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.

Why is it that our most assiduous doctors, our physicians most devoted to the well-being of their patients, are the first to go to prison when an oxy-panic breaks out? Why is it that clinicians on the cutting edge, people willing if need be to try fentanyl, people even willing to kill a patient or two, mavericks in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute and guilty of honest services wire fraud, are constantly being hounded by the Justice Department and federal prosecutors and judges and juries?

It makes UD angry on behalf of former McKesson CEO John Hammergren, simply a more … ample Gordon Freedman, a man whose company “in 2006 and 2007 … shipped more than 5.66 million opioid pills to a single pharmacy in a tiny town in rural West Virginia.” Quietly retired on his eight hundred million dollars in compensation for a few brief years of stupendous national drug distribution, Hammergren now has to worry that, like Gordon Freedman, he will be punished for his health-care zeal.

… has fallen even lower. Despite plying its students with beer at the football stadium, it’s suffering a significant drop in ticket sales. Wonder why? Must be because they haven’t partied the place up enough. (UD has long recommended, given the amazing love of opioids in that state, that WVU athletics offer fans Oxycontin.)

To make matters worse, the local public radio station recently featured a professor at WVU who gave it hell for deciding to spend seventy-five million on an upgrade for its rapidly emptying stadium. WVU’s athletic director came right back at him with the following argument:

There is no argument that West Virginia University’s first responsibility is to provide the best and broadest educational experience possible for its students. It is the first part of our land-grant mission of teaching, research and service.

For many current and potential students, high-quality intercollegiate athletics are a key part of that experience.

In what way is football part – a key part – of an educational experience? Answer: It isn’t. More and more WVU students seem to realize that. But even as attendance tanks, WVU spends all its money on its football stadium.

Wretched, wretched WVU.

SOS says: She’s surprised to see the revert back mistake in the NYT. Just as the phrase chai tea is redundant, so all things that revert revert back, since the meaning of the word is to go back, to return. Chai (it means tea) does the job alone, and so does revert.

I mean, it’s not exactly a mistake; it’s just gauche, like saying irregardless.

And meanwhile, get a load of the incredibly convoluted latest iteration of a settlement with the opiate pushers Purdue/Sacklers. The litigation has been going on for years. We’ve covered in particular here the suffering state of West Virginia, as it dealt with insanely massive over-prescription of Oxy Contin. A disgusting tale.

Massively fatal drug distribution, to alter the quotation slightly, been berry, berry good to John Hammergren, whose rancid immorality has been cleaned up nice and good by outfits like CSIS, which allowed him to buy his way onto its board of trustees.

Every now and then an article appears that brings back the beautiful Hammergren way of life, in which you direct floods of killing substances into clueless hollers in West Virginia and suck up hundreds of millions of dollars for yourself while everyone dies and entire municipalities wither.

Yesterday’s New York Times told of a recommendation by the consultancy McKinsey that Purdue (Hammergren’s now-notorious supplier) keep the drugs flowing like crazy, and its distributors happy, by handing them cash whenever someone in their distribution territory overdosed. Overdoses after all are so… awkward. So unpleasant. So… actionable? I mean, a lot of these people die. Some of them have very compellingly grieving mothers who talk to newspapers and attorneys and all.

It’s the old drug dealer problem: You want addicts of course, cuz that’s where your big reliable bucks come from; but you don’t want dead or spasming or frothing at the mouth or almost dead addicts. You want nice functional non-deadbeat addicts. McKinsey’s solution to growing numbers of dead and dying addicts that might make the distributors… uncomfortable… is to compensate them for each and every OD. A good faith gesture:

If you’re a pharmaceutical-company CEO who is making an opioid that is killing people, you already know it’s a problem, and you already have a pretty good idea of how you have to handle it. You hire a firm like McKinsey, in this hypothetical scenario, to make it look as if you’re not the one coming up with the unsavory options. It gives you some numbers and some options on paper (actually, at least traditionally, a hardbound blue book). It also gives you plausible deniability. “I didn’t come up with this idea, Your Honor. It was the consultants!”

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“How do the C.E.O.s of these companies sleep at night?” Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, said at a recent news conference.

Sleep at night? John Hammergren, from his CSIS perch, is currently handing out how-to-stay-healthy tips to the American public. Take long walks, try the Mediterranean diet, and cram twenty oxys a day down your gullet.

… (details here) retires from his drug distribution days to the life of a highly respectable billionaire, ordinary dumbshit drug distributors in the state he helped destroy – West Virginia – go to jail. Let’s put the big drug capo next to the little drug capolinis, okay?

In a species of hypocrisy too grotesque even to laugh at, Hammergren, for years the CEO behind McKesson’s opioid carpet bombing of the US, currently heads up a task force on women’s health at the Center for Strategic and International Stupefacients (of which he is also a trustee; enjoy his written-by-someone-stoned-out-of-her-mind biography here). He ran one of America’s dirtiest businesses, and his personal greed is a national disgrace, but CSIS just loves them some Hammergren money and they don’t give a shit about those dead people cuz they wanna help people, see? You follow?

“No other corporation distributed more opioids in those years than Hammergren’s McKesson … Over his first 16 years as CEO, notes Bloomberg, Hammergren pocketed $781 million. His final months in the McKesson chief executive suite brought that total near $800 million. Upon his retirement, he walked away with a pension package worth $138.6 million.” When the rewards for addicting much of the nation get this high, you do not go to jail, mes petites; you make high-level decisions about women’s health.

