Free Republic

Democratic presidential candidate John Delaney believes that pharmaceutical companies responsible for the opioid crisis should be fined out of business and plans to push for such an outcome if elected to the White House. Delaney, a former Maryland congressman told the Washington Examiner that companies who knew how addictive opioids were and continued to push them anyway should face fines and criminal charges.

NORMAN, Okla. (Reuters) - Oklahoma’s attorney general on Tuesday argued at the start of the first trial in lawsuits around the United States over the opioid epidemic that “greed” by Johnson & Johnson helped fuel the drug crisis.Attorney General Mike Hunter made the claim in his opening statement in a state court in Norman, Oklahoma, at the start of the first trial to result from around 2,000 similar lawsuits against opioid manufacturers nationally.

Officials in San Diego County have issued an alert after three people have suffered documented fatal overdoses from a new form of the drug fentanyl know as carfentanil. It would only take 2 mg of the drug to cause a deadly overdose meanwhile it would only take .02 mg of carfentanil to have the same fatal results, CBS Sacramento reported. Langdon Fielding is an emergency veterinarian at Loomis Basin Equine. He said he uses fentanyl on horses for pain relief. "Basically it's super strong morphine-like a really strong drug to control pain," said Fielding. Carfentanil is similar to fentanyl but...

Angela Kennecke is a popular reporter for a television news station in my hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Each weeknight, Kennecke is at the anchor desk for KELO, a CBS affiliate, and has been there as long as I can remember. For many people in the “Sioux Empire,” Kennecke’s work on television is a normal part of the day, and they can count on her to tell them how it is.But Kennecke’s objectivity was shaken in May 2018, when her 21-year-old daughter, Emily, was found dead after overdosing on heroin that had been laced with the opioid fentanyl....

A member of the family that owns OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma told people at the prescription opioid painkiller’s launch party in the 1990s that it would be “followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,” according to court documents filed Tuesday. “The launch of OxyContin Tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white,” he said, according to the documents.

It’s an old episode of The Twilight Zone: A woman sits in a hospital with her head heavily bandaged. A surgeon is warning her that this is his last attempt and that if this procedure of plastic surgery doesn’t take, there’s nothing else he can do. So far, we haven’t seen any of the faces of the other people. The surgeon begins to remove the bandages, and when he is done, he expresses shock: No change! The camera shows us a normal, indeed beautiful young woman, then pans to show us that everybody else is grotesquely misshapen. The young woman...

FULL TITLE - Repost by Permission: US Federal Witness Due To Testify Against Hillary Clinton For Drug Crimes Killed In Massive Explosion A highly disturbing new Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) report circulating in the Kremlin today says that a US federal government witness who was due to testify this coming week before a grand jury in the expanding FBI probe into Hillary Clinton and her Clinton Foundation was violently killed, along with her husband, in a massive explosion that completely obliterated her New Jersey home—and whose expected testimony centered on a notorious American-based pharmaceutical company who gave money to the...

Federal authorities have charged 601 people across the country, including 124 in South Florida, in what they called the largest crackdown in history on health care fraud. South Florida retains its notorious ranking of two decades as a leading region for such cases. Prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida filed charges against 20 percent of the total defendants announced and said they were responsible for $337 million in false billings. “The numbers are really staggering,” Benjamin Greenberg, U.S. attorney for the southern district of Florida said Thursday at a Miami press conference. Nationwide, various schemes involved $2 billion in...

Scientists at the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife have found that mussels in Seattle's waters are testing positive for opioids. The finding suggests "a lot of people" are taking oxycodone in the Puget Sound, researchers say. Scientists used mussels as a way to test pollution in Seattle's waters and discovered high enough oxycodone levels for the shellfish to test positive. Mussels do not metabolise opioids, but some fish can become addicted. Mussels are filter-feeders, which means they filter water for nutrients to nourish themselves. In the process, they end up storing pollutants in their tissues, which makes them...

First Lady Melania Trump visited the “Prescribed to Death” memorial this week for Americans who have died in the opioid crisis. Mrs. Trump kept her ensemble colorful in a pale pink Max Mara coat, similar to a Jil Sander coat she has previously worn, and a yellow-green dress that perfectly matched a pair of yellow-green, suede Christian Louboutins. The chilly Spring has kept Mrs. Trump in a series of suits, coats, and pants, though she has celebrated the season in bright colors. Mrs. Trump wore a similar color palette last month in a coral Emilio Pucci suit and yellow sweater....

