When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Monday, April 22, 2019
AMERICA'S OPIOID CRISIS - BIG PHARMA KEEPS AMERICA ADDICTED AND HAULS IN THE PROFITS - CONGRESS COLLECTS THEIR BRIBES AND WINKS AND NODS AT THE CRISIS
College-Grad
Salaries Eroded by Hidden Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers
Every CEO in every company sees the business
opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with
cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.
“The drug epidemic is the product of capitalism and the
policies of the capitalist parties, both Democrats and
Republicans. There is, first of all, the role of the pharmaceutical
companies, which have amassed huge profits from the
deceptive marketing of opioid pain killers, which they claimed were
not addictive. Prescriptions for opioids such as Percocet, Oxycontin
and Vicodin skyrocketed from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 259 million in
2012. What are the numbers and profits now?
OPIOID AMERICA:
CHINA AND MEXICO PARTNER TO ADDICT AMERICA
American middle-class is addicted,
poor, jobless and suicidal…. Thank the corrupt government for surrendering our
borders to 40 million looting Mexicans and then handing the bills to middle
America?
“While
drug distributors have paid a total of $400 million in fines over the past
10 years, their combined revenue during this same period was over $5
trillion.”
“Opioids
have ravaged families and devastated communities across the country.
Encouraging their open use undermines the rule of law and will do nothing to
quell their continued abuse, let alone the problems underlying mass addiction.”
NEW YORK TIMES
The
giants at the heart of the opioid crisis
DANNY HAKIM,
WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and RONI CARYN RABIN
There are the Sacklers, the family that controls Purdue Pharma,
the maker of OxyContin. There are the doctors who ran pill mills, and the rogue
pharmacists who churned out opioid orders by the thousands.
But
the daunting financial muscle that has driven the spread of prescription
opioids in the United States comes from the distributors — companies that act
as middlemen, trucking medications of all kinds from vast warehouses to
hospitals, clinics and drugstores.
The
industry’s giants, Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, are all
among the 15 largest
American companies by revenue. Together, they distribute more
than 90 percent of the nation’s drug and medical supplies.
New
civil suits from the attorneys general in New York, Vermont and Washington Stateaccuse
distributors of brazenly devising systems to evade regulators. They allege that
the companies warned many pharmacies at risk of being reported to the Drug Enforcement
Administration, helped others to increase and circumvent limits on how many
opioids they were allowed to buy, and often gave advance notice on the rare
occasions they performed audits.
Related video: Lenker Says Drug
Manufacturers Created the Opioid Crisis (provided
by Bloomberg)
Three-fourths of prescriptions at a Queens pharmacy supplied by
Amerisource were written by doctors who were later indicted or convicted, the
New York complaint said. For more than five years, Cardinal shipped to a
pharmacy with the highest oxycodone volume in Suffolk County, N.Y., despite
continually flagging its orders as suspicious. McKesson kept shipping to two
pharmacies six years after learning that they had been filling prescriptions
from doctors who were likely engaging in crimes. The shipments stopped only
last year, after the doctors were indicted.
“How
do the C.E.O.s of these companies sleep at night?” Bob Ferguson, Washington’s
attorney general, said at a recent news conference.
Now,
in what could be a test case, the United States attorney’s office for the
Southern District of New York and the D.E.A. are wrapping up an investigation
that appears likely to result in the first criminal case involving a major
opioid distributor, Rochester Drug Cooperative, one of the 10 largest, people
familiar with the matter said. The investigation began with an examination of
possible crimes including wire and mail fraud and various drug violations,
according to three people with knowledge of a federal grand jury subpoena
served on Rochester in 2017, but it remains unclear what charges might be
brought.
The state lawsuits also present evidence that government at all
levels has been ineffective at policing the distributors. For the first decade
of the crisis, the three largest companies did not even have meaningful
programs to monitor suspicious orders, despite being required by federal law to
track narcotics and to look out for spikes in orders and cash payments. Since
then they have promised and failed to build robust systems to prevent
widespread opioid abuse.
