https://www.foxnews.com/shows/fox-and-friends
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WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS HAPPENING????!!!!! HAS WAL-MART PUBLICLY ADDRESSED ANY OF THIS HORSE S**T?
Did the government over correct on the opioid epidemic?
Posted on June 26, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Colorado’s example shows legal issues marijuana could bring to Illinois
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Colorado’s example shows legal issues marijuana could bring to Illinois
https://wgntv.com/2019/06/25/colorados-example-shows-legal-issues-marijuana-could-bring-to-illinois/
CHICAGO – For all the back-slapping and applause as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signs legalized marijuana into law Monday, local law enforcement is bracing for problems that could come along with it.
Legalization doesn’t suddenly remove the drug trade’s criminal element, they say, while some argue it even inspires it.
As one federal agent told WGN Investigates, “Look to Colorado for signs of some of the trouble ahead.”
Just last month, investigators in that state seized more than 80,000 plants and 4,500 pounds of harvested marijuana in the largest marijuana black market investigation in Colorado’s history.
“The legalization of marijuana has created all kind of problems,” said Jason Dunn, U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado. “These are pure black markets creating large amounts of marijuana for distribution out of state through criminal enterprises.”
In the Denver area, police say criminals have ignored limits designed to constrain production, growing so much black-market marijuana, it’s being illegally shipped in significant amounts to seven states, including Illinois.
There are also concerns about road safety. In Colorado, marijuana-related driving deaths have more than doubled since legalization. There were 139 in 2017, up from 55 in 2013. Marijuana was involved in 21 percercent of the traffic fatalities in 2017.
In Illinois, the governor and others portray the legalization of marijuana as a new revenue stream – plus a new start for people who have a criminal record for relatively minor amounts of pot possession.
Under federal law, marijuana is still considered to be an illegal controlled substance on par with heroin. But agents are more concerned with large-scale sellers, than recreational users who use these products generated out of hemp cbd flower.
As for the impact on the drug trade?
A top official with the DEA in Chicago tells WGN Investigates: “These are trans-national criminal organizations. They’re in it to generate revenue and they’re not going to stop.”
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Iowa veteran’s survivors sue over VA’s illegal hiring of troubled neurosurgeon
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Iowa veteran’s survivors sue over VA’s illegal hiring of troubled neurosurgeon
The survivors of an Iowa veteran who died after brain surgery at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City are suing the VA for illegally hiring a surgeon with a history of malpractice allegations.
Army veteran Richard Hopkins, 65, of Davenport died in 2017 after developing a post-surgery infection. His family’s federal lawsuit, filed this month, blames neurosurgeon John Henry Schneider, who performed four brain operations on Hopkins.
Hopkins and other VA patients didn’t know that Schneider’s medical license had been revoked in Wyoming in 2014 over allegations of poor patient care. The Iowa City VA hospital hired Schneider in spring 2017 at an annual salary of $385,000 — despite a law saying doctors whose state licenses had been revoked could not work for the VA.
Schneider resigned in late 2017, after USA TODAY inquired about his status and the VA moved to fire him.
The new federal lawsuit, filed by Hopkins’ three daughters, blames his infection on “medical negligence,” and says at least three other Iowa City VA hospital patients suffered such complications.
Hopkins’ family said he developed the infection after his first surgery for a non-cancerous brain tumor. He died a few weeks later, after undergoing three more surgeries.
“Rick was strong, he was a bull,” his sister, Annette Rainsford, said in a 2017 interview with USA TODAY. “Why would you go into someone’s head four times?”
Schneider told USA TODAY that the infections suffered by his patients were complications that can occur in neurosurgery. He said Hopkins’ case was a “tragic” example, in which the patient developed two brain bleeds and then fluid buildup, each requiring another surgery.
“I’ve had a great run at the VA with zero issues,” Schneider said in the 2017 interview. “Have I had to take patients back (for surgery) for post-op infection? Yes. I mean, I can’t prevent every infection.”
Schneider maintained a Montana medical license after his Wyoming license was revoked. Generally, physicians may work at any VA hospital in the country as long as they have a medical license from any state. But under federal law, they are not supposed to be hired if they’ve had a license revoked.
