BY

NORMAN J CLEMENT RPH., DDS, NORMAN L.CLEMENT PHARM-TECH, MALACHI F. MACKANDAL PHARMD, BELINDA BROWN-PARKER, IN THE SPIRIT OF JOSEPH SOLVO ESQ., IN THE SPIRIT OF REV. C.T. VIVIAN, JELANI ZIMBABWE CLEMENT, BS., MBA., IN THE SPIRIT OF ERLIN CLEMENT SR., WILLIE GUINYARD BS., JOSEPH WEBSTER MD., MBA, BEVERLY C. PRINCE MD., FACS., LEROY BAYLOR,   JAY K. JOSHI MD., MBA, ADRIENNE EDMUNDSON, ESTER HYATT PH.D., WALTER L. SMITH BS., IN THE SPIRIT OF BRAHM FISHER ESQ., MICHELE ALEXANDER MD., CUDJOE WILDING BS, MARTIN NDJOU, BS., RPH., IN THE SPIRIT OF DEBRA LYNN SHEPHERD, BERES E. MUSCHETT, STRATEGIC ADVISORS

“IF YOU EVER THINK YOU ARE TOO SMALL TO MAKE A CHANGE, THEN YOU HAVE NEVER SLEPT WITH A MOSQUITO”

Clobbering Purdue Pharma Makes Drug Warriors Feel Good, but !!!

October 21, 2020, The Reason online magazine, Jacob Sullum, the article reads:

“The U.S. Department of Justice today announced an $8.3 billion settlement with OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, which admitted to lax anti-diversion practices that allowed doctors and pharmacies to distribute its timed-release version of oxycodone far in excess of what was medically appropriate.

The misconduct alleged by the government, some of which the company acknowledged in a criminal plea and some of which figured in a lawsuit that has now been settled, includes promoting wider use of OxyContin even when executives knew the legitimate market was saturated, encouraging

prescriptions by paying kickbacks to physicians and disregarding obvious red flags indicating that some distributors, pharmacists, and doctors were doling out pills without regard to medical need.”

The $8.3 billion DOJ settlement is part of a crackdown that has perversely pushed drug users toward more dangerous substitutes.

“Purdue, through greed and violation of the law, prioritized money over the health and well-being of patients,” said Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. “Purdue Pharma actively thwarted the United States’ efforts to ensure compliance and prevent diversion,” added Tim McDermott, assistant administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).”

“In its report on the settlement, The Hill says “OxyContin is widely blamed for starting the country’s opioid crisis,” which has “killed more than 400,000 Americans over the past two decades.” But is OxyContin rightly blamed for that?

Estimates from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (now the National Survey on Drug Use and Health) indicate that nonmedical use of prescription pain relievers rose for 11 consecutive years before OxyContin was introduced, then continued to rise. While Purdue portrayed its product, which was designed to release oxycodone gradually, as abuse-resistant, nonmedical users quickly discovered that the original version could be crushed, then snorted or injected. But as appealing as that may have been to some people, OxyContin never accounted for a very large share of the prescription analgesic market.

Defending itself against numerous lawsuits, Purdue presented DEA data indicating that OxyContin accounted for just 3.3 percent of pain pills sold in the United States from 2006 through 2012. After adjusting for potency, ProPublica calculated that the product’s “real” share of the market was more like 16 percent.

ProPublica’s approach is questionable, assuming the concern is how many opportunities non-medical users have to get their hands on prescription opioids.” 

THE YEAR IS 2018 SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION, JOHN SOPKO

THE DEA 8.6 BILLION DOLLARS WASTE OF TAXPAYERS MONEY?

June 2018, Counternarcotics: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan is the fifth lessons learned report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reads in part: 

From fiscal year (FY) 2002 through FY 2017, the U.S. government allocated approximately $8.62 billion for counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan. This included more than $7.28 billion for programs with a substantial counternarcotics focus and $1.34 billion on programs that included a counternarcotics component.

Despite this investment, drug production and trafficking remain entrenched. Afghanistan is the world’s largest opium producer, and opium poppy is the country’s largest cash crop, with an estimated annual export value of $1.5 billion to $3 billion in recent years.

WHERE IS OUR CONGRESS?

In 2017, poppy cultivation and opium production reached record highs. U.S. counternarcotics activities in Afghanistan have thus failed to produce lasting reductions in both cultivation and production.

Given the upward trend of cultivation figures and the number of Afghans who rely on the opium industry, it is critical that U.S. policymakers determine how best to mitigate the drug trade’s impact on U.S. strategic interests in Afghanistan.

‘WHEN YOU LAY DOWN LIKE A WORM YOU DESERVE TO BE STEPPED ON”

DEA MISSION FAILURE

The  (SIGARS report) further reported:

“Despite increasing alignment between DEA and DOD, progress in the Afghan judicial sector did not keep pace. Those pursuing the arrest and conviction of drug traffickers, rather than the militarized disruption that characterized DEA FAST units and TF-333, had reached an impasse. 