The
distributors rebutted the new allegations.
“We
reject the state’s suggestion that our employees circumvented safeguards to
increase sales,” Kristin Chasen, a spokeswoman for McKesson, said in a
statement. Cardinal, in its statement, said it had “developed and implemented a
constantly adaptive and rigorous system to combat controlled substance
diversion.”
Amerisource
put the onus on the D.E.A., which it said receives data on all orders shipped
and notifications of suspicious ones. “It defies common sense for distributors
such as AmerisourceBergen to be singled out,” the company said in a statement.
In the
two decades since OxyContin was introduced in 1996, there have been nearly 218,000 overdose
deaths related to prescription opioids, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While overdose deaths continue to
rise, the number of opioid prescriptions has been falling since 2012.
But
that is mostly because of a classification change that made drugs like Vicodin
(which mix opioids with milder drugs) Schedule II narcotics, which placed more
restrictions on prescribing them. Oxycodone, the powerful narcotic that is the
main ingredient in OxyContin, was already a Schedule II drug and its sales have
continued to rise, according to figures compiled by Iqvia, a health data
provider.
The
three largest distributors sold 1.6 billion oxycodone pills in New York alone
between 2010 and 2018. It was distributors, said the office of Attorney General
Letitia James of New York, who “jammed open the floodgates.”
In
2017, after years of allegedly flouting legal requirements to monitor
suspicious orders of opioids, McKesson agreed to a $150 million settlement with
the Justice Department, a record for a distributor.
For
most businesses, $150 million would be a lot of money. At McKesson, it was less
than the $159 million retirement package the company granted its longtime chief
executive, John H. Hammergren, in 2013. (After a public backlash — a Forbes headline asked
if it was “The World’s Most Outrageous Pension Deal?” — the company later reduced the
package to $114 million.)
It was
among a string of settlements, and others came far cheaper.
In
2008, McKesson, which supplies Walmart, paid $13.25 million and Cardinal, the
main CVS supplier, paid $34 million to
settle federal claims that they had been filling suspicious orders.
Before
2007, only two of Cardinal’s roughly 40,000 employees were dedicated to
addressing the problem, according to court filings. One McKesson compliance
officer complained that asking for resources was like “asking for a Ferrari,”
according to New York’s lawsuit.
More settlements followed, but little changed. Cardinal paid a
total of $64 million in settlements with the Justice Department in 2012, 2016
and 2017, with similar agreements struck by its rivals. The policing of opioid
sales continued to be largely delegated by law to the distributors.
The
companies created order volume thresholds for different drugs that would
trigger reporting to the D.E.A., but some were so lofty that they resulted in
relatively few such reports, the complaints said.
Or
they worked around them. In one industry practice, known as “cutting,” Cardinal
canceled pharmacy orders “that exceeded a threshold” and allowed “a subsequent,
often smaller order,” Vermont’s complaint said.
Brandi
Martin, a Cardinal spokeswoman, said that “cut orders are reported to the
D.E.A.” and were not “a tactic to avoid reporting.”
Egregious
moves spurred limited responses, according to the complaints. McKesson allowed
one pharmacy a fivefold oxycodone increase over six months, then refused
another request for an 80 percent increase. The company continued shipping to
the pharmacy anyway, even after a rival stopped.
McKesson,
in its statement, said it was continuing “to enhance and evolve” its compliance
efforts.
By
last year, executives were summoned by Congress. Both Mr. Hammergren, of
McKesson, and George Barrett, the executive chairman of Cardinal at the time
and its former chief executive, played down their roles in the supply chain.
During
the hearings, Representative Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, picked out a
single drugstore in rural West Virginia that had been swamped with opioids —
4,000 pills a day at one point from Cardinal, 5,000 from McKesson.
“Don’t
you take responsibility?” she asked, adding, “You saw that paying the penalties
on your settlement agreements was a cost worth paying because you were making
so much money?”
