THE BIDEN INVASION - Health inspections for foreign nationals entering our country illegally have gone out the window. That's enabled the importation of many diseases which affect livestock and other agricultural output, and already these things are happening. Legal immigrants and even returning U.S. citizens must pass these inspections to protect the U.S. food supply. But under Joe Biden's catch-and-release, illegals are exempt from such cumbersome requirements. MONICA SHOWALTER
Monday, June 17, 2019
A NATION UNRAVELS - SUICIDE RATES FOR DOCTORS SOARS - HIGHEST IN U.S. POPULATION
Suicide rates for doctors and young physicians among highest in the US population
Doctors in the United States confront a high suicide rate as a result of stressful working conditions and excessively long work hours.
Director and chairman of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, Dr. Edward Wilson, told CNBC that it is estimated that one doctor dies every day by suicide in the US due to “stress and rigorous work schedules.”
Doctors and health professionals within the US, according to Ellison, are “stressed to the breaking point” due to stifling work schedules and mounting pressures that stem from patient care.
Depression, the primary cause of suicidal ideation, affects an estimated 12 percent of male physicians and 19.5 percent of female physicians, but doctors are often hesitant to seek treatment due to the stigma associated with mental health problems.
As a result, doctors have the highest suicide rate among any profession in the country: 28 to 40 per 100,000 persons compared to 12.3 per 100,000 for the general population.
According to Ellison, recent data shows that 44 percent of physicians show signs of physical and emotional exhaustion, or “burnout,” which can lead to further mental health problems as doctors have difficulty adequately taking care for themselves, such as eating and sleeping properly.
Changes made to the way hospitals and medical centers operate in recent years may have improved the efficiency of the American healthcare system, but at the cost of longer and more exhaustive work schedules for doctors. Doctors are now spending less time with patients in traditional care settings and more time fulfilling extraneous tasks traditionally performed by adjunct staff and employees.
As a result, the suicide rate among physicians has exploded in recent decades. The suicide rate among male and female physicians is 1.41 and 2.27 times higher than that of the general male and female population, respectively.
For example, Dr. Benjamin Shaffer, a renowned surgeon from Washington D.C., hung himself in 2015 after taking his son to school. He had struggled his entire life with anxiety and a severe form of insomnia, which afforded him little time to sleep before operating on and treating patients.
Just days before he committed suicide and in the face of growing personal turmoil, his psychiatrist prescribed two new drugs which merely exacerbated his anxiety and insomnia and even led to paranoia. After he was told that he would need medication for the rest of his life, he concluded that he could never live a normal life again and decided to kill himself.
High suicide rates are also prevalent among medical students. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for medical students. They are three times more likely to kill themselves than their peers in the same age group. As many as 30 percent of medical students suffer from depression.
The work schedules for young doctors transitioning from medical school, customarily referred to as “residents,” are extremely onerous. Residents are expected to work up to 80 hours a week with single shifts that can last up to 28 hours.
These grueling schedules are largely the result of the centralized matching system for residency applicants in the hospital labor market and the monopoly held by a handful of hospital chains. Although employer-controlled labor markets are typically prohibited by anti-trust laws, the system remains the only avenue for residents to become fully licensed doctors.
Centralized matching, commonly referenced as “the match,” allows a handful of employers to select residency applicants without them having any legal right or ability to negotiate the terms of their contracts. This grants hospital conglomerates free rein to implement excessive hours and lower pay.
In 2002, a group of residency students filed a lawsuit against the for-profit selection system, deeming it an unlawful “contract” or “conspiracy” designed to undermine federal antitrust laws. After a federal district court initially ruled that “the match” may be illegal and give an unfair advantage to healthcare institutions, Congress passed legislation immunizing medical training programs from antitrust lawsuits.
Thus, residency programs give hospital employers access to a well-educated, but super-exploited and over-burdened workforce. As a 2017 article in The Atlantic noted, “while residency-program administrators no doubt take their educational obligations seriously, residents are also a cheap source of skilled labor that can fill gaps in coverage.” Resident salaries are generally equivalent to those of the hospital cleaning staff and about half of what nurse practitioners get paid even though residents typically work much longer hours.
