Trump says he wants a border Wall to stop the flow of drugs into the US. Actually, the biggest source of the opioids that have killed over 200,000 people is not Mexico or Latin America, but Connecticut. Thatsthe home of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which created and sold OxyContin, which is the most widely used opioid.
The Sackler family of Connecticut became billionaires because of their development and marketing of OxyContin. Their names grace museums around the world. The family collectively has about $15 billion or so. They have always claimed that they had no personal knowledge of the deceptive promotion of their popular and highly addictive drug, which has claimed more than 200,000 lives.
The Sacklers are major financiers of charter schools, having funded ConnCAN, 50CAN, and numerous other organizations that promote privatization of public funds for schools.
Now the New York Times reports that the Sackler family knew what was going on with their opioid drug.
The state of Massachusetts thinks the family members should be held personally responsible for the devastation their drug caused.
How do you sleep at night or enjoy your luxurious lifestyle knowing that the drug that made you fabulously wealthy killed over 200,000 people?
The Times wrote:
Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously undisclosed documents contends.
When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.
“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”
That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.
The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable.
Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids, and Purdue Pharma has been the target of numerous lawsuits.
For years, Purdue Pharma has sought to depict the Sackler family as removed from the day-to-day operations of the company. The Sacklers, whose name adorns museums and medical schools around the world, are one of the richest families in the United States, with much of their wealth derived from sales of OxyContin. Disclosure of the documents is likely to renew calls for institutions to decline their philanthropic gifts.
In a statement, Purdue Pharma, which is based in Stamford, Conn., rejected suggestions of wrongdoing by the company or members of the Sackler family, describing the court filing as “littered with biases and inaccurate characterizations.” The statement said the company was working to curtail the use and misuse of prescription painkillers.
Asked for a response from Richard Sackler and other members of the Sackler family, a Purdue Pharma spokesman, Robert Josephson, said that the company had no additional comment.
In 2007, the company and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that Purdue had misrepresented the dangers of OxyContin, and they paid $634.5 million in fines. The Sacklers were not accused of any wrongdoing and have not faced personal legal consequences over the drug.
But last June, Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, sued eight members of the Sackler family, along with the company and numerous executives and directors, alleging that they had misled doctors and patients about OxyContin’s risks. The suit also claimed that the company aggressively promoted the drug to doctors who were big prescribers of opioids, including physicians who later lost their licenses.
The court filing released on Tuesday also asserts that Sackler family members were aware that Purdue Pharma repeatedly failed to alert authorities to scores of reports the company had received that OxyContin was being abused and sold on the street. The company also used pharmacy discount cards to increase OxyContin’s sales and Richard Sackler, who served as Purdue Pharma’s president from 1999 to 2003, led a company strategy of blaming abuse of the drug on addicts, the suit claimed.
In 1995, when the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin, it allowed Purdue Pharma to claim that the opioid’s long-acting formulation was “believed to reduce” its appeal to drug abusers compared with traditional painkillers such as Percocet and Vicodin.
At a gathering shortly afterward to celebrate the drug’s launch, Mr. Sackler boasted that “the launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white,” according to a document cited in the legal complaint.
Company sales representatives told doctors that OxyContin couldn’t be abused and were trained to say that the drug had an addiction risk for patients of “less than one percent,” a claim that had no scientific backing. Within a few years, Purdue Pharma was selling more than $1 billion worth of OxyContin annually.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hi Diane. This has disturbed me too as an artist, art teacher, parent and school board member who has gone to too many wakes lately related to opioid overdoses.
In balance, I’d like to share this article for consideration as I’ve conducted some if my own research into this matter.https://news.artnet.com/opinion/discussion-sacklers-oxycontin-facts-elizabeth-a-sackler-1203458
Thanks for your continued activism on all things educational and human, Keith
Sent from my iPad
Good article. Unfortunately, she is “judged by the company that she keeps”, in this, case a family name/connection. Maybe she needs to be more vocal against what her family members have done and to divorce her own good name from the Perdue pharmaceutical monster?
