… do their thing.

Spring comes to UD‘s Garrett Park.

[A]s the country’s addiction crisis worsened, the Sacklers spied another business opportunity. They could increase their profits by selling treatments for the very problem their company had helped to create: addiction to opioids. ..

The business potential of adding addiction treatment to the mix was illustrated in internal company charts and diagrams.

“Pain treatment and addiction are naturally linked,” one Project Tango document, included in the New York complaint, said. It depicted a big blue funnel. The fat end was labeled “pain treatment”; the narrow end was labeled “opioid addiction treatment.”

The company, the document said, could make money at both ends of the funnel as an “end-to-end pain provider.”

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

Sing it.

Smack and treatment smack and treatment
They go together in a way that’s sequent
This I tell you brother
You can’t have one without the other

Smack and treatment, smack and treatment
It’s a business plan we plan to frequent
Ask the local gentry
And they will say it’s elementary

Try, try, try to separate them
It’s an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion

Smack and treatment smack and treatment

Have a flavor that Purdue finds piquant
Brother told to brother
You can’t have one you can´t have none
You can’t have one without the other

Try, try, try to separate them
It’s an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion

Smack and treatment smack and treatment
They go together … well, enough repeatment
Brother told to brother
You can’t have one, you can´t have none
You can’t have one without the other
No sir

… the French New Wave director who died yesterday, an essay UD wrote long ago about one of her best-known films, Vagabonde.

If you’ve been here, you know. You know you’re in Fauquier County when the air changes. Take a deep breath, as our motto has it, and enjoy the musty aroma of sulfuric acid as our friendly people shoot at you for getting lost and driving onto their property.

Fast-paced city life melts into the distance, and your eyes rivet onto the amazement of Virginia’s Horse Wine and AR-15 Country.

Just 40 miles west of Washington, D.C., at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So far from the inner city. And yet so near.

[UD thanks her sister.]

… just keeps going. That university doesn’t see why it should shut down its lucrative Sackler money-collection project just because everyone else is shutting theirs down. As UD predicted, it’s hemming and hawing and hemming and hawing. And the Tufts-Sackler love affair looks significantly ickier than that family’s other alliances, because, like the University of Toronto before it, Tufts seems to have let Sackler money mess with its curriculum.

The Sackler family also funded the Master of Science in Pain Research, Education & Policy (PREP) degree program within the Sackler school…

In a powerful editorial, the Tufts student newspaper says what needs to be said.

Companies identified human pain as a source of perpetual profit and knowingly created addictive and lethal substances to exploit that opportunity. This act was the ultimate perversion of medicine, a corruption of the relationship of trust and care that ought to exist between healthcare workers and the sick. Tufts took money from a company and a family whose fortune was based on knowingly creating addicts and lying about it. Tufts is still willing to take money from them.

In a recent France 24 documentary on ISIS foreign women in the Kurdish-controlled Al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria, a camp director said that “when they [foreign ISIS women] gave themselves up, some of them told us that the IS group briefed them, telling them, ‘Surrender, go back to your countries, get your strength back and we will start again.’”

The Unsinkable Molly BOOM.

… was plagiarized.

“Haha. I mean we’re going to fight like crazy.”

You think American soccer can’t go the way of European? Read this.

The reluctance of countries all over the world to repatriate the WE 🖤 DECAPITEES folks will almost certainly mean the creation of an on-site international tribunal for them. This article makes clear that there will be immense difficulties in putting such a thing together. But there is probably no alternative.

“Notwithstanding their rhetoric about meritocracy, admissions offices already make the pragmatic compromises necessary to cultivate — and pay for — good scholarship.”

But it’s all falling apart! What will happen to Yale without that money?

OOOOOOklahoma!

Where the smack comes sweepin’ down the plain

Where the cowboys rope

Prescription dope

And it fucks so badly with your brain …

OOOOOOOklahoma! Every night my pharmacist and I

Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk

As we share the most amazing high…

We know we belong to the land

Of incessant controlled-sub demand

So when we say … Hey! The Sacklers just gave way!

We’re only saying you’re in a fix Oklahoma

Oklahoma nokay.

Seal

Mourning doves and dogs barking and new bees

And air traffic heavy out of Dulles:

I’m gone a week and I come back to spring.

At the beach I walked right into a seal

At rest on the blank Atlantic shoreline.

For a second I couldn’t believe it.

The seal watched me stand there being slack-jawed

And then I dropped my shells and my backpack

And again and again took its picture:

Gray, gazing, grazing.  Crazy.  I alone

On the printless winter sand at seven

Circling, thirty feet away, the wild seal.

And this was stark, and not spring: printless sky

And featureless seal and long trackless strand

And nothing of green and the buzz of bees.

This was, you recall, Mike Royko’s famous proposed motto (Where’s Mine?) for the incredibly corrupt city of Chicago; it now clearly stands for the tragic city of Baltimore, whose already-hapless mayor has revealed not only her personal corruption, but – along the way – the corruption of the University of Maryland medical system board of trustees.

Tragicomic, really, since the latest confirmation of the link between urban collapse and systemic corruption comes from sales – make that non-sales – of children’s books the mayor wrote (maybe – maybe someone else wrote them for her), self-published, and then sold in bulk for permanent storage in a warehouse to the same UM med system on whose board of trustees she sat.

Nothing unusual about that arrangement, though — huge numbers of trustees were self-dealing through the hospital system. The head of the UMMS board of trustees is doing mucho harrumphing about “managed conflicts,” but the phrase managed conflict has about the same persuasiveness as the phrase managed massage in the mouth of Robert Kraft.

… calls time.