The rise and fall of the evil Sackler family and the opioid addiction crisis

I have written multiple times before about the opioid overdoses crisis and the major role in its growth played by the Sackler family and their family-owned company Purdue Pharma. I just finished reading the excellent book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe that carefully reveals the sordid history of the family in creating the crisis, something that the family went to great lengths to conceal from the public. He shows that while other companies also manufactured, distributed, and marketed the opioids that have caused so much suffering and deaths and continues to do so even today, the Sacklers played a special role in creating the crisis.

Drugs obtained from the poppy flower (opium and morphine) had long been known to be powerful in combating pain but were prescribed and used very sparingly because they were known to be highly addictive. They also carried with them social stigmas. Opium was associated with seedy underworld opium dens where people smoked pipes in dreamy semi-conscious states while morphine was a powerful drug that was injected and mainly used to treat incurable pain such as from cancer and was also used as a palliative at the end of life. Both those associations discouraged casual use.

What the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma did was develop and market a drug based on the opiod oxycodone under the brand name OxyContin. They claimed that they had eliminated the addictive aspects of the drug by encasing oxycodone in a coating that allowed the drug to be released slowly over a 12-hour period. They said that this eliminated the immediate highs and the subsequent lows of the drug that led to addiction. Furthermore, the drug could now be delivered in a tablet form, even though it required a prescription, and they made it seem like a mild over-the-counter painkiller like aspirin and acetaminophen. They marketed it with a vengeance to physicians and pharmacists, claiming that it should be the painkiller of choice for even everyday pain like that associated with sprains and arthritis and backache, and used their lobbying clout with the FDA and DEA to avoid close scrutiny of their claims by regulators in those agencies, even though they had little or no data to support those claims.
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Trump plays at being an aeronautical engineer

Trump is known for his obsessions, wildly irrational beliefs that he holds on to despite any evidence to the contrary. One is his hatred of windmills. While that is well known, less known is his obsession with the technology used to rapidly accelerate fighter jets from the decks of aircraft carriers. Older ships have largely a mechanical system of catapults but more modern ships have shifted to an electromagnetic system. Trump, for some reason, hates the newer systems.

What is troubling is that he seems determined to impose his will on a new aircraft carrier that is being built and demanding that they change the system to his preferred one.
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Insecure men retreating into fantasy worlds

There is a familiar pattern to stories of people with great wealth. It starts with the first generation becoming wealthy, usually by luck (they find oil on their property, say) or by developing some idea that they then ruthlessly exploit people and the earth’s resources to create their wealth. And then you have the subsequent generations that inherits that wealth. Some of them continue their ancestral business but others drift into hedonistic lifestyles where they do nothing productive at all but indulge their fantasies.

Jon Ronson writes about how, via his son, he stumbled onto the story of Chris Mark, whose great-grandfather Clayton had founded the steel company Clayton Mark & Company and made a fortune. Mark does not seem to have done anything on his own with his life but instead has nurtured the dream of using his inherited wealth to becoming a new Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, notorious for living in a mansion that was populated by scantily clad young women known as ‘bunnies’. (As far as we know, those women were not underage, which distinguishes Hefner from Jeffrey Epstein.)

Mark created his own mansion in the form of a massive medieval castle that he built in 2010 in rural Connecticut, complete with spires, towers, turrets, gargoyles, and a drawbridge. His dream seemed to be to entice attractive young women to come there and dress up and act like ‘princesses’, tiaras and all, who would curtsey before him and say things like “Yes, my lord”, and from among whom he would pick one to be his ‘queen’, while the others would have sex with one another. The lure for these women was that he told them he was producing a reality show for Netflix called 101 Princesses. Sadly, in these days of increasingly lurid and exploitative TV, this seemed plausible.
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Another election victory for a progressive

In a special election to replace Eric Swalwell in the California congressional seat he was forced to resign due to allegations of sexual misconduct, a progressive easily defeated a party establishment and Israel lobby backed candidate.

[Aisha] Wahab defeated Melissa Hernandez, a fellow Democrat who is on the Bay Area Rapid Transit board of directors, in the special election after the two got the most votes in the June 16 primary. The race moved to a one-on-one contest after no one secured a majority.

Wahab took 43% to Hernandez’s 17% in the initial primary, but Tuesday’s election was much closer. With 95% of the expected vote in, Wahab led 53% to 47%.

A super PAC aligned with the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent heavily in the race’s final weeks, dropping about $2.5 million against Wahab.

Wahab has said Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in Gaza is genocide, and her campaign website includes a statement panning “AIPAC-linked dark-money PACs” trying to “tear Aisha Wahab down.” Hernandez, meanwhile, was the only candidate who did not answer “yes” when she was asked at an April forum whether Israel was committing genocide.

AIPAC and the other members of the Israel lobby are by no means eliminated as a factor but their once-mighty clout in politics has definitely been diminished.

Mixed election results for progressives

Progressive Angie Nixon scored an upset win over the Democratic Party establishment candidate Alexander Vindman despite being vastly outspent by him by a ratio of 16-1..