This is an interesting article, but it also raises questions that aren’t answered.
Wouldn’t it be possible that someone can be “bought out” of a controlling interest in a company but still have shares that increased in value one hundred fold or one thousand fold to make that branch of the family rich?
In other words, if indeed that Sackler branch was bought out before the riches that OxyContin brought to the family, where did Elizabeth Sackler get her fortune? Certainly she would have been very rich, but there is generally a difference between being very rich from a family fortune (like the Kennedy family) and being able to plaster your name all over wings of buildings because you are donating enormous sums of money that barely make a dent in your fortune.
Just curious where all the money on that branch of the family came from if it wasn’t because they still owned stock that increased enormously in value due to the marketing of OxyContin.
Keith,
Did you catch the inaccuracy? The article claims that “The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum (founded in 2007) is the only institution in the world dedicated to presenting and educating the public about feminist art.”
Wrong.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts was founded in 1987, and the first National Sculpture Conference for Women was in the same year, reaching artists in every state and an international audience. Before that, The Guerilla Girls were doing creative publicity about the failure of major museums and galleries to exhibit works by women. They are still at it, with international creative resistance to stubborn facts about biases in the art world.
Elizabeth Sackler is a late-comer to the “feminist turn” in art. Scholarship about women artists received some measure of attention with the publication of art historian/critic Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay: Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists? Nochlin and art historian Ann Sutherland Harris co-curated the exhibition, Women Artists: 1550-1950 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, a first of a kind show. Both scholars helped to jump-start interest in women artists among art patrons. One result was the National Museum of Women in the Arts. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Nochlin-Linda_Why-Have-There-Been-No-Great-Women-Artists.pdf see also https://www.guerrillagirls.com/our-story/
Elizabeth A. Sackler is also President of The Arthur M. Sackler Foundation and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundations. You can see the 990 IRS forms at the Foundation Center website.
Here is an interesting take on some problems with philanthropies from a defender of the public good, including public schools, Robert Reich. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2019/1/7/impossible-to-justify-a-political-scientist-takes-on-american-philanthropy
This family is despicable. I worked in specialty healthcare when Oxy first came out. The Dr’s started prescribing based on the “addiction factor”. After a few years, Pharmacies were being held up and robbed for Oxy, they were being broken into and the Oxy was being stolen, Dr’s prescription pads were being stolen and phony scripts were being written. Fortunately, I worked for a very ethical physician who came to his own conclusion that he would not write this Rx nor would he see drug Reps pushing Oxy. He would only prescribe Percocet or Vicoden and he/we (his staff) would monitor patients who were calling in more frequently for pain meds. Of course people should be afforded medication to ease their pain, but the Sackler family took greed to a whole new level in the pharmaceutical world….and the FDA (a gov’t agency!) let it happen. This is what happens when big business gets to lobby and pay elected politicians. End Citizens United!!! Crush the “Stink Tank” lobby groups and start making these wealthy companies/families start paying their rightful tax debt.
A great read about the opioid addiction: DOPESICK
I was interviewing a nurse in preparation for an article I am writing. For some reason, the opioid crisis came up. Without my voicing an opinion, she blamed the federal government, which, she said, instructed them to respond to pain with ready doses of OxyContin or face sanctions if they failed to supply it appropriately. I am not sure who she worked for. Nor am I sure if she was being handed a line by an unscrupulous individual.
Someone should tell Trump that a border wall won’t stop the drugs coming from Connecticut.
Trump’s response will be to blame the 200,000 dead and/or maybe dig a moat around the state to keep everyone inside from getting out.
After all, Trump won’t want only one thing he build as president named after him.
He will want to leave office with “Trump’s Wall” and “Trump’s Moat” both monuments to his greatness.