So here’s John with probably more personal real estate than even Jeffrey Epstein, telling those American women who happened to survive his carpet bombing how to stay in tiptop shape … and here’s a couple of West Virginians – Samuel R. Ballengee and Devonna Miller-West – who saw the amazing business potential of opioids just as clearly as Hammergren but lacked his resources and connections. What happened to them?

They’ve landed where Hammergren never will – on a federal indictment for drug distribution. They’re both the sort of jerks who will end up going to jail rather than advising UD on how to keep her cholesterol low through the liberal application of OxyContin. Ballengee, once a pharmacist, and indeed a McKesson distributor until CBS aired a report about his pharmacy and McKesson went and got cold feet, got so pissed at CBS for ruining his business that he sued them for fifteen million dollars! That must seem like a lot to Ballengee, though Hammergren makes that much every time he takes a dump.

Anyway, a judge totally dismissed the lawsuit totally immediately (“These broadcasts were not only tolerable—they were applaudable... The people of West Virginia, indeed those all over the country, deserve to know about the evolution of the opioid epidemic and the identities of the bad actors.”), and now Ballengee’s unemployed, owes lawyers money, is the object of a bunch of civil suits from I guess survivors of overdosed customers, and has been named in a federal indictment. Loser.

Miller-West is similarly pitiable. She shares Hammergren’s tireless drug-entrepreneurship energy – she owned (still owns?) not only a pharmacy, but also Alternative Healing and Coalfield Cannabis (admiring local news article here) – but she too finds herself on the federal indictment.

The Yale Daily News takes note of the … awkward friendship between Yale and the company that made and marketed all those opioids that fucked everyone up.

[T]he Drug Enforcement Administration found that [Sackler company] Purdue Pharma had used “excessive and inappropriate” marketing that “very much exacerbated” OxyContin abuse. In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its executives pled guilty to federal charges of misbranding the drugs, collectively paying more than $600 million in fines… Mundipharma, a company associated with Purdue Pharma and owned by members of the Sackler family, has continued to push [OxyContin] in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. A Los Angeles Times investigation found that Mundipharma had paid doctors to give presentations abroad on the benefits of the drug. In 2015, the company saw a $100 million increase in sales from China — a jump of 45 percent — compared to the previous year, although Mundipharma did not disclose the portion of its revenue that came from OxyContin sales alone. There, the company used cartoon videos that understated the likelihood of addiction in a campaign for opioid pain relievers.

The YDN asked various friends and beneficiaries of the Sacklers on campus to comment, and … well… what do you expect?

“These are gifts that different family members made as individual family gifts. These were not gifts from the company — these were individual family gifts, so in that sense, these individuals have wealth that they gave to us, so it’s no more complicated than that when they made these gifts a number of years ago,” said Vice President for Development Joan O’Neill.

God knows how they got all that money… But for sure in the process of converting that money from corporate earnings to individual assets, they… uh… It’s no more complicated than that it all became … laundered?… And anyway, it was so long ago…

“While it is now clear that these drugs have been abused and there is certainly an addiction problem in our country, responsibility for it cannot be attributed to a single cause.”

You’d think the dean of Yale’s med school would be able to distinguish between a problem and an epidemic which the President of the United States has declared a public health emergency. As to his larger capacity for argumentation: Who said there was one cause? He’s correcting a straw man, ain’t he? All we’re talking about is one of the very biggest, and one of the most unconscionable, ongoing, causes.

Anyway. It’ll all settle down. Most opioid addiction occurs in no-‘count places like West Virginia, and why should a place like Yale give a shit about that?

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.

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

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.

Professors Robert Dworkin (University of Rochester) and Dennis Turk (University of Washington) are feeling no pain!

Read their hilarious emails about how they’re making tens of thousands of dollars off of pharma – which wants to listen in on American professors conversing about new developments along the Oxycontin line (We Americans ♥♥ LOVE♥♥ our Oxycontin. Just look at any town in West Virginia. Eli Lilly’s got us eating out of its hand!).

’20k [to attend a meeting] is small change, and they can justify it easily if they want to be at the table,’ Dworkin wrote to Turk in July 2003, after an Eli Lilly representative bridled at the price.

Dworkin’s absolutely right. Once you’ve got a national (soon to be international!) epidemic going, you’re talking real money. Dworkin knows Lilly routinely pays billions in fines every year for illegal this and that, and it really don’t make no never mind since when your profits are zillions you can laugh at billions. So this Lilly asshole has the gall to bridle at paying twenty thou to sit in a room for twenty minutes? UD finds it amazing the Dworkin/Turk gang isn’t demanding twenty million per meeting.

Possibly Dworkin and Turk are low-balling because they’re professors and not businesspeople and there’s a learning curve for them. This might be helpful for context:

[There’s a new rule,] unveiled by the S.E.C. … requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages… [Yet C.E.O. compensation continues, and almost certainly will continue, to rise.] Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’s something naïve about the new S.E.C. rule, which presumes that full disclosure will embarrass companies enough to restrain executive pay. As [one expert] told me, “People who can ask to be paid a hundred million dollars are beyond embarrassment.”

If Dworkin and Turk find themselves at all hesitant, they can tape this article to their refrigerators and reread it just before talking price with Lilly.

In West Virginia, state Sen. Evan Jenkins said flights on discount airlines between Huntington, W. Va., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. [pill mills] have been dubbed the “Oxycontin Express.”