It’s hard to put the big guys away (just ask John Hammergren), but they did just get Laurence Doud, and that ain’t chopped opioids.

He got the pharmacist award the same year he was indicted, which means that the Pharmacists Society has now had, uh, five years to stop boasting about him.

The criteria for this award is very selective and discerning… He has provided creativity, innovation, and moral support for decades to his true passion: pharmacy. Doud also received an Honorary Doctorate from Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science in 2016.

That’s six years the Albany College has had to mull its decision to honor CEO Inmate Number One.

Wyoming, with the most guns and the highest suicide (overwhelmingly by gun) rate in the country, wants the National Rifle Association to relocate to the state.

This idea would create a brilliant synergy, sure to sweep up any suicide-hesitant gun owners into the general NRA-infused enthusiasm for La Vie (or in this case La Mort) Militaire. Just as locating the makers of oxycontin smack dab in the middle of the most addicted part of the US represents an obviously robust business plan, so placing the national headquarters of the NRA, which features a gun museum, a gun cafe, a gun bookstore, a gun movie theater, and just everything gun, in the very center of America’s suicide by gun epidemic, promises to take a real rifle blast to the head of the Depressed Cowboy State.

… all of the other things in which UD takes a keen interest. Certes, though, she has been virally distracted, and has had difficulty returning to normal.

But she’s getting there; and as always she thanks you for the tips and links, and will attend to them soon.

The American courts are taking care of Purdue; time to direct our attention to Purdue’s overseas conspirator, Mundipharma. Cuz they might be having a spot of trouble addicting us here, what with all the lawsuits, but overseas they are coked to the gills.

As Marx might put it, the people of the globe have nothing to lose but their sobriety; and they have a world of druggy deaths to win.

Look at Italy, a country transitioning from two glasses of wine for dinner to two bottles of morphine for eternity. I’ve just linked to a long article, but it’s worth reading for the bubbly richness of that nation’s surrender to Mundipharma’s ambassador, Guido Fanelli, a man who wants everybody Oxyed unto death. Fanelli’s war plan is so familiar to those of us who have for years tracked academic pharmawhores in the US – the releasing of bogus scientific papers, the organizing of bogus scientific conferences, the gathering-in of kindred prossies from universities and laboratories.

As the U.S. market contracts, opioid consumption is climbing overseas. Canada and Australia are already following America’s catastrophic course, with rising rates of addiction and death. Others may be on the cusp of crisis: Researchers in Brazil report that prescription opioid sales have skyrocketed 465 percent in six years. Overdose deaths are going up in Sweden, Norway, Ireland and England, fueled by prescription painkillers and the illicit drug trade.

Fanelli, “a motormouth and a braggart,” made it reasonably easy for Italian police to discover and record his epic monologues about his Oxy-obtained yacht, so he and various Mundipharma executives are currently somewhat up shit’s creek.

But there’s so much more to come:

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor, published a paper in 2017 pleading with the world to pay attention, especially as prescription rates rise in developing countries with minimal regulation. “As Oxy marches around the world, the things we see in Europe will be disturbing,” he said, “but less so than they will be in Botswana or India.”

[Michelle] Caetano has been on an alternative work assignment outside the [URI] classroom since the legal process began, URI has said. She moved from NECC to URI in August 2012, according to her attorney, just before the outbreak was discovered. URI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday after the verdict.

So Caetano, now convicted of a felony for her part in writing bogus prescriptions for the drug compounding firm [New England Compounding Center] responsible for the meningitis deaths of 76 people in 2012, remains on the University of Rhode Island faculty. Is she still giving out advice on assessing the behavior of her faculty colleagues?

You can’t make this shit up.

So Mr UD and I went back and forth a bit on the meaning of this most unusual sign in the pharmacy owned by Steven Henson’s comrade in crime (Henson, an MD, was just sentenced to life in prison). Ebube Otuonye’s trial date has not yet been set.