In an upset for the Democratic establishment, progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.

Nixon, a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had significantly less funding going into the primary – with $975,000 to Vindman’s $16.3m at the end of July, according to Florida Politics.
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Nixon, who was born in Jacksonville, has aggressively opposed DeSantis’s policies, including with a sit-in at the governor’s office this spring to protest Republican redistricting, the Miami Herald reported. That demonstration resulted in her facing misdemeanor charges of trespassing and resisting, which she is fighting in court.

Vindman’s campaign had been focused on Moody, not his primary opponent, and he did not agree to debate Nixon, despite her public calls for him to take the stage with her.

“Floridians don’t want the establishment in Washington DC deciding who their Democratic nominee and US senator is going to be,” Nixon told the Tampa Bay Times in an earlier interview. “I’m someone who’s willing to debate. He’s not. I’m someone who doesn’t have to be briefed on the issues Floridians are facing because I’ve been fighting the attacks alongside them for nearly two decades.”

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The petty cruelty of Pirro and Trump

After the humiliating reversal over the charges to four people accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, US attorney and former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro was lambasted by her cult leader Trump for backing down and saying that the pool fiasco was caused by shoddy and rushed work.

Now, no doubt in an effort to suck up to him, she has brought vandalism charges against a 41-year old homeless woman Melissa Farris for defacing a World War II memorial. As usual, her prosecution team made absurdly exaggerated statements and tried to make out that this was a grave assault on America itself.

“This was a brazen attack on one of the Nation’s most sacred monuments—an enduring symbol of freedom and a solemn tribute to the sacrifice of so many,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Charles Klug and Samuel Deau wrote in a brief that also carries Pirro’s name in the signature block.

“Rather than honoring the courage and selflessness of the World War II Veterans, Defendant chose to assault that symbol of sacrifice for her own gain and to make a public spectacle,” prosecutors added. “Defendant’s actions are not just criminal, they violate the American values that the Memorial represents.”
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While most vandalism cases get little attention from U.S. attorneys, Pirro posted twice on social media about Farris’ arrest. The prosecutor also said she was personally aggrieved by Farris’ actions.

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Bomb Oman? Sure, why not? What could go wrong?

Trump’s desperation over his failed war with Iran is getting more obvious, especially his threat to bomb Oman, a long-time ally, using his usual vulgar language.

“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News on Monday, the second time he has directed such a threat at Muscat, a longtime US strategic partner that has traditionally served as a key backchannel between Washington and Tehran.
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Trump also dismissed concerns that Washington’s own arsenal was being depleted by nearly six months of fighting, telling Fox News that what the US had expended against Iran so far is “peanuts”.

He suggested many of the US’s more advanced munitions, including air defense systems, had already been “given away” to Ukraine under his predecessor, Joe Biden – a claim that echoes warnings from defense analysts earlier in the war that US and allied stockpiles were being drawn down faster than they could be replenished.
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In a casual aside at a cabinet meeting in May, the president also threatened to “blow up” Oman if it failed to “behave”.

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Thoughts on the blog comments policy

Readers may recall that at one time I was becoming frustrated with the tone of the comments in this blog, with few people endlessly and acrimoniously sniping at each other over trivial things, treating them with disdain, being needlessly sarcastic, acting superior, and generally creating an unpleasant atmosphere for everyone.

So I introduced some harsh measures such as a limit on the number of comments that could be made to a single post and what I would not tolerate. You can see that policy here. As a consequence, a very few people were either banned or received private messages from me that they were skirting the line.

I must say that the blog comments have become so much better. People are actually talking to one another, responding positively and collegially to others even they disagree, and contributing very useful information that I find enlightening. Sometimes people ask questions and others respond thoughtfully with answers instead of being dismissive. The comments on this post are a good example of what I am talking about because in them I learned a lot about naval logistics.

It is just what I hoped the comments section should be like and a rarity in the world of the internet. I find the comments section to be very pleasurable to read now and hope others do to.

So thanks everyone!

Trump and Pirro’s Lincoln pool problem may well get worse

Greg Sargent argues that simply because the justice department has dropped all the charges against the four people who had been accused of deliberately vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool does not mean that the problems for Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington DC, who gleefully announced the indictments before later dropping them, will go away.

When the charges were dropped, they were done ‘without prejudice’ meaning that they could be filed again. Norm Eisen, the lawyer for David Hearn who had been charged with a felony that could have had him imprisoned for ten years, is first seeking to have the charges dropped ‘with prejudice’ to prevent Pirro from carrying out what Trump clearly wants, which is to charge them again. But in addition, he is seeking to have the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the indictments released, because they will show if the jurors were grossly misled by Pirro, which could result in sanctions against her.

Eisen and Hearn’s other lawyers are not letting this drop. For some time now, they’ve been seeking access to full transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—including instructions that prosecutors gave jurors on charging guidelines—to determine whether prosecutors misled them to secure Hearn’s indictment.
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