The long hours residents are compelled to work causes tremendous physical and psychological stress. In response, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (AGGME) implemented a “duty-hour” reform policy in 2003, which lowered the maximum weekly hospital working hours from 120 to 80 and the length of single shifts from 48 to 28 hours.
However, this change did little to lessen the severity of residents’ schedules. Surveys show that the reforms led to virtually no changes in work and sleep hours.
A large reason behind the failure of the reforms is that hospitals have not increased the rate of new hires to keep up with the rising demands of healthcare operations. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of patients admitted to teaching hospitals rose 46 percent, but the number of residency spots only increased 13 percent.
Kay
Hymowitz joins City Journal editor Brian
Anderson to
discuss a challenge facing aging populations in wealthy nations across the
world: loneliness. Her essay in the Spring 2019 issue, “Alone,” will be
released online this Sunday.
“Americans
are suffering from a bad case of loneliness,” Hymowitz writes. “Foundering
social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising
numbers of ‘deaths of despair’ suggest a profound, collective discontent.”
Evidence
of the loneliness epidemic is dramatic in other countries, too. Japan, for
example, has seen a troubling rise in “lonely deaths.” The challenge, Hymowitz
says, is to teach younger generations the importance of family and community
before they make decisions that will further isolate them.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blogs podcast. This is
Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Kay
Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a longtime
contributing editor at the magazine. Her latest piece in City Journal is called
“Alone: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.”
That's the subtitle. It's one of the great pieces she's ever written in City
Journal and I encourage you to find it on our website. Lastly, just one more
announcement. We created a new email address for the show, so if listeners want
to get in touch and drop a comment or share an idea, you can now email us
at podcast@city-journal.org. That's podcast@city-journal.org. That's it for the
introduction. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Kay Hymowitz.
Brian Anderson: Hello again everyone. This is Brian
Anderson, the editor of City Journal and joining us in the studio now is Kay
Hymowitz. She's a contributing editor at City Journal and a fellow at the
Manhattan Institute. You can follow her on Twitter @KayHymowitz. And she's the
author of many books, most recently the New Brooklyn: What It Takes to
Bring a City Back, which came out in 2017. And prior to that, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, which came out in 2011.
We're here today though to talk about her latest piece in City Journal called
Alone. Kay, thanks very much for joining us.
Kay Hymowitz: I'm happy to be here, Brian.
Brian Anderson: So let's just start off. What made you want
to write about the topic of loneliness, and what is the state of loneliness in
America?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, let me start by saying I didn't
actually set out to write about loneliness. I knew it was a great topic, but I
wasn't exactly sure how to approach it. And I stumbled across an article that
inspired me by two social scientists, I think they're demographers. And they
described something called a rise of kinlessness, that is a rise in the number
of people who have no kin, older people who have no kin. And it was very eye
opening and I began to see that the breakdown of the family that I've been
studying for maybe 15 years now and that I had mostly talked about in relation
to its impact on children was also having quite an impact on older people,
particularly aging adults. And that some of the despair that we were hearing
about, the deaths of despair, the opioid crisis and so on so forth, are
actually disproportionately made up of divorced and single, well, of men, in
particular. So I realized that we're looking at something big here in terms of
the family breakdown and its ultimate impact is something that I hadn't quite
foreseen or thought of.
Brian Anderson: It's probably worth rehearsing some of the
numbers in terms of this breakdown in family. Divorce rates for married
couples, I think, are probably double what they were back in the 50s.
Kay Hymowitz: They are indeed.