Schneider disclosed his licensing history when he applied for the Iowa City job, but he was hired anyway. A USA TODAY investigation found several similar examples nationally. In response to the USA TODAY findings, the VA pledged to review its hiring practices to ensure they comply with the law.
Schneider was sentenced last year to spend two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraudulently hiding assets in a bankruptcy case in Montana. His bankruptcy filing came while he was facing medical malpractice judgments from earlier cases. Online records show his Montana medical license was revoked in 2018.
A spokesman for the Iowa City VA hospital declined to comment on the new lawsuit.
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FDA releases millions of adverse event reports on medical devices
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
FDA releases millions of adverse event reports on medical devices
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has released more than 20 years of reports detailing adverse events involving medical devices, ending a program that allowed some manufacturers to keep safety issues from the public.
The agency announced on Friday it has made publicly available approximately 6 million adverse event reports dating back to 1999 that were previously not included in the federal database Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience, or MAUDE. Those reports previously were exempted under the FDA’s Alternative Summary Reporting program.
Established in 1997, the ASR program allowed exemptions for individual adverse events involving certain devices with “well-established risks.” Manufacturers were instead told to write quarterly summary reports of such events. This did not include events involving patient deaths and “unusual, unique or uncommon adverse events,” according to the agency.
“We believe these steps will improve our ability to identify and address device safety signals and provide patients and healthcare professionals with important information they can use to make better informed health care decisions,” Shuren wrote on Friday.
The FDA first announced it was ending the ASR program in May. At that time the agency announced it was ending all adverse event summary reporting for breast implants in response to concerns over related anaplastic large cell lymphoma, which forms in the scar tissue around a breast implant.
Shuren said the FDA has been working on sunsetting the ASR program since 2017 as it developed the recently-unveiled Voluntary Malfunction Summary Reporting Program where devicemakers report events in a quarterly summary that’s made publicly available through MAUDE.
In addition, Shuren said the FDA will make the MAUDE database more user-friendly over the next few years.
“Our goal is to make MDR (medical-device reporting) data more usable and easier to find, furthering our efforts to increase transparency in medical-device reporting,” Shuren wrote.
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Bureaucrats: pushed “uppers” to WW II soldiers.. to push the soldiers past their limits.. to help win the war
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Nazi soldiers used performance-enhancing ‘super-drug’ in World War II, shocking documentary reveals
https://www.foxnews.com/science/nazi-soldiers-used-super-drug-in-world-war-ii
A shocking documentary is shedding new light on just how far the Nazis and Allied soldiers went in an attempt to win World War II — including the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
“Secrets of the Dead: World War Speed,” which airs June 25 on PBS, reveals that Nazi soldiers were given the methamphetamine Pervitin, manufactured by Temmler Pharmaceutical, while American and British forces used everything they could get their hands on, including coffee, Pervitin obtained from Nazi forces and the amphetamine Benzedrine.
“In 1940, the British army discovered Pervitin in a downed German plane in the south of England, unlocking the secret to the German troops’ boundless energy, and leading the Allies to consider the same tactic for their troops,” PBS representatives wrote in a statement.
The representatives continued: “The Allied troops decided to use the amphetamine. Both drugs make users intensely alert by flooding them with a sense of euphoria. With its added methyl-group molecule, Pervitin races across the blood-brain barrier a bit faster than Benzedrine. Otherwise, the two drugs have virtually the same impact.”
Military officials (including U.S. General and future President Dwight Eisenhower, who ordered 500,000 tablets of Benzedrine) were anxious to gain an edge in the war. They wanted to push the soldiers past their limits, hoping the drugs would “defeat not just the need for sleep, but anxiety and fear among troops” as well.
(Courtesy of Brave Planet Films)
LiveScience reports that in 1940, the year of the Nazis’ relentless attacks against Britain (also known as the Blitzkrieg), approximately 35 million Pervitin tablets were sent to 3 million German soldiers, seamen and pilots, citing data from the British War Office.
The findings were compiled by Nicolas Rasmussen, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia and published in 2011.
However, the implications of the drugs were largely overlooked, PBS reports.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), methamphetamine is chemically similar to amphetamine and can be used in a variety of different ways, including smoking, pills, snorting or injecting the powder after it is dissolved in water or alcohol.