Since he loves bragging how he builds things, he will want to brag about this through Twitter for ten lifetimes. I think it is a safe bet that if Trump has any money left when he dies, he will set it up in trust to keep paying someone to Tweet his list of repeated lies for as long as the cash lasts. Even when he dies, we won’t get rid of him.
The FDA and other federal agencies have let the Pharmaceutical companies go unchecked for years. Orphan drug laws are the worst. Any drug that has been on the market before 1964 is subject to retesting/rebranding/renaming. It’s been big fish eating little fish until all we now have is big Pharma and high prices for medications that used to only cost a few dollars a month. All these ads for all of these “new” drugs…..lots of retesting/rebranding/renaming at a higher price. And the gag order laws that Pharmacists aren’t allowed to tell customers?…..that’s just abusive. The crap that you have to deal with while trying to navigate the system for an elderly parent with medical issues is mind boggling. There is no way that the elderly can navigate the system that is rigged against them. It’s sad and it’s wrong.
The Sacklers built their empire on addiction. Our government’s reluctance to regulate the so-called free market should also bear part of the responsibility. We knew long before 2018 that opioid addiction was a problem, but failed to interfere with the market. We also should know from past experience that we cannot always trust medical professionals to intervene, particularly when they are receiving incentives to prescribe certain medications.
Once again the EU is far more willing to regulate a market than our country. There is much less of an opioid problem in the EU because they took action to combat the problem. We have known about the addictive qualities of opioids for at least ten years; yet we have failed to intervene. When drug companies buy compliance from politicians and doctors, people die.https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/the-opioid-epidemic-what-can-we-learn-from-europe/
Healthcare was fully privatized by the 1990’s. The free-market schemes don’t work in healthcare and they don’t work in education. The free-market has no place running amok in the social service aspects of a society.
The best title for the XLV a-dim-istration is Look Anywhere But Homeward, Angel — the whole thrust of its sleight of hand is devoted to directing the public’s attention away from the real sources of our problems.
This is from the National Institutes of Health under headline “The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy”
PROMOTION OF OXYCONTIN
From 1996 to 2001, Purdue conducted more than 40 national pain-management and speaker-training conferences at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and California. More than 5000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended these all-expenses-paid symposia, where they were recruited and trained for Purdue’s national speaker bureau.19(p22) It is well documented that this type of pharmaceutical company symposium influences physicians’ prescribing, even though the physicians who attend such symposia believe that such enticements do not alter their prescribing patterns.20
One of the cornerstones of Purdue’s marketing plan was the use of sophisticated marketing data to influence physicians’ prescribing. Drug companies compile prescriber profiles on individual physicians—detailing the prescribing patterns of physicians nationwide—in an effort to influence doctors’ prescribing habits. Through these profiles, a drug company can identify the highest and lowest prescribers of particular drugs in a single zip code, county, state, or the entire country.21 One of the critical foundations of Purdue’s marketing plan for OxyContin was to target the physicians who were the highest prescribers for opioids across the country.1,12–17,22 The resulting database would help identify physicians with large numbers of chronic-pain patients. Unfortunately, this same database would also identify which physicians were simply the most frequent prescribers of opioids and, in some cases, the least discriminate prescribers.
