Finding the real major dealers

The Weekend Edition of the Appalachian News-Express featured a pair of stories that served to remind us of the toll the drug epidemic is taking on our communities. And though each had a local connection, the distinction between the two could hardly have been greater. The first was about a drug roundup of some locals Chief Deputy Melvin Sayers alleged were “small” dealers, while the second would had to have concerned an alleged “major” dealer.

That alleged major dealer was a former doctor from Mingo County, a Dr. Kathryn Hoover. Hoover was said to have written 335,130 prescriptions for pain pills between 2002 and 2010, a record for that state that still stands to this day.

Hoover lost her medical license in West Virginia, not because of her alleged ability to crank out pain pill prescriptions, but oddly enough because of an alleged attempt to solicit a female patient as a paramour for her son. Not that prosecutors have forgotten her lightning-fast abilities to diagnose and prescribe, as they are seeking to seize assets from the doctor in the neighborhood of $2.2 million.

Presumably, those people who she saw each day, whom she charged $450.00 each for the first visit and a paltry $150.00 for each additional visit, were not unlike those small dealers rounded up in Pike County. These people and the Doctor are hardly likely to run into each other at a lavish cocktail party though, because those who now reside in the Graybar Motel in Pikeville would never have had the wherewithal to travel in the circles Doctor Hoover must inhabit.

That would currently be, by the way, in the Bahamas, where she and her husband own an island. The feds would like it if she would return to West Virginia to give a deposition, since she was due to give one in May, but so far no luck in getting her back. Can’t imagine why, either.

There has to be other groups in these stories, though, and they aren't mentioned in either, but they are terribly important to both. This would be the Big Pharmaceuticals (Big Pharms) and their salesmen, who are the rugged individuals who travel through the country calling on medical doctors while doing the bidding of their masters back at HQ.

These sales staffs always followed the instructions given them, too. From Purdue Pharma, we had trained sales people advise doctors to prescribe the highly addictive semi-opioid, Oxycontin, for moderate pain. You know the kind that any over the counter product would be able to control?

There were a myriad of questions that came to me as I read about the alleged exploits of Dr. Hoover. For instance, who was on the sales staff from the Big Pharms that dealt with what must have been some colossal orders because of Dr. Hoover? Didn’t that raise any red flags with them? What about the people back at HQ? Didn’t they bother to ask the good Doctor why she was writing so many prescriptions for addictive substances?

Or were they too busy counting money to notice that they were the pipeline in this drug trade? Too bad, because they might have been able to have helped at one time. Lucky for them they aren’t targets of federal or state investigators, either. Wonder why not?

The A1C Test

Diabetes is a continual learning experience that sometimes translates to other areas of your life.  Take my first experience with the A1C test.  An A1C test is like the daily blood test except that the A1C test will show how well you are managing your blood sugar lever, usually over a three-month period.

My first one was suggested within a month of my having been diagnosed with this dread condition.  My doctor then said it might be helpful and I wanted to ask how, but I didn’t.  I also knew what the results would be, because I had been in denial for over four months about my diabetes. 

What I should have asked was “How much?”  But that would have shown foresight and I am legally blind in this area.  So the blood was drawn, sent to the lab, which then sent back the results and a bill for $371.00.  Well, I found out my heart was still good, otherwise that would have given me a heart attack.

I paid payments on that thing for three months, $50.00 at a time, and then I got curious, so I called those people at the lab and I asked them “Why did you all charge me so much?”  Their answer was that this was about my health, blah, blah, blah, and I interrupted and asked “How is this about my health?”  And they said you need to know how your blood sugar level was doing and I said “I know how my blood level was doing, it was high.”  And they said yes, but you need to know how high, and I said, “I know how high, it was danged high.  What I want to know is how much did it cost you to do the test?  Show me where you spent even close to $371.00 and I’ll finish paying you, otherwise, I’m cutting you off.”  They couldn’t, so I did,

I bring this up because in the article in last Wednesday’s Appalachian about the new town to be built on a mountaintop removal site, the sentence that nearly stopped me from reading it was this:  “…Rutherford…announcing the county has been approved to spend $300,000 in multi-county coal severance tax funds to study  the possibility of establishing the new community.” 

Study the possibility?

Now there are a lot of people in this county to whom $300,000 is a good deal of money, and I am one of those people.  So for those people, I would like to ask some questions similar to the ones I posed to that lab.  Oh, don’t fret if you are one of those who can answer them.  As my cousin Vinny said in the movie of the same name, “Just shout ‘em right out if you know the answers.’

First of all, who decided how much was needed to do this study?  Secondly, how is the study going to be conducted?  Thirdly, is it really going to cost that much?  Fourth, who is going to get the money for doing the study?  And finally, when the money has been spent and the study is in, can I see how the money was spent?

I ask because my uneducated opinion is the town won’t be built.  And it’s free.  I just want to know how the pros do it.