Some of the long-term consequences of methamphetamine use include extreme weight loss, addiction, memory loss, violent behavior, paranoia and several others.
“In addition, continued methamphetamine use causes changes in the brain’s dopamine system that are associated with reduced coordination and impaired verbal learning,” NIDA writes on its website. “In studies of people who used methamphetamine over the long term, severe changes also affected areas of the brain involved with emotion and memory. This may explain many of the emotional and cognitive problems seen in those who use methamphetamine.”
Inside the German Pharmacy Museum, James Holland meets with medical historian, Dr. Peter Steinkamp of Ulm University. (Credit: Courtesy of Brave Planet Films)
The organization even cited a recent study that people who once used methamphetamine “have an increased the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.”
And though Benzedrine was determined not to be as dangerous as Pervitin (it was administered in tablet and inhalant form), the drug was still harmful to soldiers, documentary consultant James Holland told Live Science.
“It stops you from sleeping, but it doesn’t stop you from feeling fatigued,” he told the news outlet. “Your body has no chance to recover from the fatigue it’s suffering, so there comes a point where you come off the drug and you just collapse, you can’t function.”
German soldiers battling in the Stalingrad region, Russia, World War II, on Sept. 6, 1942. (De Agostini Editorial/Getty)
Holland added that the full extent of the addiction and the devastating effects were not “properly understood” and that there was “very little help” given to the people who became addicted.
“By the end of the Second World War, you saw increasing knowledge of the side effects of these drugs,” Holland said. “What you don’t see is what to do with people once they become hooked — that’s something that had to be learned the hard way in the years that followed.”
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there’s a “disconnect” between decisions being made by health plans and pharmacy benefit managers that “aren’t necessarily medically based” but are instead often “financially based.
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
KSL TV, File
Some patients taken off opioids too abruptly amid opioid battle, lobbyist says
SALT LAKE CITY — While Utah and the country take aim at the opioid epidemic, many with chronic pain have suffered as doctors take away or taper them off their medications, a lobbyist told legislators Monday.
There are people having trouble getting their prescriptions from pharmacies and others being “force-tapered” or having their opioid prescriptions suddenly discontinued, which can cause severe opioid withdrawal symptoms, said Amy Coombs, who has worked with substance use patients and serves as executive director of Prestige Government Relations and Consulting Group.
Coombs presented to members of the Health Reform Task Force as the group discussed opioids, health care costs and Medicaid expansion during a Monday legislative interim meeting.
In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced its 2016 opiate guidelines have been “widely misapplied” to include those using opioids for palliative care, chronic pain and illnesses such as cancer, Coombs said.
There’s been a “broad brush stroke” of tapering or cutting people off of opioids, according to Coombs, but opioids should be considered on a person-to-person basis.
Also in April, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning and required labeling changes after receiving “reports of serious harm in patients who are physically dependent on opioid pain medicines suddenly having these medicines discontinued or the dose rapidly decreased. These include serious withdrawal symptoms, uncontrolled pain, psychological distress and suicide.”
Many do benefit from opioid therapy, Coombs said, and she’s heard “more and more of those particular stories” about people in Utah who have taken their lives or suffered severe setbacks in their pain management because of their opioid prescriptions changing too quickly.
Some have turned to illegal drugs, according to Coombs. “People are not getting the care that they need.”
Those who need opioids now face more difficulty finding access to quality care and providers willing to treat their chronic pain, she said. People who have been on opioids for years often have to wait for pharmacists to reach their doctors before dispensing prescriptions — and suffer withdrawal symptoms while they wait, she said.
Rep. Jim Dunnigan, R-Taylorsville, asked what could cause that delay.
Senate Majority Leader Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City, himself a pharmacist, explained that there’s a “disconnect” between decisions being made by health plans and pharmacy benefit managers that “aren’t necessarily medically based” but are instead often “financially based.“
Health insurance plans have taken the fight against the opioid crisis as “a hard, fast rule and they don’t allow a lot of leeway,” Vickers said.
Opioid patients prescribed high quantities of opiates need to be tapered off slowly to get long-term results, according to Vickers. But health plans often don’t allow for slower tapering.