A lucrative bonus system encouraged sales representatives to increase sales of OxyContin in their territories, resulting in a large number of visits to physicians with high rates of opioid prescriptions, as well as a multifaceted information campaign aimed at them. In 2001, in addition to the average sales representative’s annual salary of $55 000, annual bonuses averaged $71 500, with a range of $15 000 to nearly $240 000. Purdue paid $40 million in sales incentive bonuses to its sales representatives that year.19
From 1996 to 2000, Purdue increased its internal sales force from 318 sales representatives to 671, and its total physician call list from approximately 33 400 to 44 500 to approximately 70 500 to 94 000 physicians.19 Through the sales representatives, Purdue used a patient starter coupon program for OxyContin that provided patients with a free limited-time prescription for a 7- to 30-day supply. By 2001, when the program was ended, approximately 34 000 coupons had been redeemed nationally.19
The distribution to health care professionals of branded promotional items such as OxyContin fishing hats, stuffed plush toys, and music compact discs (“Get in the Swing With OxyContin”) was unprecedented for a schedule II opioid, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.19
Purdue promoted among primary care physicians a more liberal use of opioids, particularly sustained-release opioids. Primary care physicians began to use more of the increasingly popular OxyContin; by 2003, nearly half of all physicians prescribing OxyContin were primary care physicians.19 Some experts were concerned that primary care physicians were not sufficiently trained in pain management or addiction issues.23 Primary care physicians, particularly in a managed care environment of time constraints, also had the least amount of time for evaluation and follow-up of patients with complicated chronic pain.
Purdue “aggressively” promoted the use of opioids for use in the “non-malignant pain market.”15(p187) A much larger market than that for cancer-related pain, the non–cancer-related pain market constituted 86% of the total opioid market in 1999.17 Purdue’s promotion of OxyContin for the treatment of non–cancer-related pain contributed to a nearly tenfold increase in OxyContin prescriptions for this type of pain, from about 670 000 in 1997 to about 6.2 million in 2002, whereas prescriptions for cancer-related pain increased about fourfold during that same period.19 …
And that was the bitter fruit of Arthur Sackler who, in 1997, was inducted into the “Medical Advertising Hall of Fame.”
Do the Sacklers know that public schools in affected areas are bearing the brunt of the crisis the Sacklers created?
It’s yet another problem that our feckless and corrupt political leaders have dumped on public schools, ordered them to solve, and walked away.
Maybe the Sacklers could step up and help- instead of hiring lobbyists to denigrate and destroy public schools they could help public schools deal with the addiction crisis they caused.
As usual, all my public school got to deal with this crisis was a series of scolding lectures by the political classes.
Provide some PRACTICAL and USEFUL assistance. The Sacklers could do that now, today, but they aren’t.
Black, brown, and poor humans have been taking the blame for the real drug dealers in this country for decades.
right on the mark: this is a TWO-FOLD money making game — let one population overwhelmingly buy the prescriptions, let one population get sent off to massive incarceration
The 1st FINE: $634.5 million
The profits since 1995 averaged ONE BILLION dollars annually for $23-billion in profits to the end of 2018.
“highly addictive drug, which has claimed more than 200,000 lives”
The Sackler family blamed and/or blames their victims for becoming addicted.
Trump never accepts the blame for any of his crimes and failures. The Sackler family and Trump have that in common.
The 1st FINE was not enough. The FINE should equal the profits
And when there is no more money left, each member of the Sackler family goes to a hard-core prison for the rest of their lives.
At their lavish dinner table, wherever they are, they are surrounded by ghosts.
200,000 ghosts.
We can hope those tortured souls will drive the Sacklers all insane to the point where they become drooling catatonic slugs.
Speaking of dinner parties, Elizabeth Sackler funded the environment and curatorship at the Brooklyn Museum, where Judy Chicago’s very large “Dinner Party” sculpture is displayed.
I cannot help but to think that this is a second take on the way British traders desirous of prying open the Chinese market in the eighteenth century brought them opium, laying waste to a great civilization with opium from India. Then I think of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, which described the introduction of Heroin to Harlem. Then there are the little advertisements in the local newspaper in rural Tennessee plugging snake oils that would get you off the various opiates that were available from other patent medicines.
How can anybody look at this history and suggest that the free market is a self-policing entity? Back in the 1980s, private hospitals crept into big cities. The word was that other hospitals were ashamed of how much money their medical attention required and how much better the for profit hospitals were. As the Reagan years wore on, it seemed the whole world was convinced that nothing was good unless someone made a profit on it. Now that medicine is almost all privatized, no one is making them take the responsibility of their failures. The opioid crisis is just one example. While government is made to own its failures by a “liberal media,” for profit companies are allowed to fail miserably to provide services without comment.