Brian Anderson: But in some ways the picture's even darker. You
have a 40% of kids, I think, are born to unmarried mothers now. That's up from
5% in 1960. And strikingly the rate of women who don't give birth at all, I
think, has doubled or is much higher. Yeah. And you could go on and on in this
vein. This is obviously the core of your argument that's having a big impact on
loneliness and kinlessness and this whole phenomenon. So say a bit more about
that and what do you think is driving it?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, I think that a lot of what's
happening is due to a change in our understanding of what the family is, what
its purpose is. I talk a lot in the article about the beginnings of what I see
is the unraveling of the family, or shall we say, a kind of assault on, on the
traditional family. I want to clarify that as we go on. I see the beginnings of
it in something that demographers call the Second Demographic Transition. We
sometimes talk about the, in ordinary parlance, we talk about the 60s or the
Sexual Revolution. But those were actually an American reflection of something
that has, as I said, demographers have been studying. The second demographic
transition they believe is partly the result of affluence as he, as the
societies in the west in particular, but also over time Japan and others, as
they got richer, families were not as essential to mere survival as they had
one been. Now this was intensified this fact by the introduction of the birth
control pill, obviously because you could control sexual reproduction without
worrying about whether you're married or not. And what the theory is that this
would introduce a different set of values, anti-authoritarian, and little bit
of anti-tradition. Individualistic. As people began to see they could be freer
to find other ways of living than to depend entirely on family or depend mostly
on their families. And in fact, following the second demographic transition,
um, there was a huge increase as you, just as you just pointed out in your
numbers in the percentage of divorces, the percentage of non-marital births.
And this by the way, is not just true in the United States, but in other
developed countries. Not all of them, but many. And also of fatherlessness. So
I think that these ideas that emerged with affluence and the second demographic
transition made it possible for people to think very differently about how they
were going to live. And I should say now, because I'll be talking about the
downsides of this, what followed from the second demographic transition. But it
did really give people a lot of freedom. And there's no question that there
were many people for relieved from very miserable and even violent marriages.
As a result of the second demographic transition. There were many different
ways to think about letting the people, it was possible to not be married if
you really didn't want to. Which I think has worked nicely for some
individuals. And of course it opened up the door to gay marriage, for much more
freedom for gays and lesbians. So there is a tremendous upside and I don't want
to discount that. But what I try to do in this article or show that there's
some real downsides that we haven't quite understood.
Brian Anderson: What are some of those downsides? Why is it a
problem for society that people are increasingly alone? And what are some of
the manifestations of that that are negative?
Kay Hymowitz: Right. So one of the things that I try to
do in the article is to remind people that kinship, those close family
relations, blood and marital relations, have been kind of the linchpin of
societies practically since we came out of the caves. It is absolutely
fundamental to every society. The relationship between kin and what it does
is... Those relationships define certain kinds of obligations. We tend to be
more protective of kin and to understand our roles better when in relation to
kin. Everything else, all of our other relationships may be very important to
us, but we're making those up pretty much as we go along. And the kinship... As
we've sort of gotten rid of that basic building block, or we've sort of
undermined it through the divorce revolution, the sexual revolution in the
second demographic transition, we've undermined the way kin work. So one point
I make is that there's been a huge rise in cohabitation and particularly among
less educated and lower income people. Cohabitation has become a kind of
substitute for marriage. And the hope among, social scientists and sociologists
and economists was always that gradually people would realize that you could
cohabit, but you really ought to stay together. That it would be a kind of it,
that it would be a kind of marriage or marriage light. But in fact, that's not
what's happened. What's happened is that the, the norm of cohabitation is much
more transitory, impermanent, fragile, and unpredictable. And those couples who
were cohabitating and do not go onto marry tend to break up much, much more
quickly.
Brian Anderson: This is even true when they have children?
Kay Hymowitz: Oh yes, definitely. The children of
cohabiting couples are having a very, very different upbringing than the
children of married couples. Now, it's true. we do have higher rates of divorce
than we used to, although it's stabilized. And one of the reasons it's
stabilized is that so many people are not getting married anymore, they are
cohabiting. The upshot is that there are an awful lot of children, as I've
pointed out many times before growing up in very unstable environments, but
then an awful lot of parents, particularly men, who are losing direct contact
with their kids. Now most men, after a divorce or after a child out of
marriage, try to maintain some contact. But that tends to, it's not always
true, that tends to fade out over time. Remember a lot of the people who are
cohabiting, having children as their cohabiting are young, and understandably
if that relationship doesn't work out, that go on and seek out another one.
