You know, the media and the population at large has a lot of nerve to criticize Joe Biden and Democrats generally when you have a Republican Party that caters to the like of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has introduced a bill to award a murderer (regardless of what a jury ruled) a Congressional gold medal, and at some point to be indicted sex pervert, Matt Gaetz, offering Kyle Rittenhouse an internship. Of course the Democrats have their own problem children, such as Sen. Joe Manchin, who is back to making threats again, this time insisting that Keystone XL pipeline be given the green light or he won't consider voting for the Build Back Better spending plan.
Manchin claims that the sand oil going through it makes this country more “energy independent,” or whatever. As pointed out before, the Keystone project—like Line 5 and 6—are Canadian projects in which Canada sees all the positive financial benefit, and the U.S. shoulders all the negative environmental impact. But Manchin has also been “strangely” insistent that the only thing he thinks absolutely must be in the BBB spending bill is funding for opioid addiction. There are two facts that need to be stressed here:
1. 1. Opioid addiction is a huge problem in West Virginia.
2. 2. The state is 93 percent white.
Which brings us to the curious case in Ohio, where three retail outlets which fill doctors’ prescriptions for opioids—Walgreens, Walmart and CVS—were found “liable” for “fueling” the opioid “crisis.” The three chains denounced the verdict, stating that they did what they were legally imposed to do—fill out doctors’ prescription for the drugs, which they could not refuse to fill. Furthermore, it was not their duty to make assumptions or determinations about their uses by patients of legally proscribed drugs.
Many criticized the behavior of the judge in the case, including the Wall Street Journal:
The combination of avaricious lawyers, a consolidated case system and a rogue judge is highlighting again the need for Congress and the courts to crack down on legal abuse. Cleveland-based federal Judge. Dan Aaron Polster opened proceedings in October in a trial in which two Ohio counties are seeking to hold pharmacy chains CVS, Walgreens and Walmart liable for the opioid epidemic. The counties say pharmacies ignored red flags when they filled opioid prescriptions and caused a “public nuisance.”
The WSJ notes that the Ohio trial is the first of 3,000 targeting anyone involved in the pharmaceutical supply chain to “extort distributors and retailers,” including Johnson & Johnson and others this past summer to the tune of $26 billion. “The Ohio suits are in what’s known as multidistrict litigation, a means of sandbagging industry into high-dollar settlements…Too often, the process becomes a club to beat corporations into sweeping settlements without a trial.”
The WSJ singles out Polster, who “is wielding the club in the pharmacy litigation. Since landing this MDL in late 2017, he has pressured defendants to settle in the name of doing ‘something meaningful to abate the crisis…We don’t need a lot of briefs and we don’t need trials’ he has argued.’ That bias has informed the judge’s decisions throughout the case,” according to the WSJ. Further, “The plaintiff’s claim is based on a bizarre notion of liability. The companies are accused of filling legal prescriptions for a legal substance for real patients from licensed doctors.” They are alleged to have known that “they were filling out too many prescriptions, and should have been skeptical of even legal prescriptions about some undefined ‘red line.’”
The WSJ rightly points out that pharmacists have no way of knowing where that mythical “red line” is, and in most states “they must fill prescriptions under penalty of law if the doctor has a valid license and is registered with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. State medical and pharmacy boards have threatened to discipline pharmacists who refused to fill or watered down opioid prescriptions. Some pharmacists who refused have been sued by doctors for defamation and by patients for discrimination.”
Polster, who has refused to recuse himself despite his evident bias, has allowed plaintiffs attorneys to make the outrageous argument that “pharmacists cannot hide behind state law and should have investigated doctor’s prescriptions,” and has pressed companies “at every turn to settle. In an outburst earlier this year, he threatened the companies with bankruptcy if they go to trial.” He has allowed plaintiffs attorneys to present “big numbers” as “proof” rather than be forced to show “evidence of specific prescriptions that were improperly filled.”