Trump and the Sacklers destroyed America, each using different means.
Boys from Northern Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School went to Wash. D.C. this weekend for a pro-life event. An elderly Native American war veteran was attending an unrelated event in D.C. that the boys wandered into. The Catholic boys wearing MAGA hats demonstrated the type of hatred and hostility to the man that is beyond scary for humanity. The incident is on video shown by various media including TPM.
And, Northern Kentucky’s opioid crisis, courtesy of the Sachlers, is staggering in its adverse impact on the state’s residents.
In one hospital in Northern Kentucky a few weeks ago on one day there were 4 women under the age of 35 admitted with life threatening health issues related to drug addiction.
That video is one of the most disgusting things I have seen in some time. What have those students been learning? Certainly not what they should have been learning.
Covington Catholic should never have sent the high school boys to a pro-birth rally. The boys and the school’s male administrators have no compassion for women and girls whose pregnancies threaten their lives nor for women and girls impregnated by their rapists who can be family members.
What those students had in their hearts was hatred against people that they felt they had the right to control and to make cower. Their hatred is fueled by the right wing. Kentucky is Mitch McConnell’s state.
Mission work is alive and well on this soil.
TOW-
Nathan Phillips is an American hero. This morning, media funded by racist billionaires attempted to spin the religious right’s pack of MAGA hat-wearing boys, who tried to takeover the Indigenous Americans’ event, as the victims. Sleaze never tires of using the same tactics over and over again.
Trump: “Walls are not immoral. In fact, they are the opposite of immoral because they will save many lives and stop drugs from pouring into our country.” I think we need a wall around Connecticut. What is good for the south is good for the east. Right?
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Trump Announces His Plan to End the Shutdown: Trading Deportations for a Wall..Mother Jones
Or “steel barriers in high priority locations,” if you prefer.
In a speech delivered at the White House this afternoon, President Donald Trump proposed spending $5.7 billion on a border wall in exchange for offering to protect some undocumented immigrants, including some Dreamers who came to the United States as children, from deportation. The proposal, reportedly crafted by Vice President Mike Pence and White House …
Democrats rejected the offer even before Trump read his remarks. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the Senate’s second highest ranking Democrat, said Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell must first end the shutdown before negotiations begin….
A border wall remains at the center of Trump’s proposal, though he tried to play it down. “This is not a 2,000-mile concrete structure from sea to sea,” he said. “These are steel barriers in high priority locations.” However, he added, “Walls are not immoral. In fact, they are the opposite of immoral because they will save many lives and stop drugs from pouring into our country.” He suggested, without evidence, that a wall might cut crime and drug rates in half….
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/trump-immigration-speech-shutdown/
We need a border wall around Purdue Pharmaceuticals in Connecticut
You did not add RI and gov. raimondo’s connection to the Sackler Family.
Jonathan Sackler, the Purdue Pharma scion, has donated seven $1,000 contributions to Raimondo. And, Raimondo’s political action committee, Gina PAC, collected another $1,000 from Sackler.
Raimondo received $5,000 from Sackler’s wife Mary Corson, upping the total amount to $12,000. Then in the Saturday Dec 22, 2018Saturday edition of a media site, Golocal, it was stated that under Raimondo opioid deaths in RI continue to increase, according to New CDC Data. And Yale is also not giving back any donations. Yale refuses to return the donations or remove the Sackler names from academic chairs or academic centers. Beyond Raimondo, the Trustees are a who’s-who of American influence and wealth. Trustees include Joshua Bekenstein, managing director of Bain Capital, Charles W. Goodyear IV, the president of Goodyear Capital Corp & Douglas Warner who served as chair of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
The Sacklers have endowed two professorships at the School of Medicine and funded the Raymond/Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences, among other gifts at Yale, according to the Yale Daily News. Naturally, Yale is not going to look at a gift horse in the mouth! RI is Home to Major Oxycodone Manufacturer and Marketing And, little known to most, Rhode Island is home to one of the world’s largest oxycodone manufacturing plants — and the company’s marketing functions.