“I
wish we had moved earlier to stop shipping to that pharmacy,” Mr. Barrett said
at the hearing. Mr. Hammergren echoed that, saying, “I would have liked to have
made a decision faster.”
Ms.
Castor was not satisfied. “This was the opposite of due diligence,” she said.
A criminal inquiry
There
was little enthusiasm for policing opioids at Rochester Drug Cooperative, New
York’s complaint alleges.
For
years, only two people at Rochester were assigned to compliance, and one had
other responsibilities. Amid discussions about hiring a compliance consultant,
Laurence F. Doud III wrote in an email when he was the company’s chief
executive that it was “making me ill as to how much this is going to cost.”
Mr.
Doud is now suing Rochester, claiming wrongful termination and contending it
conspired to blame him for conduct that the D.E.A. and federal prosecutors in
New York are investigating in the criminal inquiry. (His suit was previously
reported by The Democrat and
Chronicle of the city of Rochester.) The current chief
executive, Joseph Brennan, is on leave.
Rochester
is a cooperative of pharmacies, so monitoring suspicious orders meant
monitoring its own members. But it had practices that were similar to those of
its larger rivals. Rochester’s upper limits on how many pills pharmacies could
buy were “invariably so high that customers could not reach them unless their
order volumes tripled from their historical purchasing patterns, rendering the
system virtually useless,” New York alleges.
Sales
were brisk. Between 2010 and 2018, Rochester sold 143 million oxycodone pills
in New York.
The
company added a Queens pharmacy with numerous cash buyers as a customer in
2016. The pharmacy was also filling prescriptions from out-of-state doctors and
one who had been arrested over oxycodone prescribing practices, the complaint
says.
In
2013, Rochester continued shipping to a pharmacy run by a pediatrician who had
surfaced in headlines as running a pill mill, according to the complaint. In an
email, one Rochester consultant called the situation “a stick of dynamite
waiting for the D.E.A. to light the fuse.” The shipments continued.
In a
$360,000 settlement in 2015, Rochester admitted that it had failed to report
thousands of opioid transactions over five years. The subsequent criminal
inquiry sought records including loans and lines of credit that Rochester had
extended to its customers, according to people with knowledge of the 2017
subpoena.
Criminal
charges are soon expected, with the company and current and former executives
under scrutiny, the three people familiar with the matter said. They, like
those with knowledge of the subpoena, spoke on the condition of anonymity
because of the developing investigation. Such a prosecution would appear to be
the first time a major distributor has been held criminally responsible in
connection with opioids.
The
D.E.A. and the office of Geoffrey S. Berman, United States attorney for the
Southern District of New York, declined to comment on the inquiry.
Jeff
Eller, a Rochester spokesman, declined to answer specific questions, citing the
investigation, but he said that Rochester’s compliance department is more than
six times larger than it was in 2013 and that the company “will continue to
make a significant investment.”
A failure to regulate
Louis
Crisafi’s opioid of choice was Actiq, a powerful fentanyl lollipop.
He
allegedly left wrappers around the office, which was a bad idea, since he was a
senior investigator for the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, a branch of the
New York State Department of Health that monitors opioid sales.
Mr.
Crisafi’s fentanyl use was noticed at work by several other investigators and
was among the topics of a 2008 reportissued by the state
inspector general that raised concerns about the bureau, where
many investigators reported to a pharmacist. (Mr. Crisafi, who left the bureau
at the time, said he had a legal prescription and never used opioids on the
job.)
States
have had trouble policing opioid use — even among their own. Like similar
agencies elsewhere, the New York narcotics bureau was ill-equipped, with fewer
than 20 investigators overseeing distributors and manufacturers, along with the
state’s 5,586 pharmacies and more than 120,000 prescribers.
Kenneth
Post, a former director of the bureau, said it does not belong in the Health
Department, which has close ties with health care providers.