The WSJ suggests that Polster’s behavior is merely an effort to “go out big” before he retires. While the editorial admits that the opioid epidemic is a “scourge,” it has “multiple causes and is not justification for abusing the court system.”
What about those “multiple” causes? We have to remember that opioids are derived from the opium poppy plant, which of course is the source of heroin. The John Hopkins Medicine website makes little distinction between heroin and prescription opioids, since both technically do the same thing: “Block pain signals between the brain and the body…to treat moderate to severe pain. In addition to controlling pain, opioids can make some people feel relaxed, happy or ‘high,’ and can be addictive.”
The principle difference between what is referred to as “opioids” and heroin is that one can be legally prescribed, and the other is illegal. Otherwise, there is no real difference, like the difference between “medical marijuana” and marijuana sold on the street. Legal opioids are technically differentiated from heroin by the fact that the FDA approves it in the form that it is provided in (such as pills) and can only be prescribed by a doctor.
Legal opioids are also differentiated from other opioids like heroin because you can go to jail for using the latter. And that leads us to the question of why, for example, the 93 percent white population of states like West Virginia are “victims” who require our sympathy and billions of dollars in restitution, while a heroin user in Chicago is demonized and can face years in prison if they are black or Hispanic. After all, white people who use legal opioids can make choices too. If they choose to abuse opioids and become addicted to it, that is still their “choice.” If anyone is “liable” it is the doctors who prescribe opioids, and they are at the mercy of patients who complain about “the pain” for real or imagined reasons (meaning lie about it), and willingly become “addicted,” and now are told they are “victims” and can be “compensated” for it.
Although all demographics can become addicted to opioids (for example, low-income people and minorities who can’t afford major medical procedures), the “face” of opioid addiction is white, and since white people don’t do anything “illegal,” they must be “victims.” In a 2018 study by two PhDs, Julie Netherland and Helen Hansen, entitled “The War on Drugs That Wasn’t: Wasted Whiteness ‘Dirty Doctors,’ and Race in Media Coverage of Prescription Opioid Misuse,” they noted the contrasted
media coverage of white non-medical opioid users with that of black and brown heroin users that show how divergent representations lead to different public and policy responses. A content analysis of 100 popular press articles from 2001 and 2011 in which half describe heroin users and half describe prescription opioid users revealed a consistent contrast between criminalized urban black and Latino heroin injectors with sympathetic portrayals of suburban white prescription opioid users. Media coverage of the suburban and rural opioid “epidemic” of the 2000s helped draw a symbolic, and then legal, distinction between (urban) heroin addiction and (suburban and rural) prescription opioid addiction that is reminiscent of the legal distinction of crack cocaine and powder cocaine of the 1980s and 90s (the former more likely to be used by blacks, the latter by whites). This distinction reinforces the racialized deployment of the War on Drugs and is sustained by the lack of explicit discussion of race in the service of “color blind ideology.”
When white people become addicted, it isn’t their fault, but somebody else’s. The study observes that “rather than simple casting out or disparaging white opioid users, we see instead attempts to reclaim and restore (through the medicalization of their drug use) these white bodies. As opioid use grows among middle class suburban whites, we argue that opioids are constructing another kind of White drug user—an innocent victim worthy of empathy and deserving of less punitive policy responses.” Contrast these white “victim” tropes with those of “racially disparate policy responses” in which “although black Americans are no more likely than whites to use illicit drugs, they are 6-10 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses.”
The U.S. judicial system spends untold billions of dollars incarcerating blacks and Latinos for drug use that helps them “forget” about the pain of injustice of this country, while the WSJ editorial states that we are only seeing the beginning of punitive damages that probably will ultimately number in the hundreds of billions of dollars that will “reward” (mainly white) people who demanded their “legal” opioids to take care of their aches and pains, and having taken too many at one time and demanded more, need someone to blame for their addictions, and the media and the criminal justice system has been all too willing to oblige them. Is this a case of white privilege and entitlement? Anyone who says it isn’t needs to see a psychoanalyst.
No comments:
Post a Comment