Well, what often happens is that there is a new family that develops out of
that second union and possibly even a third or forth. So the child is faced
with a, and fathers too, are faced with this rolling cast of people, none of
whom have quite the connection of the kin of the old fashioned can
relationships so that those men are frequently on their own as they get older.
And if I could just add a little personal observation here that some people
might not agree with, men just don't make homes or, you know make even make
friends quite the way that women do. And we do have some data on this as well.
Brian Anderson: Looking around the world, and you noted this
earlier, we know that the US isn't the only country facing problems of
loneliness. One of the most striking examples in your story is Japan, which was
seen just an incredible rise in what they call "lonely deaths." Maybe
you could describe a little bit the situation there and how Japan is dealing
with it?
Kay Hymowitz: Japan is an interesting contrast. to the
United States in some ways in other western countries because non marital
childbearing, single motherhood is relatively rare, unlike here. And also
divorce is, relatively rare. It's getting, it's getting more common. What's
happening instead is that an awful lot of people are not having children, so
therefore their fertility rates are very, very low.
Brian Anderson: Well below replacement rate, I believe?
Kay Hymowitz: Well below replacement. Ours are low, but
this is lower. I read one a social Japanese social scientists who said that the
basic concept of the family in Japan is dead. So there's an awful lot of
elderly people on their own, living alone. And by the way, dependent on the
state to support them because they don't have any family to speak of. Or their
family has moved away, or is extremely busy with work. We know that the
Japanese are workaholics. But they started to see this rise in lonely deaths,
which, we're beginning to see here too. And it became such a phenomenon in
Japan that the newspapers started to cover, local newspapers would start to
cover these stories that were happening very frequently. And in addition, this
was the part that kind of, caused me to sit up and wonder. There are businesses
now, there are cleanup companies, to take care of apartments after a lonely
death because what happens is that when somebody dies and they're alone and
nobody's really watching out for them, they often die in their apartment.
Nobody knows they're dead. Nobody finds them until the telltale smell of
decaying body. And it makes a huge mess for building owners or landlords. So
they've started these companies, these cleanup companies. And I believe I
mentioned the name of one of them, which is kind of grim. It's called Next.
Brian Anderson: Yeah.
Kay Hymowitz: But these companies, there are a fair
number of them and they've become an essential, essential part of Japanese
life.
Brian Anderson: It's a very, very grim reality. I've been reading
a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism, and it's an argument
against being immersed in social media and other forms of technologically
driven distraction. He says, we need to set more time for our sanity sake to be
alone or at least off of the Internet and this constant bombardment of, of
connection with other people. In other words, he's saying technology is making
us constantly exposed to other people in ways that can harm us. At least if it
goes too far. How does social media and the constant judgment that people
sometimes feel themselves under through social media if they're participating
in it, how does that intersect with the argument that you're making?
Kay Hymowitz: Well social media, I'm thinking of Facebook
in particular was supposed to bring us all together. Right? It was the social
network. We were going to create all these new social networks and you know, I
think some people have been able to use it that way. I have ordered up to make
contact with old high school friends or whatever, but it has also added to a
sense of anxiety as people post pictures of their happy family occasions. They
can look like things are just so wonderful and peachy keen for everybody else
while you're feeling down in the dumps. So what does that expression,
"fomo," fear of missing out? You're missing parties that you might've
been invited to... People are taking wonderful trips that you, you know, don't
have anybody to travel with or whatever. So I think it can exacerbate
loneliness in that way because you're constantly comparing yourself to other
people at their peak moments because that's when people post their pictures.
And there is something about, aside from the fomo, aside from that, the kinds
of connections you make through social media don't seem to be the same as those
should make in real life. I haven't seen wonderful research on this yet, but it
seems to me an area ripe for exploration. It seems so clear somehow that you
can be online, communicating, even playing games with people, from all over the
world, and seemingly making new friends and still feel quite lonely and be
lonely because you turn off the computer or walk into another room and you're
alone.