“And that forces (the patients) into making choices that they probably normally wouldn’t make,” including finding drug sources on the streets, Vickers said.
Sen. Allen Christensen, R-North Ogden, noted that the opioid issue has been “beat to death.” But opioids are “miracle drugs,” he said.
“We have to move the pendulum back and forth a little bit. … We have to regulate it, but don’t overreact with it. … We’re trying to find that healthy medium in the middle,” he said.
Coombs said patients have also suffered because doctors have been incentivized to taper patients off opioids and de-incentivized to treat pain patients with opioids.
She urged the task force to work on creating a palliative care definition or exemption to help those who need opioids long term receive them. She also encouraged creating “bridge” opportunities for patients to receive supplies of two to four days so as not to suffer withdrawals while doctors and pharmacists work out issues such as authorization.
Several of the legislators agreed that Coombs brought up a real problem, but a potential course of action was not discussed in the meeting.
“I think it’s a problem. You have to find someone who thinks it’s enough of a problem to try and do something about it,” Christensen said, quipping that “a pharmacist” legislator would be a good person to tackle it.
Rep. Suzanne Harrison, D-Draper, said, “I think this raises the issue of: We need to make sure that we’re providing evidence-based care and enough access to those care providers who have the qualifications.”
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Pain patients left in anguish by doctors ‘terrified’ of opioid addiction, despite CDC change
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Pain patients left in anguish by doctors ‘terrified’ of opioid addiction, despite CDC change
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/06/24/pain-patients-left-anguish-doctors-who-fear-opioid-addiction/1379636001
New York resident Mickey Saxbury worked on a General Motors assembly line for 25 years before sharp, throbbing back pain from an on-the-job injury forced him to retire.
A back operation failed. A device to block his pain gradually became ineffective. The only thing that’s consistently worked, he says, is pain medication.
But a judge overseeing his New York State Workers Compensation Board disability case ordered that his opioids be sharply reduced.
“They dropped me so far down that I can’t even get off the couch anymore,” said Saxbury, 61, who lives near Buffalo.
Chronic pain patients such as Saxbury are becoming increasingly vocal about what they say is a medical community that’s shutting them out. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines in 2016 to cut back prescriptions after years of liberal opioid dispensing contributed to addiction and overdose deaths.
Those guidelines not only influenced doctors – state regulators, health insurers and even disability administrators also have cited these federal guidelines to justify policies that limit pain pill prescriptions.
Last month, the CDC clarified its position, saying that the response to the opioid crisis went too far. In a New England Journal of Medicine editorial, a panel of experts cited examples such as inflexible thresholds on dosages, abrupt tapering and misapplication of the guidelines for people with cancer, sickle cell disease or recovering from surgery.
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former health secretary of Maryland and health commissioner of Baltimore, said he supports how CDC’s clarified guidelines reconcile the risk of opioids with their need.
“The right thing is to follow that balance,” said Sharfstein, who is now a professor and vice dean at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The guidelines “shouldn’t be used as a kind of cudgel to reduce appropriate prescribing.”
Many chronic pain patients question whether the revised policy will bring them relief.
Saxbury took a powerful opioid, oxycodone, to manage throbbing lower back that radiates down his left leg. His prescription remained steady for several years: 30 milligram pills, four times each day.
But the New York State Workers Compensation Board, which oversees his case, tapped a medical expert to review Saxbury’s medical chart. The expert, Dr. Chris Grammar, who never physically examined Saxbury, concluded he was being prescribed unsafe levels of opioids.
In his report to the New York board, Grammar cited the state’s non-acute pain medical treatment guidelines and CDC data on overdose deaths linked to opioid prescriptions. He added that Saxbury’s pain doctor’s high-dose opioid prescriptions are “no longer supported.”
“This is not to be critical of his treating physician as this approach is relatively new,” Grammar wrote. “However, in the absence of functional improvement, this patient is undergoing extraordinary risk with little benefit.”
A judge agreed and ordered Saxbury’s pain medication reduced.
Based on the judge’s decision, Saxbury said his doctor cut his daily pain prescription by half. He cannot muster the energy or tolerance to do many daily activities. And his planned move to Arizona to escape a cold climate that makes his pain worse and live near family seems more daunting than ever.
