… but the source is Bloomberg, and it’s about a prominent member of the Sackler family having pled guilty to a felony she committed while addicted to the family brew. So it seems worth pursuing as other outlets pick it up… Cuz it casts a certain opiate spell…

As the Sackler family worked through a plan to pay $6.5 billion to resolve their liability over Purdue Pharma LP’s production of addictive opioids, the epidemic hit even closer to home.

Joss Sackler, the wife of former Purdue board member David Sackler, admitted deleting WhatsApp messages showing she was the intended recipient of a shipment of prescription drugs seized by US border agents in 2024. Sackler, who said she was addicted to opioids at the time, pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation into the transaction.

“I am so truly sorry that when I was suffering from …”

… multiple Maersk ships passing without incident through the Strait of Rehoboth.

Les UDs will be here for a while, and will keep an eye out.

… it can be hard to focus on particular states. A new study confirming that NOLA must be relocated will certainly get our attention, but basically if you’re like UD there’s a bunch of pretty squishy territories out there, all of which somehow add up to USA.

She knows Utah’s all virtuous and the Deep South deeply fucked; and because of her special interest in the country’s amazing rates of gun ownership/gun violence/gun suicide, she can rattle off our leading abattoirs.

But when a drug use/drug overdose map like this one comes out, the bright red disparities really jump out at you — as in mega-malsain New Mexico, where a few years ago the desperate governor, knee-deep in gore, declared a health emergency, making it illegal for anyone to carry a gun for thirty days. Angry bangbangers practically torched the state when they heard that one.

As for this most recent map, New Mexico dominates the national overdoses too. While clueless coastals like UD persist in picturing Georgia O’Keefe meditating on Taos Mountain, the reality of (by pretty much any metric) our worst state screams out at them in bright red on a drug map.

‘[Schools are] taking all the funding that they’re getting and they’re putting in place cameras. Well, that’s great. I mean, now you have a video of this little girl committing this terrible act.”

A Valley Forge High School parent points out that while America lacks any real means to stop school shootings, it at least has the fun of watching them happen.

The speaker seems surprised that an eleven year old almost shot a Milwaukee city inspector to death. The eleven year old was trying to carjack him.

 Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear (2011, in this case), when critics like Marcia Angell screamed at anyone who would listen about the obscene overprescription of psychotropics in America and Europe. Maybe all the pharma shits are killing us with psychotropics talk got sidetracked for the last fifteen years by the super-obscene Purdue/Sackler/Oxycontin saga, in which the shits are killing us with opiates. In any case, despite powerful evidence of the inefficacy, not to mention withdrawal perils, of mood pills for many Americans, everyone kept gobbling them, cheered on by docs in the hands of pharma companies, and of course by pharma itself. Lots of people are on four or five of these pills. Even the morbid obesity of the DSM (“At least one diagnosis for every American.”), and the strong improbability of the underlying theory of psychotropics – brain chemical imbalance – have done little to stop the Gabitril train.

But now, under the influence of RFK Jr (politics makes strange bedfellows, mes petites), psychiatrists are suddenly engaging the air brake system, tossing about terms like deprescribing space, and knitting their brows over the fact that “16.6 percent of U.S. adults, or roughly one in six, report currently taking an S.S.R.I.”

Fuuuuuck that’s a lot man and some of that is, you know, kids under six and shit…. Pharma bros ain’t gonna like it, but maybe we should do something…

Lord knows how much more you could have done.

They keep trying to anoint the state a Christian kingdom. Back in 1995 they got all pissed when the local ACLU threatened to sue an Ohio county just cuz they put a twelve foot cross on top of their courthouse. And just tuther day the entire Columbus Downtown Commission rejected a Christian lobbyist group’s proposal for three crosses on a rooftop right across from the statehouse, two 12 feet and one 16 feet high and illuminated and all.

It’s real hard to make people who don’t understand the foundations of this country stop trying to Christianize its institutions. Like the Columbus Commission, you just have to keep heading them off at the pass.

Y’all know (if you know UD) how much she loves this kind of writing, with exfiltrated AIM forming ominous messages; and you know she reliably found it in university sports writing.

In the old days, she read gobs of this stuff, and was sure to share it with you; but now, though the sports biz is – uh – starker than ever, her gaze has wandered away from violent coaches, criminalized teams, empty stadiums etc etc.

Still, if the toothpaste is so stark that no one can look away (see Rutgers and WSU), she will read and report about the writing on the wall. Shockingly, because I was sure as shootin’ it was just a few bad apples, approximately “75% of male college students bet on sports and more than 25% .. are athletes.” And then there’s the coaches. Legal/NCAA compliance among our gridiron and b-ball court guys looks kind of like this.

At least she didn’t say World War Match Sticks.

Man Dead after Gun Discharges

in Parking Lot at Dolly Parton’s Stampede

in Pigeon Forge

… hit people in the head and threaten to shoot them with the 9-millimeter gun you’re holding. In a hospital’s emergency department.

Many certifiable lunatics are shooting at us. Ask the White House Correspondents.

Little Miss Rural Vermont and SOOOO many like her get little to no press coverage. But they’re busy resolving their rage issues at the local hospital and environs as we speak. Take care.

***************

Also, in Annals of American Heath Care:

Talley ultimately shot out a hospital window and fled on foot … A photograph obtained by the [Chicago] Sun-Times showed him running naked with electrodes on his chest. Prosecutors said he was found a short time later under a nearby porch.

An incredibly dangerous criminal hiding a gun is let into a hospital where he kills one cop and critically injures another.

Walk on through the slugs, walk on through the rounds! Though your guts be tossed and blown…

Sunday’s shooting comes exactly a week after another mass shooting near the University of Iowa, another Midwest Big10 school.

This one, at Indiana University, happened a couple of hours ago.

I mean, he was sitting right up there with the president and all and his sensitive equipment picked up nothing?

Fuck, man, this is America. You don’t even need sensitive equipment to anticipate bangbang in any public setting. Shopping malls are shuttering across the United States cuz of all the exchange of fire (one local reporter was cruel enough to quote a chamber of commerce person about a dying mall: “[Nancy] Hafford said the crime rate is actually on the decline, and crime should not be a deterrent for mall shoppers.”); and even the expertly surveilled power structure of the free world can’t get through a dinner without pistol play/hysterical hiding under tables. Not very seemly, but when everyone’s got a gun [current number of guns in private hands 500 million plus], what do you expect?