Bloomberg has reported the ownership relationship between Purdue Pharma and RI-based Rhodes Technologies and its related marketing company. Rhodes is a subsidiary to Purdue, the company owned by the infamous Sackler family — the billionaire family pushing the drug — often described as “heroin in a pill.”
A Financial Times analysis of company registration documents also established that the family also owns Rhodes Pharma, “a little-known Rhode Island-based drugmaker that is among the largest producers of off-patent generic opioids in the US.” https://www.golocalprov.com/news/ri-is-home-to-major-oxycodone-manufacturer-and-marketing-state-is-suing-par
Thanks for sharing this info., sprawler. Raimondo’s preference for hedge funds, making her a DINO along with her friend, Corey Booker, was a subject of Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone, “Looting the Pensions”. IMO, the public would be very skeptical about Corey Booker’s source of wealth if they read about it in the media and Gina should be uniformly loathed by all except the richest 0.1%.
Watched the news about El Chapo’s trial this evening and thought, “If only he had funded some nice museums.” He just had the wrong business plan.
Donald Trump’s “Wall” and the government shutdown have little to do with protecting the country…they are merely rallying cries to serve three purposes: pandering to his base, to push people from focusing on the corruption between government and business, and to divert inquiries into his Russia “connections” and their harm against the United States.
The government shutdown is merely another way to destabilize the nation…logical minds know that comprehensive and effective immigration policies must not only be written, but they must also be enforced…that which is necessary to keep our nation safe from drugs and violence.
While Trump’s policies may or may not be meant to fix, they further weaken and divide a great nation from its foundation. It is easier and more self-serving for Trump to focus on caravans of immigrants traveling north, rather than caravans of drugs produced by the Sackler family.
A president of the United States must have the ability to be of a sound and logical mind, but this president demonstrates a severe lack of both…and the nation continues to pay the price, for the failed policies of his predecessors, and now more importantly, of his own.
The Sackler family, as do others of the one percent continue to get rich, as middle class America and her citizens face horrific social, political, and economic policies conceived in back room deals between lobbyists and government leaders…
“The Wall was to hide what you can’t see…”
The Sacklers took a page from the tobacco company playbook… and the Big Oil playbook… and the playbook of countless corporations who have worked with politicians who have managed to convince the public that government regulations are bad and the government is the problem…. the body counts from tobacco and the body counts from global warming are mounting…
It is scary that glaciers are melting, raising the ocean level and eventually flooding coastal cities. There are many people who depend upon this glacial water. Melting will increase the flow of water for a while until it reaches a peak. What will happen when this necessity for life is no longer is available? Trump’s Chinese hoax isn’t a bit funny. He stands for polluting the environment and where is the outcry? $$$ for short-term profit is just plain stupid. Trump is just plain stupid.
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Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water.
Glaciers are crucial sources of water for people and crops in Central Asia. But global warming is causing glaciers there and around the world to shrink every year.
The world’s roughly 150,000 glaciers, not including the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, cover about 200,000 square miles of the earth’s surface. Over the last four decades they’ve lost the equivalent of a layer of ice 70 feet thick.
Most of them are getting shorter, too. Some have shrunk to nothing: Smaller glaciers in places like the Rockies and the Andes have disappeared. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were sharply curtailed immediately, there has already been enough warming to continue shrinking glaciers around the world.
This great global melting contributes to sea level rise. It affects production of hydroelectricity. It leads to disasters like rapid, catastrophic floods and debris flows. It alters rivers and ecosystems, affecting the organisms that inhabit them….