“They’re
policing their own, and it doesn’t work,” said Mr. Post, who left the agency in
2010. The Health Department called him a “disgruntled former employee.”
A 2012
audit by the state Comptroller’s Office found that the bureau had overlooked
hundreds of thousands of flawed opioid prescriptions over two years.
The
Health Department said in a statement that the bureau had only “limited
investigatory” power, deflecting responsibility “to federal, state and local
law enforcement.”
At the
federal level, the D.E.A. does not closely monitor the millions of transactions
involving controlled substances, said Paul T. Farrell, a lawyer who represents
municipalities in lawsuits against
drugmakers.
“The
D.E.A. is not the T.S.A., which is responsible for looking at every passenger
going through and screening out those who are threats,” he said, referring to
the Transportation Security Administration. Instead, he said that “once a tip
is made,” the D.E.A. will “reconstruct what actually happened.”
In a
statement, the D.E.A. said investigations are presented to federal prosecutors,
who choose “the appropriate litigation strategy.”
Distributors
have marshaled lobbyists, contributing $1.5 million to sponsors and co-sponsors
of a 2016 law thwarting the
D.E.A.’s efforts to freeze suspicious drug shipments.
Distributors
have also lined up lobbyists with ties to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York,
where lawmakers included $100 million in opioid taxes or surcharges in two
consecutive budgets, though last year’s measure is tied up in court. They have
hired two firms founded or co-founded by onetime aides to former Gov. Mario M.
Cuomo as well as Mercury Group, whose executives include former advisers to the
current governor.
For
now, distributors remain largely in control.
“It’s
not a good system,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, an addiction expert. “It’s the fox
guarding the henhouse.”
MEXICO K ILLS AMERICA TWICE OVER!
DHS Secretary: ‘ICE Interdicted Enough Fentanyl Last Year to
K ill Every American Twice Over’
Fentanyl is a
synthetic opiate that according to the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. The
illicit drug has been attributed to the alarming increase in opioid overdose
deaths throughout the United States.
“Mexican Border States Net 320 Pounds of Meth in Two
Days” BREITBART
*
“Eight-Time
Deportee Accused of Trafficking $850,000 in Meth, Cocaine.”
MICHAEL CUTLER
JUDICIAL
WATCH:
“The
greatest criminal threat to the daily lives of American citizens are the
Mexican drug cartels.”
“Mexican
drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists
have the goal of destroying the United States. Mexican drug cartels
are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in
virtually every community across this country.” JUDICIALWATCH
Government-approved opioids almost doubled the number of young men who were pushed out of the workforce before the election of President Donald Trump, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
“Our estimates imply that prescription opioids can account for 44 percent of the realized national decrease in men’s labor force participation between 2001 and 2015,” said the report, which was written by Dionissi Aliprantis, Kyle Fee, and Mark Schweitzer.
The report focuses on rural areas which comprise 30 percent of the U.S. population, saying:
We find that increasing the local prescription rate by 10 percent decreases the prime-age employment rate by 0.50 percentage points for men and 0.17 percentage points for women. This effect is larger for white men with less than a BA (0.70 percentage points) and largest for minority men with less than a BA (1.01 percentage points).
Legal opioids did more damage to young men than to young women, the report says:
Examining the growth of national average prescription rates between 2000 to 2016 … For prime age men, they would imply a reduction in the labor force participation rate of 1.3 percentage points, or 44 percent of the decline from 2001 to 2015. For prime age women, our estimates would imply a reduction in the labor force participation rate of 0.5 percentage points, or 17 percent of the decline.
The legal drugs — not the economic decline — caused the opioid dropout, the authors say:
We find that our results are not simply an artifact of the same areas being impacted both by the opioid crisis and by weak labor market conditions; areas with weak or strong labor markets react equivalently to increased exposure to legal opioids.
Legal opioids helped kill tens of thousands of Americans. Breitbart News reported in December 2016 that “overdose deaths from legal prescription opioids rose four percent from 2014’s 16,941 up to 17,536 in 2015. These drugs include oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone.”