Brian Anderson: A lot's been written, especially since the
election of Donald Trump, about the state of rust belt communities. The opioid
crisis, which you mentioned earlier. How much in your view is the family
breakdown you're describing having an impact on those communities? And is it
part of what's causing the problem or is it an outgrowth of the breakdown in
those communities? Economic breakdown.
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah, there's no question that family
breakdown exacerbates and intensifies the loss of these communities, or rather
the jobs, the factories that have left. If you lose your job and you lose your
wife or husband because to opioids, or they've just left, then you've got real
trouble. You don't have anybody to support you through difficult times. One of
the things I argue in that piece is that the breakdown in the family has not
affected educated and well off people anywhere near to the extent that it
has... well, blacks, and also now the white working class that came a little
bit later. And I think what we underestimated, we who lived through the second
demographic transition and played a role in pushing it actually because I was
in college in the 1960s when a lot of these ideas were being tested out and
promulgated. If the educated classes, the more well to do classes, were able to
figure out a way to maintain their families, what they didn't anticipate, or
that none of us anticipated, was that it would be much harder for people who
were living more on the edge, who had evictions to worry about or layoffs or a
factory closing. You need, in those cases, a culture that really supports, a
cultural environment, that really supports the idea of the family and of
kinship as people... as people that are there for you in hard times.
Brian Anderson: Providing a network of support...
Kay Hymowitz: That's right. That's right. And in those
communities instead, we saw a more and more of a collapse of the family. Now
was it possible that, we could have, in a different cultural environment, it
could have been different? Maybe, maybe. It's very hard to disentangle the
cause and effect here, but there's no question that they go hand... the loss of
the working class or the manufacturing jobs, has definitely been related to the
breakdown of the family in the working class. Now I should mention that one of
the things that's happened as a result, well, related again to the breakdown of
the family in those communities, is this opioid crisis. Opioids, as you may
know, is now killing more people than traffic accidents, than car accidents.
And I was amazed to see in a recent study that the victims or the people who
die of opioid death are much more likely to be single, unmarried or divorced
men. And that speaks of exactly what I've been trying to describe. I think that
women are better at creating their own social networks. This was something that
the sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a book called Going Solo, about
people living alone. It's something he noticed as he started to interview
people who were living alone. Even among the elderly women were more likely to
want to live alone. They didn't want to remarry if there were widowed or
divorced. But who kept fairly rich lives, they were still able to... they
volunteered. They had friends, networks of friends that they could go out with,
and that sort of thing. So, and if there were children, they were closer to the
kids than a single father. So they had all those supports. Men seem to suffer
much more loneliness than women. And you know, we can debate from here to
eternity why that is. But there it is.
Brian Anderson: Well, to ask a final question, and it's how you
conclude your piece: What might be necessary to start re-knitting the social
fabric in a way that might address this problem. You mentioned Tom Wolfe's idea
of a "Great Re-learning." Say a little bit about that?
Kay Hymowitz: Well first, I should say that there are a lot of
government programs for seniors, a lot of, on the federal level and the city
and local level. There are all kinds of ways that civil society jumps in.
Seniors Helping Seniors is one group, Meals on Wheels, organizations like that.
They are absolutely essential and beneficial and I don't want to knock them at
all, but they don't begin to address the loss that a lot of people are feeling,
or the loneliness. So one of the things that struck me in thinking about all
this was how much joy and pleasure so many of my friends, and I should say I'm
70 years old, so many of my friends now with grandchildren, would mostly worry
when their kids were growing up about their careers. They would focus so much
on their education. Starting from early on, we were the beginning of helicopter
parents, not quite as bad as today, but it did begin quite a while ago. But
never talking about this other, what I consider to be the other big goal in life:
to find a spouse, a kind and reliable and giving spouse who will make a good
mother or father for your children. Because most people are going to want
children. And society's depend on them wanting children. Those parents didn't
talk to their kids about these things. And yet here I was going to weddings and
watching these grandchildren being born and the parents were going nuts. I
thought, well, why wouldn't they ever talk about the joy of this stage of life
and of the connection that we now have with our children. And this is one
lovely thing of the that has followed the second demographic transition is, I
think, there's a much, much less of a generation gap between me and my kids
then there was between me and my own parents because,
Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think that's true.