Across the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, the glaciers number in the thousands and the people who rely on them in the hundreds of millions, along rivers like the Indus in Pakistan, the Ganges and Brahmaputra in India, the Yellow and Yangtze in China and the Mekong in Southeast Asia.
Eventually these rivers will be affected by glacial retreat, said Arthur Lutz, a hydrologist with FutureWater, a Dutch water-resources consulting firm. The timing may vary; the Indus, for example, is more dependent on glacial melt than the Ganges, which receives much of its water from the monsoon.
Either way, Dr. Lutz said, “the total sum of water you get from the mountains is likely to increase until about the 2050s.”..
The sugar industry did the same thing all the other industries did that knew how dangerous their product was and went out of their way to hide those facts from the public.
This is a personal subject for me, having lost a son to opiods. (That was my conclusion; the ME said ‘unknown’). He was very ill w/a rare autoimmune disease that can cause excruciating pain. It was his 4th hospitalization in as many months; his pain-mgt physician was transitioning him to methadone to avoid continual increase of opioids. The dr followed all protocols; my son died of sudden fatal cardiac arrest.
The pain-mgt field was 15-20 yrs old at that point & many unknowns. It seemed to me big problems were created by the fed’s backward attitude toward pain treatment. Far more attention was paid to the potential for crime. Periodically the DEA in its zeal to shut down ‘pill-factories’ chilled medical treatment and research. [We are in another of those waves today.]
Case in point: soon after my son’s death I read of a small study on transitioning chronic pain patients to methadone pointing to a possibly much higher risk of fatal arrhythmia than understood. The study never went anywhere, because sufficient data was unavailable: methadone deaths were thrown into the same hopper as all drug deaths, w/o distinction between medical treatment and street addiction. There are also recent papers in the pain-med field pointing to zero follow-up data on longterm [1yr+] opioid pain treatment despite its prevalence.
Articles about EU’s much-lower incidence of high-risk opioid patients (e.g. at retired teacher’s link) say the primary difference is our comparative lack of healthcare regulation. That’s built in to our increasingly unfettered ‘free-market’ approach favoring ins cos, big pharma, marketing, litigiousness. Our system favors silver-bullet moneymakers & undermines good medical practice– same paradigm we see in education. We leave ourselves wide open to criminal malfeasance like Sacklers’ fraudulent peddling of Oxycontin.
This is criminal. And US politicians, who are wealthy, believe these people need tax cuts. Hoo-rah! to Trump and the GOP for their generous ‘tax cut for the middle class’. How stupid are people to believe the middle class benefited? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is getting flack for suggesting such a horrible thing as a tax increase on the super wealthy.
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World’s 26 richest people own same wealth as poorest half of humanity: Oxfam
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND (AFP) – The world’s 26 richest people own the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity, Oxfam said on Monday (Jan 21), urging governments to hike taxes on the wealthy to fight soaring inequality.
A new report from the charity, published ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, also found that billionaires around the world saw their combined fortunes grow by US$2.5 billion (S$3.4 billion) each day in 2018.
The world’s richest man, Amazon chief executive officer Jeff Bezos, saw his fortune increase to US$112 billion last year, Oxfam said, pointing out that just 1 per cent of his wealth was the equivalent to the entire health budget of Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.
The 3.8 billion people at the bottom of the scale, meanwhile, saw their wealth decline by 11 per cent last year, Oxfam said, stressing that the growing gap between rich and poor was undermining the fight against poverty, damaging economies and fuelling public anger.
“People across the globe are angry and frustrated,” warned Oxfam executive director Winnie Byanyima in a statement…
UNDER-TAXING THE RICH
Oxfam warned that governments were exacerbating inequality by increasingly underfunding public services like healthcare and education at the same time as they consistently under-tax the wealthy.
Calls for hiking rates on the wealthy have multiplied amid growing popular outrage in a number of countries over swelling inequality.
In the United States, new congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines earlier this month by proposing to tax the ultra-rich up to 70 per cent…
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