It is broken, let’s fix it

So the big fight is on in D. C. about what to do with the national budget. The House of Representatives is in the hands of the Grand Old Tea Party and is in a fighting mood. These rebels in Speaker John Boehner’s army are in no way ready for a compromise, even if the President has said that we need to talk now and come up with a lasting solution.

To that end, the President has pretty much said that everything must be on the table, with one exception; any agreement on a budget must include an increase in taxes on the wealthiest Americans as well as spending cuts. Boehner, very well aware of the mood of his Grand Old Tea Party compatriots, has said the one thing that cannot be included in any agreement is any tax increase at all.

For his part, Obama wants a plan that will set a debt ceiling that will not need to be increased until the year 2013. That, in his view, will settle the matter long enough for an agreement to be reached that will be lasting. It will also be one year past next year’s presidential elections.

In an interview on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Senator Dick Durbin, D. Ill., acknowledged one problem with the President’s position calling for an increase in the debt ceiling; as a U. S. Senator, Obama voted against an increase in it. In fact, Durbin acknowledged that Obama’s vote against the increase was probably cast because the President who asked for it was from the other party, which is precisely why the Grand Old Tea Party in the House of Representatives will vote against it now.

One might be tempted to quote the warden from the Paul Newman movie “Cool Hand Luke” when he said “What we have is…a failure to communicate”. But that would only be partially true. What we have are two political parties who are increasingly in the hands of their bases, and in each instance, that base is hardly representative of the country as a whole.

For instance, President Obama has offered compromises that would include spending cuts that are far greater (four trillion dollars over ten years) than what the Grand Old Tea Party has asked for. But his plan includes tax increases on the wealthy. And it is opposed by extreme elements on both sides; from the left because it includes cuts in Social Security and Medicare and from the right because it will ask for more taxes from the uber-wealthy.

Well, in this instance, neither side can get what their bases really want. What the left-wing of the Democrats wants is more social-welfare legislation and far greater tax increases on the wealthiest Americans. What the right-wing of the Republicans wants is repeal of all social-welfare legislation and, for all intents and purposes, no tax on anyone in the billionaire’s club.

Since neither side is going to get what they want, are both parties willing to throw the baby out with the bath water, or will they find that compromise isn’t the nasty word they’ve led us to believe it is? It’s high time, after all, to realize that this “all or nothing” attitude is what got us in this mess in the first place.

New title, same bill

Those of us who are hoping to see industrial hemp legalized in the United States were encouraged after the 2010 congressional elections.  Every one of the twenty-five Members of the House of Representatives who co-sponsored H R 1866, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009/10 were re-elected.  The most important member, of course, is Rep. Ron Paul, R., TX, the original Tea Partier, who sponsors a version of this bill pretty much every year.

What this bill would do is redefine the term marijuana so that it no longer includes its blue-collar cousin, hemp.  Marijuana, of course, has been selectively bred long enough so that it has become considerably more potent than the varieties available at Woodstock.  This is done primarily by growing only female plants, the one that produces flowers. 

If there is a male plant in the vicinity, it will pollinate the female plant.  The female plant will then produce seeds, and that produces a subpar pot plant.  Wouldn’t get a fly high, in the words of Cheech and Chong.

One of the most quoted excuses for keeping industrial hemp illegal is that it is the same thing as a marijuana plant.  Except that it contains almost no tetrahydrocannibinol and would render any illegal pot plants worthless, and we’ve already discussed why.

Well, Ron Paul isn’t buying the idea that industrial hemp is nothing more than a variant of marijuana.  That’s why he has reintroduced his bill-this time it’s H R 1831-the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011/12.  By the way, it still has those same twenty-five Members of the House of Representatives as cosponsors.

What it doesn’t have is a snowball’s chance in the abode of the wicked.  As was the case in years past, this bill will be assigned to the House Judiciary Committee.  The Chair of this committee, Lamar Smith, R, TX, sadly, does not support the aims of this bill, and while he has referred it to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, he does not anticipate bringing it up for a vote.  This was the same fate, by the way, of H R 1866.

Oddly enough, the U. S. is almost alone in banning production of industrial hemp.  Canada, for instance, legalized it in 1998.  China is the world’s largest producer of hemp.  And can you guess who the leading importer of hemp is?  Oh, go ahead and take a wild guess.  What nation has outsourced so many of its jobs to the People’s Republic and now imports almost everything from it?  Yep, it’s the same country that keeps it illegal to grow within its own borders.  Of course we are talking about the good old U. S. of A. 

How much hemp does the U. S. import?  That’s a tough one to answer, because the U. S. doesn’t officially keep tabs on it, but industry reps claim that products that contain imported hemp are valued at more than $300 million each year.  That figure could easily climb and would provide American farmers with a crop that could yield around $300.00 an acre profit.

Of course, this can never be because the feds are on the job, and as long as they have anything to say, this drug, in the same class as heroin, will never be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.