[A]lmost all Swiss bank accounts set up by Scandinavians are being used for tax evasion.
The producers of the soap opera General Hospital have worked out a deal with a pharma company to give one of the show’s characters a rare disease only the company’s drug can treat.
UD admires this marketing as much as she did the toy blocks with the name of a powerful antipsychotic on them.
Another favorite sales tool that began to be distributed in the waiting rooms of [pediatricians] were Legos imprinted with a Risperdal logo.
It’s our country’s most amazing, most expanding, frontier: Already a huge number of ads that interrupt soap operas are for anti-depressants, etc. etc. Now the shows themselves push controlled substances.
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UD sees a new tv comedy set in a hapless but adorable oxycodone clinic. Lil’s Pill Mill is run by a brassy wisecracking distributor with a heart of gold and her tattooed boyfriend Scooter who powers into the West Virginia hollers on his Harley to make deliveries. The simple but desperate mountain folk are colorful and hilarious. Each week brings a new challenge as the LPM staff seeks to evade detection by government agents, or as Lil suspects Scooter’s got “special friends” who turn tricks for him in exchange for the oxy.
Keep your eye on DEA/FBI raids of pill mills. One clinic operator currently on trial for everything from “violations of the RICO organized crime statute to illegal drug distribution to kickbacks to wire and mail fraud to money laundering” decided it was too dangerous to pocket the money he got for talking up his corporate drug supplier’s big drug – because a doc now in jail in Michigan for the same shit this guy’s on trial for pocketed his pharma money and look what happened to him.
So here’s what this guy decided to do, in order not to attract attention from the government.
[One] batch of emails [discussed in the trial] concerned [Xiulu] Ruan’s handling of the fees he collected for speaking for Insys. … Ruan … changed his procedure for handling the money after the Michigan case flared up… Rather than receiving the money, he’d begun routing the fees to various educational institutions, directly or through a charitable foundation, with recipients including the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of South Alabama.
Good man! Good man! And there’s every reason why your university can also be the beneficiary of alleged drug dealers trying to hide their money from government investigators. Just set up a lunch with the most prominent pusher in your town and suggest your campus as a routing location.
Academic medicine: That’s where University Diaries comes in.
The family whose name emblazons med schools and med school professorships all over this country – the Sacklers – is the same family addicting America and soon the rest of the world with OxyContin. It couldn’t have done it – it can’t keep doing it – without university researchers and clinicians lying for it in exchange for money.
Now that the opioid epidemic is so deadly that politicians and journalists can’t help noticing it, we will look forward, on this blog, to publishing the names of all the professors who did their bit to make a hideous drug respectable.
More news (see post below this one) from the University of Missouri, which didn’t notice a thing for thirteen years.
UD‘s friend Courtney, applying to law school, received this.
Waiving application fees is now apparently pretty standard; the Amazon gift card is, I think, something new.
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Update: Also on offer: Starbucks cards and hundreds of dollars worth of travel expenses. (See this post’s comment thread.)
In 2006, Trump said … [a] “terribly written” book had defamed him [by saying he was worth far less than what he claims], and he demanded $5 billion in damages.
… Trump sat for a two-day deposition for the case in 2007, during which he made a series of false statements… A New Jersey appeals court ruled in [the book’s author’s] favor in 2011.
The university foundation – the shady organization of rich boosters who want to do nice things for a particular university without having to be bound by the board of trustees and other pesky official organizations/rules – is often a very naughty thing. Sometimes it’s a slush fund for the president and his or her cronies, as at the University of Louisville, where its main function was loading more and more dollars onto the president’s personal haul. God only knows (channeling the Beach Boys) what many campuses’ sports and administration figures would do without The Foundation.
Iowa State University, the inspiration for Jane Smiley’s novel, Moo, has a typical foundation. It buys stuff the administration is too embarrassed, or legally unable, to buy. Until ISU’s president crash-landed one of the planes the foundation bought, no one seems to have been prompted to ask what Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, has asked: “Why does a university need to buy a plane at all?”
In answering that question, UD has always sought the guidance of Purdue University trustee Joanne Brouillette:
Excluding one flight to Naples with several other trustees and administrators, [Purdue University trustee JoAnn] Brouillette’s [twelve private, university-paid] flights [since the beginning of 2008] were to and from Fort Wayne, Ind., only spending 30 minutes in the air. Out of these flights, five of them carried no other passengers.
Big people like go UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN!
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UD thanks dmf.
The U of Smell is about to smell to even higher heaven.
“RNC Releases New Paid Web Ad ‘Hillary Clinton’s Liberal Elite Summer Tour’”: “highlighting her string of fundraisers with the liberal elite in wealthy enclaves like Nantucket, Cape Cod, and Beverly Hills, a reminder of how out-of-touch she is and a clear sign of whose priorities she will really be championing if elected president.”
Trump held fundraisers in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard earlier this month, and he owns a home in Beverly Hills.
… I like Vlad Putin!
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[Trump] has offered the most pro-Kremlin slate of statements of any U.S. presidential candidate since Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign of fellow travel in 1948. Trump has suggested that NATO is obsolete and should be dismantled or drastically scaled back. He’s indicated he would not necessarily come to the aid of NATO allies in the event of a Russian attack. He spoke about conceding Russian annexation of Crimea, a region of Ukraine that Moscow annexed in 2014, in what the global community almost universally views as a violation of international law.
On a personal level, Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin’s style of leadership, expressed hope that the two men would get along well, and claimed that he knew Putin, only to say later that they had never met.
Meanwhile, … all indications are that the Trump campaign maneuvered to soften language in the Republican platform backing Ukraine in its dispute with Russia. Manafort then denied this, a claim that is disputed by extensive reporting on the process.
… Trump … has publicly wished that Russia would release Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as secretary of state, a plea for foreign interference in the American state that shocked and appalled foreign-policy hands of every political stripe.
Two of America’s most eminent men, one of them the founder of a university and the other a lifetime trustee of NYU, go to court for fraud.