggest otherwise. They are blind to bipartisan studies that indicate going back to pre-ACA status quo will result in lower care quality, more uninsured Americans, etc. Anyone who wants to fix Obamacare rather than overturn it is a lazy moocher who should get a jerb!
I wish there were a way that the consequences of Trumpism could be visited solely on the heads of Trumpsters. At this point, I’m bereft of empathy for these ignorant cockwaffles. I want them to suffer. I’d laugh as I stepped over the fuckers as they waste away in the gutter. But unfortunately, we have to carry their worthless carcasses on our backs, kicking and screaming, to make any goddamned progress. Sick. Of. It.
A Ghost to Not
@geg6:
All of this. Twice.
I served my country for 10 years, and I’ll be dead before I see some fascists take it away. I’m old, but ornery and spry. My wife and sons are with me on this.
Emma
@Betty Cracker: same here. Part of me feels ashamed of writing off so many people but they have separated themselves from reality so much that I don’t think there’s a way to bring them back. Everything — and I do mean everything — will have to be done in spite of them. It’s bloody exhausting.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I really can’t understand what these people are doing. Some of them have children. Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. A lot have grandchildren. Do they really not care what kind of a country they’re building for them? If they wanted to turn the U.S. into a benighted, feudal shithole from the dark ages, they couldn’t be going about it any more effectively. They can’t really believe this Ayn Rand shit that Ryan spouts all the time. Nobody can be that stupid.
A Ghost to Not
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
“Hold my beer!”
– Idiot America
Ladyraxterinok
A recent Jim Bakker show on youtube had a preacher Gallops (sp?) who said demons had been taking America away from God for a hundred years, more openly in the last 50. Obama was the final move.
Think about the progress that has been made in civil rights in the US and then realize what Religious Right, Evangelicals believe is the work of God and the work of the devil!! His rant could not make it clearer.
I was in the So Baptist Church in OK and TX thru college (grad 61). Today’s Evangelicals have a view of Christ’s message that is completely antithetical fo what I learned in Sunday School and church. Do kids even hear the song any more ‘Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.’
Evangelicals would now doubtless view this as words from the devil!
Baud
I think Trump destroys our side’s illusion that these people have simply been misled and only need better information. But I’m not sure what approach replaced that strategy.
Gvg
Since this happened in April, 2016, isn’t it on Obama’s DEA and Justice Department that it started to go wrong? How did that happen and why?
Baud
@Gvg: Everyone missed it. Read the story. It goes into it.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
White, male, Christian America is scared stupid at the notion of losing its dominant status. I like to believe these destructive moves come from it desperate death throes, but I’m not certain.
A Ghost to Most
@sylvania: Judging by the troll traffic on WaPo, they are getting desperate.
Uncle Cosmo
@Steeplejack: It takes a thief…to enable more theft. (This new!improved! saying brought to you by Trumpolini-Altered Reality, LLC.)
Petorado
“Federal agents mad ’cause I’m flagrant,” may be the more appropriate lyric for this post, sadly.
Cermet
@satby: I partly understand; during my daughters college years, she has spent each summer in Europe working at a major national lab – being fluent in French and having a working understanding of German is very useful. She is very likely to move there considering both the lack of opportunities here (in her field) and the utter nonsense occurring here, as well. She was shocked by how good German healthcare was (dental is included) and how inexpensive housing and most essentials were compared to here.
Cermet
@Gvg: Yes, on his watch but it was congress and specifically a thug that introduced the bill; if part of a larger spending bill, President Obama is helpless to stop that unless he veto’s the whole bill.
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
At this point I’d settle for a way that made absolutely certain that when the shit comes raining down on them they absolutely know the real reason why. It is maddening to see them never get a clue and never admit what is right in front of their faces, even as they are being ground to dust by the system they voted for. Grr!
Big Ole Hound
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Agree but unfortunately these are the guys the last of them keep electing so the status quo will take a long time to change.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ladyraxterinok:
It worth viewing modern Evangelicals not as a Religion in the sense of some institution trying to regulate societies morality, and more like a bunch of competing small businesses offering philosophical products. It’s about chasing consumer demand for profit and who gives a damn about morality. So basically the preachers are giving a theological gloss to what their congregation wants.