Saxbury said he has unsuccessfully pleaded with his doctor to reconsider the pain pill reduction.
“My pain-management doctor said they cannot give me the medication because they could lose their license,” Saxbury said. “I’m between a rock and a hard place.”
Grammar declined to discuss the specifics of Saxbury’s case with USA TODAY. But, in general, he said medical evidence does not support long-term opioid use for chronic pain patients.
He said pharmaceutical companies such as OxyContin maker PurduePharma have not proved in medical studies that long-term opioid use alleviates chronic pain.
Patients who have become dependent on opioids now feel scapegoated as more doctors scrutinize the use of the pain medications.
“With few exceptions, the patients are innocent,” Grammar said. “They’re not writing the prescriptions.”
State laws created a ‘chilling effect’ on pain prescriptions
States have responded to the addiction crisis by passing laws that aim to reduce opioid prescriptions.
As of October 2018, 33 states have passed laws that limit or impose requirements on opioid prescriptions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Most of these states limited initial pain pill fills to seven days, with some states imposing even more aggressive cutbacks that limit fills to three or five days.
Last July, Florida passed a law requiring physicians to register as chronic pain clinics to prescribe more than three days worth of opioids. Dr. Melanie Rosenblatt, who is a pain doctor and certified in addiction medicine, said the law has had a “chilling effect” on prescribing. Many of her new patients were dropped by their former physicians or “would doctor shop until they got what they want.”
Federal statistics show total U.S. opioid prescriptions have declined each year since 2012. However, that trend accelerated since the CDC issued guidelines and has caused for many to land in an addiction recovery program.
Total prescribing dropped from 46 billion morphine milligram equivalents in March 2016 to 32 billion morphine milligram equivalents in September 2018. MMEs are a measure of the amount and potency of opioids.
John Downey, a pain doctor in Augusta, Georgia, argues that the “damage has been done” from restrictive state laws and reluctant prescribers.
Family doctors who fear disciplinary action from medical boards have dropped chronic pain patients. Those pain patients have crowded the lobbies of pain clinics seeking relief.
Downey served a three-year term on the Georgia Medical Board through mid-2018 and chaired the board’s pain committee. He told colleagues he was not interested in another term because his medical practice was so busy with patients turned away by other doctors.
One Monday morning, he had 50 referrals for new patients “just because doctors are saying they are fed up,” Downey said.
While he was on the medical board, he developed a point-based worksheet for family doctors who treated pain patients. The goal: Help doctors determine whether pain patients are willing to complete therapy and try non-opioid therapies such as injections, rather than only seeking pain pills.
Medical board investigators who see patients taking the same prescription every month might see signs of abusive prescribing or a “pill mill,” said Downey.
But he said such patients often are able to maintain regular activities such as working, spending time with family or going to church.
“From a pain perspective, that is a well-managed patient,” Downey said. “They are stable.”
Doctors are ‘terrified of addiction’
Sharfstein, the former health secretary of Maryland, said “there’s been a big whiplash” as doctors react to the opioid epidemic which was fueled by years of permissive prescribing.
“Doctors were told they should treat pain as much as possible and now might be hearing the message they they could get in trouble for any opioids,” he said.
Sharfstein and his wife, Dr. Yngvild Olsen, an addiction medicine physician, wrote the book The Opioid Epidemic: What Everyone Needs to Know. In it, they argue that doctors need to be trained to detect and treat addiction. Most medical residency programs don’t teach how to care for patients who misuse substances.
Doctors are “terrified of addiction and need to understand it and treat it,” said Sharfstein.
Garrett Greene, 27, was dropped as a patient by his pain management doctor last month. He said the doctor told him he wasn’t comfortable seeing a cystic fibrosis patient.
Greene said he was taking about a 90 milligram dose of the opiod Percocet every day to control pain since he had surgery seven years ago after his left lung collapsed twice. He’s had many other surgeries and blood clots.
“I spent the better part of my twenties cooped up in the hospital watching firsthand how this monster of a disease can rear its ugly head,” said Greene.