The dropout by millions of American men had a huge impact on wages, wealth, and economic activity in heartland America, and millions of young men are still without jobs in President Donald Trump’s tight labor market. “More than 12 million Americans have remain sidelined from the U.S. workforce despite their wanting full-time employment, federal data suggests,” Breitbart reported April 15.
The dropout has also spurred business demands for more immigrant workers.
However, some of the young men hurt by opioids are returning to the job market under Trump’s low-immigration “Hire American” economic policies. Heartland states have gained jobs and investment faster than the Democrat-dominated coastal cities and countries won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to an April 17 article by the New York Times:
Now, under a Republican administration, job growth rates in Trump country are rising faster than they are in Democratic America. As the national unemployment rate hovers at just below 4 percent, far more red states than blue states are setting records for low levels of joblessness.
“Everyone’s accelerated, but Trump counties have gone from lagging Clinton counties to seeing faster job growth,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings wrote by email. “Redder, smaller, more rural communities really are ‘winning’ a little more. So long as there’s no recession, that may shape the atmosphere surrounding the 2020 election.”
…
During the first 21 months of the Trump administration — January 2017 to September 2018 — both Clinton and Trump counties continued to experience faster rates of job growth. But the increase was substantially larger in Trump counties, where the rate of growth increased from 1.5 to 2.6 percent.
But much of that gain has been among young women, not young men, according to the Wall Street Journal:
The workforce participation rate for young men aged 25 to 34 fell three points from 2009 to 2014 and has nudged back up to half a point since mid-2017, according to the Wall Street Journal. But the workforce rate for similar-aged young women fell one point after 2009 and has since risen two points above the 2009 level.
The drugs worsened the civic damaged caused by the Washington, DC, free-trade, low-wage, high-immigration economic policies. In August 2016, Breitbart reported:
President Barack Obama’s chief economist says Washington is imposing the economic pain of five simultaneous recessions on less-educated Americans, thereby pushing millions of working-age men off jobs, out of the workforce, and into poverty.
Roughly ten percent of American “prime age” men, or seven million men aged 25 to 54, have dropped out of the nation’s workforce of 150 million. They are not trying to get jobs, and are not participating in the nation’s labor force.
“This [dropout] is caused by policies and institutions, not by technology,” admitted Jason Furman, an economist who chairs the president’s Council of Economic Advisors. “We shouldn’t accept it as inevitable,” he told a Brookings Institute expert, Dave Wessel onAugust 10.
…
Furman says low wages are the primary cause of the workforce shrinkage.
“The amount [of money] that employers would want to hire them for some reason has gone down. … That’s consistent with what we see in the states and in the aggregate,” Furman said.
Goldman Sachs says Trump's tight labor-market policy (AKA 'Hire American') gave 4% raise to blue-collar/middle-class in 2018. But upper-income graduate salaries lagged - maybe b/c of 1.5 million visa-worker graduates who work for spaghettiOs & green cards http://bit.ly/2Fan4b0
The post-2o10 inflow of illegal fentanyl drugs worsened the legal drug crisis. But officials working for Obama largely ignored the rising disaster, according to a Washington Postarticle. In 2016, the Postreported:
The 11 [health] experts pressed the officials to declare fentanyl a national “public health emergency” that would put a laser-like focus on combating the emerging epidemic and warn the country about the threat, according to a copy of the letter.
“The fentanyl crisis represents an extraordinary public health challenge — and requires an extraordinary public health response,” the experts wrote to six administration officials, including the nation’s “drug czar” and the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The administration considered the request but did not act on it.
In 2017, almost 74,000 Americans died from drugs, up from almost 64,000 in 2016.
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest workers, in addition to approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and also tolerates about eight million illegal workers and the inflow of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants.
This federal policy of flooding the market with cheap white-collar graduates and blue-collar foreign labor is intended to boost economic growth for investors.
This policy works by shifting enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts children’s schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
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