UD‘s theory was all about money: Knowing he had a captive desperate audience for the oxys, Otuonye figured out a way to make a real killing by forcing Witchita’s addicts to cough up extra money for non-necessities. Mr UD disagreed: “The guy knows the DEA is watching for proportions of pain pills sold relative to non-pain pills. He’s trying to hide the numbers.”

When your school or museum starts considering whether to return Sackler money, keep this in mind. Not just depraved indifference. Fiercely determined depraved indifference.

When can his glory fade?
O the wild charge he made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge he made!
Death to the FDA!
Noble four hundred!

… and 1 800 GOT JUNK?…’

UD just heard this, as she turned on her radio at 5:30 AM, and she thought: “Not sure about that sequence…”

Nice writing about choosing the right vacation while still deeply mourning the sudden death of your husband.

As autumn approached, my parents agreed that it would be good for my mental health to skip my first holidays without Peter. “Let’s go on a trip,” my father said. “Anywhere but Asia or Australia. I don’t want too long a flight.”

“Let’s go to Peru,” I suggested. An avid bird-watcher, I had always wanted to visit the Tambopata region of Peru, home to the largest known clay licks on Earth. (A lick is a cliff where macaws, parrots, and parrotlets congregate to ingest mud, a vital source of sodium.) I can think of no more breathtakingly gaudy sight in the world. As our guide marched us through the jungle, day after day, in search of an ever-narrowing list of the area’s antbirds and antthrushes and flycatchers and manakins, I came to see the trip as avian psychopharmacology. It was a perfect, if privileged—and wet and buggy—way of avoiding the tinselled and ornamented triggers of the holidays.

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.

WHOOOOOPS! Did you catch me peddling an American university affiliation while helping the Sackler family make the world safe for opioids? Now why would I do that? Why would I present myself as an American university professor – from Temple, no less, one of whose trustees just spent decades sharing with women the amazing power of drugs – when I’m not?

It turns out I don’t understand that when you no longer have an affiliation with a university you’re not affiliated with it anymore.

That’s why the Sacklers chose me to promote OxyContin to the world. I’m smart.

“[Martin] Shkreli has become the Wolf of Pharma Street — he’s basically come to represent everything … bad and wrong with pharma,” Art Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University, said by phone. And while Shkreli may be reviled, said Caplan, “he’s not doing anything in terms of prices that other companies haven’t done.”

This blog, dedicated to universities, has over the year pointed out the ways in which America’s predatory pharmaceuticals industry has compromised our academic institutions. Some of pharma’s corruptions are crude and overt: Med students have been so hounded by pharma (and other health industry) reps – med students, right? not even docs yet, but people who will at some distant point be docs – that to defend themselves their organization (the American Medical Student Association) established its now well-known Conflict of Interest Scorecard (UD‘s own George Washington University languishes near the bottom), which ranks such delicacies as GIFTS, MEALS, and of course GHOSTWRITING (a category all its own here at University Diaries).

Several of the best-compensated professors at American med schools are walking around with the names of the very dirtiest companies (GlaxoSmithKline Distinguished Professorship). Quite a few professors are themselves little more than pharma shills, given the riches they’ve accepted from the industry. Because of pharma, academic experimental protocols and published results are often tainted; because of pharma, research subjects may be treated unethically. Because of pharma, the fifteen-million page Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (At Least One Billable Diagnosis For Every American!) has become a joke.

Some of pharma’s academic depredations are more covert. For instance, on the board of trustees of the University of Chicago sits Gilead’s John Martin, a far more powerful and destructive icon of greed than measly little Shkreli.

…much of the nation’s press, but as you’re admiring 13 to 750 in Seconds Shkreli, remember that the University of Southern California boasts among its trustees Gilead’s John Martin, another amazingly obscene pharma babe.

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UPDATE: Matt Taibbi’s thoughts on The American Asshole.

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LOL: The Shkreli pill costs $900 in New York!

Probably costs a thousand here in UD‘s ‘thesda.

UD‘s pal Carl Elliott tells all in a New York Times opinion piece.