I understand that some Congressmen (by that I mean men and women, I’m unaware of any other “genders” currently serving but if there are, it includes them too) are offering jobs to Andrew McCabe in order to allow him to earn his federal pension. Would have been nice if they’d been similarly concerned about ordinary Americans who lost their jobs, and pensions, during the 8 year Obama occupation.I wish they’d just get back to tending to Global Warming, so the Rothschilds don’t end up running the world – and the weather.But what’s really not what’s bothering me today; number one...

---SNIP--- Like other patients across the country, Craig is a victim of the recent crackdown on prescription opioids, which is based on a narrative that mistakenly blames pain treatment for a plague of addiction and death. Most Americans believe we are in the midst of an "opioid crisis" that began in the 1990s with the introduction of OxyContin. According to the generally accepted account, deceptive marketing encouraged reckless prescribing, which led to widespread addiction among patients and record numbers of opioid-related fatalities—a situation President Donald Trump has declared a public health emergency. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who chaired...

FULL TITLE: Unclaimed bodies pile up as opioid overdose death rates soar and burial costs overwhelm the government Unclaimed bodies are piling up across the US as state and local governments struggle to keep up with payments to the funeral homes that spend thousands to bury them. A 2004 report estimated that there are 40,000 unclaimed bodies stored in morgues across the US, and experts say that number has risen dramatically in recent years in part due to the opioid crisis. More than 115 people die from opioid overdoses each day, and the most affected populations are those in lower...

Bolling explained. “We were going to sit down for the Thanksgiving dinner. There was an empty chair.” “We are walking over to the table and the phone rang. It was President Trump who said, Eric, no one should have to lose a child and we are thinking of you. Very, very important that he did that” “He has been great,” Bolling added. “He showed empathy and compassion, so I used it as an opportunity to say, Mr. President, can I come talk to you about this? And I have. I’ve gone to the White House a couple of times.”

A couple years ago, someone who stole $3.5 million from the government food stamps program was sentenced to...one year in jail. WORCESTER – A federal judge Monday sentenced a local woman to a year in jail and ordered her to forfeit $3.5 million and pay restitution in what lawyers said was the largest food stamp fraud case in Massachusetts history. Vida Ofori Causey, 46, owner of J&W Aseda Plaza at 753 Main St., pleaded guilty in December to charges of conspiracy to commit Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits fraud, SNAP fraud, and money laundering in a $3.6 million cash-for-benefits scheme. The...

ROCK HILL, S.C. - A Rock Hill woman walked up to meet her mail carrier thinking the yoga mat she ordered from Walmart had arrived. Instead, the postal worker handed her a heavy box, and a bag of pills, that had spilled from it. In all, there were more than 20,000 oxycodone pills, worth roughly $400,000. The woman who received the package lives in a neighborhood off Ebinport Road. She didn't want to go on camera, but told Channel 9 there were so many pills, they were spilling from the packaging. She immediately called police. York County drug agents gave...

One of the biggest drivers of America’s opioid epidemic is Medicaid, and ObamaCare’s expansion of the program has only made matters worse, claims a new report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, drug overdoses were the leading cause of accidental death in the United States in 2016, accounting for almost 64,000 deaths. Adjusting for age, the rate of drug-overdose deaths more than tripled between 1999 and 2016. Abuse of opioids such as oxycodone is one of the primary reasons for this increase.How does Medicaid play into this? For its...

Full Title: Remarks by President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and Bipartisan Members of Congress at Signing of H.R. 2142, INTERDICT Act Oval Office 5:22 P.M. EST THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you very much. This is very important to all of us gathered here. We’re pleased to be joined by many of the members of Congress as we take an important step to halt the flood of deadly drugs that are pouring into our country like never before. It took place two, three, four years ago. It’s at a level that people haven’t seen over the last few...

A new Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) office on the front lines of the opioid crisis will aim to tackle exploding drug overdose death rates and Mexican drug trafficking, according to its chief-in-waiting, DEA agent D. Christopher Evans. Evans, who currently serves as Associate Special Agent in Charge of the Detroit field office, will move up to the role of Special Agent in Charge of the DEA's new Louisville division. That office, which was announced earlier this month, will be the 22nd field office in the DEA's network. It will combine DEA operations in the states of Kentucky, West Virginia, and...

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has been chosen to be President Trump's "opioid czar." Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Wednesday that the former pollster will supervise the White House's efforts to combat opioid addiction. "The president has made this a White House priority," Sessions said. "He's asked her to coordinate and lead the effort from the White House." Trump declared opioid abuse a national public health emergency in October. Federal data shows opioids such as heroin, fentanyl, and prescription painkillers kill 71 Americans a day. "She is exceedingly talented," Sessions continued about Conway. "She understands messaging." --snip-- The news of...