It’s not often that we get as good an example of RepubliCare as this. When the treatment fleeces the recipients of everything they have and kills them, that’s the RepubliCare Death Benefit. The Republican Reich provides death at no extra charge. In this example, greedy Republican corporate criminals intentionally addict millions to opioids. Then they feed them more and more pills, via the black market, until it kills them.
The Walgreens employee was bewildered by the quantity of opioids the company was shipping to just one store. Its pharmacy in Port Richey, Fla. (population 2,831) was ordering 3,271 bottles of oxycodone a month.
“I don’t know how they can even house this many bottles to be honest,” Barbara Martin, whose job was to review suspicious drug orders, wrote to a colleague in a January 2011 email. The next month, the company shipped another outsized order to the same store.
The email was among thousands of documents from corporations across the pharmaceutical and retail industries — internal memos, depositions, sales and shipping reports, experts’ analyses, and other confidential information — filed Friday in federal court in Cleveland by lawyers for cities, towns and counties devastated by addiction. They lay out a detailed case of how diverse corporate interests — far beyond the familiar players like Purdue Pharma — fed a deadly opioid epidemic that persisted for nearly two decades.
Little-known manufacturers of generic pills, superstores like Walmart and chain retailers like Rite Aid also flooded the country with billions of pills, according to the filings. The devastation was so extreme that one Ohio county resorted to a mobile morgue to handle all the corpses of people who died from overdoses… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <NY Times>
Rachel Maddow did a superior job of bringing this crisis to light.
Let me be clear. Opioids are not the problem. I use Oxycodone for phantom limb pain. I very seldom need one and average one pill every month or two, but when I do, it’s the only thing that stops severe pain in a limb that no longer exist. The problem is sales and marketing by Republicans that is so abusive that they are murdering people for profit. These Republicans need to do hard time, and lots of it!
RESIST!!
10 Responses to “An Example of RepubliCare”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Callous as this is going to sound (and to be, really), I wonder whether they have outsmarted themselves. Much of Florida is heavily Republican. Parts of Ohio are dark red to the point of being near black. Another area getting ridiculous amounts of opiates is West Virginia, which is so red that the only Democrat who can win there is Joe Manchin. Rush Limbaugh was eating these like candy. Whereas a progressive, like you, TC, is, by and large, far more conscious of overall health, and, while we can get addicted of course, we tend to work harder to prevent it (for one thing, we are more aware that addiction is a health issue and not a moral one – the belief that addiction is a moral issue had hooked many people who think because they are “good Christians” they couldn’t possibly “become” addicted.) Could this be related to the fact that gerrymandering and voter suppression are getting more and more blatant, to the point that a Republican recently stated publicly that the votes of voters in large urban areas ought to count less than the votes of voters in rural areas?
Republicans are the dominant rural party, so they get disproportionate representation in the Senate amf the Electoral College. They want to increase their advantage.
RM: Love her reporting re: this epidemic. I wasn’t aware of the $$ involved with big pharma, and corporations or their involvement. Call me stunned, as this is mind boggling !!
RepubliCare indeed !!
Really surprises me to listen and read about this serious epidemic. Here is California I’ve noticed doctors not handing these prescriptions out like they use to. With the new laws that were put into effect in January 2019, they’ve really cut back. I like you TC, not one to use them unless it was severe pain, like right after my arm surgery in February. I took one to help calm the pain right before bed.
What really bothers me, is reading these other states where people are dying from them. That one doctor who was giving them out like they were candy. Here they do get ones who get to taking them several times a day and get addicted. Then they do cut them off and don’t offer them any assistance what-so-ever.
They need to offer free, low cost help to these innocent people who did get addicted. Not just let them suffer and die.
This is obscene marketing. The Sackler family philanthropy, based on murder, is getting a bad name, and being resisted in places. So, Walgreen’s was shipping vast amounts of the stuff to Port Richey, just north of where I now live, and no one in their system wondered what the heck was going on? How much money did they make as the middle man?
YES as DivergentRevolution says, they are all in on it together, it’s global!!
AND we have our own horror stories here in Oz!!
i too was almost one of them!!
There’s many innocents in jails, while the true criminals are relaxing in their mansions!!! 🤬
Our so-called health care system is 100% profit-uber-alles and 0% giving a rat’s arse about patients. We have put fat, greedy spoiled brats in charge of the cookie jar and wonder why it’s empty all the time.
Not one illegal Latino with cantaloupe calves drug-muling into the US on that list, is there.
As far as I know, oxycodone, or similar opioids can only be obtained through prescription in Australia or The Netherlands, and I presume in the US also, so how can these ridiculous amounts of tablets be sent to towns without doctor’s prescriptions to back the order up? Not only are these drug companies turning whole towns into addicts and murdering them over time, they are also directly involved in fraud and crime.
Bogus prescription pads cam be mass printed by any unethical printshop.
Thanks and heat wave hugs to all.