Kay Hymowitz: And there's a kind of companionship and
friendship that I didn't see in my day so much. We have that, and it's a source
of great comfort and pleasure. I think for most of the people that are able to
experience it. So I note all that because I want readers to realize that this
is something we don't talk about to our kids very much. And so we have another
generation, growing up, who have never heard those words or any of those
concepts from their parents or from anybody.
Brian Anderson: Well maybe it's a time for a different kind of
conversation. In any case, don't forget to check out Kay's brilliant essay in
City Journal, it's called Alone. It's in our latest issue you can find it on
our website and we will link to it in the description. You can follow Kay on
Twitter @KayHymowitz. You can also find City Journal on Twitter, @CityJournal
and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI, and always, if you like what you've heard on
the podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and thanks,
Kay Hymowitz, for joining us.
EYE ON THE NEWS
An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis
Opioids are fueling
homelessness on the West Coast.
By latest
count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in
California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has
generated headlines and speculation
about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies
have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets.
Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the
same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing
shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual
abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans.
These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West
Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.
Homelessness
is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors
and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of
the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and
fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least11,000 homeless opioid
addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California
(concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered
population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages
are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80
percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers
must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.
For
drug cartels and low-level street dealers, the
business
of supplying homeless addicts with
heroin,
fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids is
extremely
lucrative. According
to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834
in drugs per month. Holding rates constant, we can project that the total
business of supplying heroin and other opioids to the West Coast’s homeless
population is more than $1.8 billion per year. In effect, Mexican cartels,
Chinese fentanyl suppliers, and local criminal networks profit off the misery
of the homeless and offload the consequences onto local governments struggling
to get people off the streets.
West Coast
cities are seeing a crime spike associated with
homeless opioid addicts. In Seattle, police busted two sophisticated
criminal rings engaged
in “predatory drug dealing” in homeless encampments (they were found in
possession of $20,000 in cash, heroin, firearms, knives, machetes, and a
sword). Police believe that “apartments
were serving as a base of operations that supplied drugs to the streets, and
facilitated the collection and resale of stolen property.” In other words, drug
dealers were exploiting homeless addicts and using the city’s maze of illegal
encampments as distribution centers. In my own Fremont neighborhood, where
property crime has surged 57 percent over the past two
years, local business owners have formed a group to monitor a network of RVs
that circulate around the area to deal heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines.
Dealers have become brazen—one recently hung up a spray-painted sign on the side of his
RV with the message: “Buy Drugs Here!”
What are
local governments doing to address this problem? To a large extent, they have
adopted a strategy of deflection, obfuscation, and denial. In her #SeattleForAll public relations
campaign, Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only one in three homeless people
struggle with substance abuse, understating the figures of her own police
department as well as the city attorney, who has claimed that the real numbers,
just for opioid addiction, rise to 80 percent of the unsheltered.
The
consequences of such denial have proved disastrous: no city on the West Coast
has a solution for homeless opioid addicts. Los Angeles, which spent $619
million on homelessness last year, has adopted a strategy of palliative
care—keeping addicts alive through distribution of the overdose drug
naloxone—but fails to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and
recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions. The city
has been cursed, in this sense, with temperate weather, compounded by
permissive policies toward public camping and drug consumption that have attracted20,687 homeless
individuals from outside Los Angeles County.
No
matter how much local governments pour into affordable-housing projects,
homeless opioid addicts—nearly all unemployed—will never be able to
afford the rent in expensive West Coast cities. The first step in solving these
intractable issues is to address the real problem: addiction is the common
denominator for most of the homeless and must be confronted honestly if we have
any hope of solving it.
Opioid Crackdown Could Lead To More Drug
Company Bankruptcies
BRIAN MANN
Two years ago, the drug company Insys Therapeutics posted a quarter-billion dollars in annual sales. But the Arizona-based firm's fortunes plummeted so far that on Monday its leaders declared bankruptcy. It was the latest fall-out from the nation's prescription opioid epidemic, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans and triggered hundreds of lawsuits against Big Pharma.