As far of the rest if it goes, well if you get your history from a mixture of Neo-Confederate conspiracy tracts and Cable TV “history” shows, that’s what you end up with.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@sylvania
That’s pretty much what the word in Washington is, that Trump took Moore wining the nomination as a serious person blow and a sign The Base is threw with Trump. So Trump is a bully and everything he is doing lately his hurting his own base along with the Republicans so it sounds like Trump the idiot is trying to beat his own supporters back into loving him. Small wonder his kids are all creeps.
Caphilldcne
I haven’t been able to read this article but the DEA is among the worst, least reformable drug war agencies in washington. It singlehandedly kept going after medical marijuana in states that had made it legal, pioneered shady entrapment and torture practices, insulated local cops from local accountability by using forfeiture laws and undermined obama’s ondcp directors. That’s just off the top of my head. That Tom Marino introduced this bill and that he is now going to head ondcp is a travesty but quite simply put there is no problem that the DEA can’t take and make worse because of their blinkered ideology. anyway they should not be the object of any sympathy whatsoever and would frankly be high on my list of agencies to abolish.
oatler.
@Caphilldcne: Right on! Anything that fucks the DEA is ok with me.
Brachiator
@Steeplejack:
Wait. That didn’t happen already? Don’t give Trump any ideas.
tobie
@Emma: This is my experience exactly. My formerly middle-of-the-row Republican neighbors in Cecil County have been radicalized and have absorbed every Trump defense against bad news. Things look grim in Puerto Rico, well it’s the Puerto Ricans fault because the infrastructure there was crumbling long before Hurricane Maria hit; too many opioid addicts today, well the fact that we live in a culture that mollycoddles people instead of teaches them to buck it up is at fault. I don’t see how anyone can reach them given their information bubble. Epistemic closure indeed…Like North Korea levels of epistemic closure.
As to the Post article, that was depressing. Dems and the Obama White House were walked all over by Marino and Hatch. What was the interim director of the DEA doing? Where was the Obama Justice Department? The level of venality and fail at so many levels is breathtaking.
tobie
@Cermet: The amazing thing is that no one in Germany complains about how expensive health insurance is. Yes, it costs a pretty penny. The govt pays 50% and you pay the other 50%, and if you don’t earn enough to opt for a private insurer, you pay for those who can’t through public insurers. What you get in return is quality insurance with massive consumer protections. Germany was supposed to be the model for the ACA because it’s an employer-provided system with public and private insurers. That the Republicans were able to work their base up into a lather about the ACA doesn’t surprise me. That so many Dems were hoodwinked into destroying it in a vainglorious pursuit of single payer appalls me.
Kay
It just keeps going. My middle son is an electrician apprentice. They have a classroom day every other Friday and they’re drug tested, so every 2 weeks. They had an apprentice overdose and die on a job site – he was 20 years old. No one can figure out how he beat the test. The addicts say they can beat the tests- they brag about it- but I didn’t believe them up until now. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe they have to go to hair testing, which everyone considers the most reliable?
Ruckus
Just read the comments and I have to say that I agree with everyone so far. I think that’s a first for me reading a thread here.
I agree with Satby about leaving, sometimes there is only so much one can live with. I agree with A Ghost to Most as well about we should fight, and I do because I don’t speak a foreign language and this is my country that I served as well. It isn’t perfect, boy it isn’t perfect, but then really while a lot of places may be better in a lot of ways and more than good enough, no place is perfect. But it’s also tough to realize that you are a second or third class citizen in your own country, not because of anything you do but because of the color of your skin or the bits in your pants or how much money you make. And that most of us seem to be here to make life richer for people who are already, how did it use to be said, richer than avarice or wealthy beyond all need. I don’t like being a modern day serf. Not being one was why this country was formed. We’ve come full circle and it’s not an enjoyable journey.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Ruckus: Agreed. I’ve not been able to keep up with the blog as much of late; health issues (both my own and my mother’s) have been first and foremost. For those reasons and like the other veterans here, I am not inclined to go anywhere. Damned if I’ll roll over for these fascist bastards.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I worked in professional sports. We drug tested for a couple of reasons but mostly because it was/is a dangerous sport and some drugs could make it a lot more so. There is an organization that is so zealous in their anti drug stance that they test for every drug, including prescriptions and OTC anything. And because they test for everything, not all the tests were as reliable as one might think, which is bad when the cost to a competitor might be a career, for nothing. And the cost was $500/test. The organization wanted to test each competitor. Of course you probably can guess who owned the lab. And for those of you that think Europe is much better than here, they were based there. Smarmy is everywhere.