In the absence of an extradition agreement, and with little confidence in an often corrupt and still nascent Afghan judicial system, DEA agents found it difficult to advance their cases.#322 

Their efforts suffered a significant setback with the arrest of Mohammed Zia Salehi, an aide to President Karzai, by the FBI-mentored Major Crimes Task Force in July 2010 and his subsequent release.323 Outraged by the arrest of Salehi on corruption charges, President Karzai ordered the seizure of all files related to the Salehi arrest and authorized an investigation into the handling of the case.#324 

The Afghan administration then began to dismantle
the law enforcement infrastructure that had been established, including the wiretaps, polygraphs, and presence of DOJ personnel assigned to mentor Afghan staff.#325 

As a result, DEA became increasingly reluctant to invest resources in an environment where its agents could not develop cases.  As one senior law enforcement official summarized, “After all of that work, all of that expense, and all of that danger, DEA’s Special Operations Division said we are not going to do it anymore.”#326

QUESTIONS

1. SO THE TARGETING OF DOCTORS AND PHARMACISTS ARE MUCH EASIER FOR DEA/DOJ?
2. SO, DEA/DOJ PAYS OFF THE DRUG WAR LORDS THEN JOINS THEM, CREATES AN OPIOID CRISIS THEN BEGINS ARRESTING DOCTORS AND PHARMACIST IN AMERICA FOR COMPETING AGAINST THE DEA’S HEROIN?
3. WHERE IS OUR HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVE, US SENATE, ATTORNEY GENERAL AND PRESIDENT? (8.3 BILLION DOLLARS WASTED)!!!!

“It Won’t Reduce Opioid-Related Deaths.”

Jacob Sullum further wrote in this same article:

“Contrary to the conventional depiction of bona fide patients who accidentally become addicted to opioids they take for pain, nonmedical OxyContin users typically do not get the drug that way. According to a 2007 American Journal of Psychiatry study of OxyContin users admitted to drug treatment programs, 78 percent “reported that the drug had not been prescribed to them for any medical reason.”

“The government, of course, argues that Purdue is responsible for selling more OxyContin than was necessary for legitimate pain treatment, regardless of how non-medical users obtained it. But blaming the company for OxyContin abuse overlooks the crucial role of the people who choose to consume it for nonmedical purposes, who tend to have histories of substance abuse before they try OxyContin.

In the American Journal of Psychiatry study, nearly four-fifths of the OxyContin users “reported receiving prior treatment for a substance use disorder.” A 2012 study of Utah deaths involving prescription opioids, reported in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, likewise found that 61 percent of the decedents had used illegal drugs and 80 percent had been hospitalized for substance abuse, including abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs as well as prescription medications.

While OxyContin’s contribution to opioid abuse is routinely exaggerated, the government’s assumption that reducing the availability of this particular drug will reduce opioid-related deaths is demonstrably wrong. Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen declared that the Purdue settlement “re-affirms that the Department of Justice will not relent in its multi-pronged efforts to combat the opioids crisis.” Gary Cantrell, deputy inspector general for investigations at the Department of Health and Human Services, vowed that “we will continue to combat the opioid crisis.”

How has that been going so far?

“In 2011, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new version of OxyContin that was designed to discourage nonmedical use. When the reformulated OxyContin is crushed and mixed with water, it forms a gel. The old version of OxyContin was withdrawn from the market when the new one was introduced, a switch that coincided with a post-2010 spike in heroin-related deaths.

In a 2017 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Wharton School health economist Abby Alpert and two RAND Corporation researchers investigated whether those developments were related by comparing states with different pre-2010 rates of nonmedical OxyContin use. “We estimate large differential increases in heroin deaths immediately after reformulation in states with the highest initial rates of OxyContin misuse,” Alpert and her colleagues wrote. “Our results imply that a substantial share of the dramatic increase in heroin deaths since 2010″—perhaps as much as 80 percent—”can be attributed to the reformulation of OxyContin.” They concluded that the increase in heroin-related fatalities offset any decrease in OxyContin-related fatalities, “leading to no net reduction in overall overdose deaths.”

More generally, as the government succeeded in curtailing opioid prescriptions in recent years, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated. Meanwhile, patients who relied on opioids to relieve their agony increasingly found that the government preferred they “take some aspirin” and “tough it out.” The perverse effect of restricting access to prescription opioids should not have been surprising since the crackdown on pain pills pushed nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that are far more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable.

Illegally produced drugs now account for the vast majority of opioid-related deaths. In 2018, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the category of drugs that includes fentanyl and its analogs was involved in more than two-thirds of those deaths, while heroin was detected a third of the time. Prescription opioids like hydrocodone and oxycodone turned up in 27 percent of the cases, and many of those deaths also involved fentanyl or heroin. After a slight decline in 2018, opioid-related deaths seem to be on the rise again.

In this context, Purdue’s punishment, however unethical and dishonest its business practices, cannot reasonably be expected to have any noticeable impact. The problem, as always, is not that psychoactive substances are available from one source or another but that some people use them in ways that disrupt their lives, hurt the people close to them, and sometimes kill them. That problem, which is rooted in misery, despair, and social isolation, cannot be solved by making an example of one pharmaceutical company—or dozens.”

CONCLUSION

It more than appears the Big Pharma settlement and The CDC Opioid Guidelines were all but one big hoax used to cover up the DEA’s squandering of 8.6 Billion dollars of taxpayer monies in Afghanistan.

Doctors and pharmacists appear to be targeted by DOJ/DEA for competing against the DEA’s own heroin supply market. So it is past due time for heads to roll!

1. Big Pharma, the Sacklers family must demand return of all their funds paid to each government entity.
2. All DEA prosecutions should reviewed and reversed, Paul Volkman MD, Abby Foeboda RPh, and all other VICTIMS of the DEA gestapo prosecutions must be release from prison with records expunged.
3. The CSA registry must be return to Pronto Pharmacy, Lincourt Pharmacy, Gulf Med Pharmacy, Fowlerville Pharmacy, along with beibg rewarded damages (settlements of $85 million per pharmacy) attorney fees must be paid by the government.
4. CDC Guidelines must be abandon and repudiated
5. All prosecutors, and Judges must surrender their licenses and become uber drivers while PROP must be disbanded.

FOR NOW

YOU ARE WITHIN THE NORMS