Insys marketed an opioid pain medication called Subsys that included fentanyl. It generated tens of millions of dollar in annual sales. But like other prescription opioids marketed aggressively by the drug industry, it turned out to be highly addictive.
Insys Files For Chapter 11, Days After Landmark Opioid Settlement Of $225 Million
Many of the drug industry's biggest companies are tangled up in a wave of opioid litigation, including name brand companies Johnson & Johnson and CVS. It's unlikely large firms will follow Insys' lead and seek Chapter 11 protection, but smaller firms including Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, have already floated the possibility.
Attorneys representing hundreds of communities that hoped to win compensation from Insys issued a statement Monday saying they'll work to determine whether the company is actually insolvent. "We will actively pursue full financial disclosure for Insys and any other defendant that files for bankruptcy," the plaintiff group said.
New York Lawsuit Claims Sackler Family Illegally Profited From Opioid Epidemic
They added that their goal in targeting 21 other drug firms isn't to put them out of business but to "abate the current opioid epidemic and seek long- term, sustainable solutions." State and local officials hope to recoup some of the billions of dollars they've spent responding to the opioid crisis.
One major state opioid trial is underway now in Oklahoma against Johnson & Johnson, with a second consolidated trial against other firms set to begin in October in Ohio. Judge Dan Polster, who's presiding over that federal case, has urged the parties to reach a settlement so communities receive some compensation without disrupting the pharmaceutical industry.
Sources tell NPR negotiations are underway but no deal has been reached.
In all, more than 1,800 state and local governments have filed opioid-related lawsuits. Penalties and settlements could run into the tens of billions of dollars, rivaling big tobacco payouts of the 1990s. The move by Insys came a week after the firm pleaded guilty to felony charges that it bribed doctors to prescribe its Subys fentanyl medication to patients who shouldn't have been using it.
The company agreed to pay the federal government $225 million in penalties. Last month, company founder John Kapoor, once a towering figure in the drug-tech industry, was found guilty on federal racketeering charges along with four other Insys executives. The company still faced numerous other opioid-related lawsuits.
In his statement, Insys CEO Andrew Long, said in a statement those "legacy legal challenges" contributed to the firm's decision to enter bankruptcy proceedings.
He said bankruptcy proceedings would allow the company to negotiate with creditors.
AMERICAN BIG PHARMA, RED CHINA and NARCOMEX PARTNER FOR THE BIG BUCKS
“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?
MEXICO KILLS AMERICA TWICE OVER!
DHS Secretary: ‘ICE Interdicted Enough Fentanyl Last Year to
Kill 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
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“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
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.”
At least 527 pounds of methamphetamine worth $7.2 million was seized in southern Arizona this past weekend during a joint investigation by local police and federal agents.
The incident began last Saturday after police in San Luis conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle observed speeding westbound on Juan Sanchez Boulevard and 10th Avenue. Police reportedly discovered 95 pounds of methamphetamine and arrested the driver identified as Angel Leon-Camberos, 26.
The San Luis Police Department contacted Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) for further follow up investigation and later developed probable cause to obtain and serve a search warrant for the residence belonging to Leon-Camberos. Investigators say they then seized an additional 432 pounds of methamphetamine, one AR-15 style rifle, a magazine, 14 pounds of high-grade marijuana, “numerous wax (marijuana extract) products,” and THC vape pens with an estimated street value of $103,930. Other items seized were packaging materials indicative of possession for sale purposes, multiple cell phones, and $15,295 cash. The total amount of methamphetamine seized related to the traffic stop and search warrant at the residence was 527.3 pounds with an estimated street value of $7.2 million, according to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security media release.
Leon-Camberos was charged with various drug and weapons offenses. The Yuma County Attorney’s Office will be handling the prosecution.
Breitbart News reported this week on the seizure of a major meth lab in Sinaloa, where an estimated $170 million in finished product and precursor chemicals were collected by Mexican security personnel. Since 2018, Mexican officials busted 20 similar labs in the state.
Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.) You can follow him on Twitter. He can be reached at robertrarce@gmail.com
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