So we conducted our own testing routine. $75/test and it caught the drugs that increased performance. To your point Kay, there were people who tried to fool the tests. It could be done to a degree but not easily and not always successfully.
But the real problem is that we most often use punishment rather than assistance for people with drug problems. I work with a fella who was a meth addict and the court offered him treatment rather than punishment. It worked, he’s a functioning person again. He holds down a job and manages child support, something he couldn’t do as an addict. Had he been sent to jail for his problem he would be none of those things.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steeplejack: What do you think Mnuchin is?
Ruckus
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
I wondered why I hadn’t seen you here all that often.
Hope you and mom are getting and feeling better.
Villago Delenda Est
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: We don’t know about Barron, and Tiffany, aside from her own appetite for government largess as in bodyguards for trips to Europe, doesn’t seem to be in the same league as the vile spawn of Ivana, all of whom, in a just universe, would spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
[Quite often it’s far more than just intellectually corrupt.]
This as I see it is the puritanical streak of our culture. Every thing is god’s will and all we do is corrupt that, so we must be punished for even the suspicion of any deviation from the impossibly restrictive concept of what god wants. Which means that we have to be punished for everything because everything humans do is against god’s will. It’s bullshit to the nth degree. And has no place in a supposedly religiously free society.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ruckus: One of the reasons I’m an agnostic apathetic, bordering on atheist.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Ruckus: Thank you. She is healing, though dealing with a blood clot at present. My issue is minor by comparison, but aggravating nonetheless. Patience is a hard-earned virtue, and I ain’t there yet.
Tokyokie
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Years ago, I worked a summer job in which one of my bosses was an Irish Protestant who lived in the Republic of Ireland. He was openly contemptuous of his co-religionists in Northern Ireland, saying to me: “Don’t you see? They’re scared that the way they’ve treated the Catholics for hundreds of years will be the way they’d be treated were they part of Ireland.” I think you see the same dynamic among white, male Trump supporters. They have to maintain their dominance at all costs lest they face the consequences of generations of shabby behavior. But as my Irish friend knew firsthand, such fears are entirely misplaced and based on the assumption that those they’d been oppressing for hundreds of years are just as big of assholes as they are.
Alain the site fixer
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): I hear you. When I began this odyssey caring for my mom a few months ago, Adam’s suggestion, among many, that I not get angry or impatient with my mom. I try, every day. Sometimes I get snippy for a moment but remember the greater good and catch myself. My one fear from childhood was perpetuating my father’s temper/frustration. I once congratulated myself for having succeeded, not realizing that it’s a permanent battle.
FYI I’m planning on running your pics Thursday. I find them powerful and they stir up a lot for me so I wanted to treat them appropriately.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Alain the site fixer: Thank you, much appreciated.
Ruckus
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
Hang in there, you get used to it. Glad to hear it isn’t extremely serious.
Ruckus
@Alain the site fixer:
We have history with our parents, good and/or bad. When they get old and need care it’s no different than when we were young and needed the same. We have to try to remember that they are people in illness or decline and that we need to be as tolerant as we can. For some people on either side of this that can be impossible some of the time. So you do the best you can, it’s all you can do.
Anonymous patient
I am a chronic pain patient. I have had two joint replacements, which fixed those joints. So, what, 202 arthritic joints to go? Can’t fix back jonts, can’t fix foot joints, can’t fix hand joints. not practically. And surgery hurts, months of rehab, post-op pain killers required.
So far I have been able to self-control. I don’t take pain pills every day by any means. I do take Naproxen NSAID most days, which can cause toxic kidney damage. Fortunate to have good PT, expert, knows every joiint, muscle, tendon, how to strengthen and align vertibrae to help nerve numbness.
But I dont know what I would do without medication on a bad day, with a front coming through, with temps down for winter, ,needing to carry firewood, groceries, it will really suck. Sp far my doctor is aware of my condition and wants to provide the med s I need. But what happens when they change rules and change rules til I can’t afford a weekly dr applintment to get another script.