Late last month, Greene went through what he calls “a horrific detox” while he was “losing my mind” trying to find a new pain doctor. When he found Rosenblatt, she switched him to buprenorphine, which is also an opiate but one that is used to help wean people off heroin and other opioids. Percocet, said Greene, wasn’t good for his lungs long term and could suppress his breathing.
Rosenblatt finds she often has to change new clients to longer-acting opioids, as well as combinations of physical therapy, antidepressants, muscle relaxants and therapy to help improve sleep.
“Most of the time it works out really well and there is a silver lining in many cases because people get the appropriate specialist,” said Rosenblatt. “For other people, not so much, because they go through crazy withdrawal after doctors just cut them off, go to jail or retire with no exit plan.”
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said regulators “arguably had to play catch up” with the opioid crisis, which he calls the “biggest public health crisis in modern history.”
Regulators “had to take dramatic action to intervene,” he said. “It was inevitable there were going to be public health consequences at the margins.”
As for doctors, they have been “overshooting in both directions” – first over- and now often under-prescribing.
“You are seeing doctors too reluctant” to prescribe opioid painkillers now, said Gottlieb, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It was inevitable they were going to land there.”
Reach the reporters at alltuck@usatoday.com or jodonnel@usatoday.com.
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New York doctor says marijuana should ‘absolutely’ be taken off controlled substance list
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
New York doctor says marijuana should ‘absolutely’ be taken off controlled substance list
Dr. Mary Jeanne Kreek on Tuesday said that Congress should “absolutely” remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act list, arguing that such a move would help facilitate more medical research.
Kreek, a senior attending physician Rockefeller University, said her lab has struggled over the past two years to get permission to study two key active ingredients derived from the cannabis plant: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) because marijuana is still considered a Schedule 1 drug, which is defined by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as having a “high potential of abuse.”
Cannabis remains scheduled alongside heroin, LSD and Ecstasy.
This means that the federal government considers it to be more dangerous than even potent synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which is a Schedule II drug and has been credited for heavily fueling the opioid crisis.
“We have what they call a DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] laboratory license for research in rodent models in my lab and it took us over a year to get that permission for Delta-9-THC — that’s the active ingredient of marijuana,” Kreek said in an appearance on Hill.TV’s on “Rising.”
“There’s a second ingredient in the plant called cannabidiol — CBD — and there’s evidence shown, very credible research — both in this country and particularly in Israel — that this compound may be beneficial for certain kinds of disorders, including seizure disorders and possibly some inflammatory disorders,” she continued.
“This, we all know as scientists, does not bind to the marijuana receptor, it does not alter brain function, it does not alter behavior but it’s scheduled as Schedule 1 in DEA and my lab is still under process of getting approval to purchase and study CBD in rodent models,” she added.
Kreek’s comments come amid a broader push to legalize marijuana in several states across the country as public support for legalization hits a record high. Thirty-three states and Washington, D.C. have legalized marijuana in some form.
Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, meanwhile, have touted their support of marijuana legalization on the campaign trail.
Sens. Kamala Harris (Calif.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) among others have come out in support of full legalization.
In 2017, Booker introduced the Marijuana Justice Act, which would eliminate marijuana’s status as a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act. Harris, Gillibrand and Warren co-sponsored the bill.
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U.S. attorney: methamphetamine as the most problematic drug in WV
Posted on June 25, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Meth increasing problem
www.wajr.com/meth-increasing-problem/
MORGANTOWN – The Northern District of the West Virginia U.S. Attorney’s office has opened 81 methamphetamine cases that involve 101 defendants. Those statistics are about 45 percent of the total case load.
The case load has prompted U.S. attorney Bill Powell to label methamphetamine as the most problematic drug in the Mountain State and request money from the federal government via the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program to help fund the campaign.
Investigators of personal injury attorneys have formed task forces across the state comprised local police, FBI and DEA agents.
In Morgantown, police chief Ed Preston says, “Methamphetamine is starting to replace and overtake opioids for quantity of abuse because of the changing international drug markets and availability. The greater the availability, the lower the price, the more it becomes abused locally.” Preston served for two years in the Appalachian Hideout Drug Task Force the covers West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.
Preston says tips from the public help detectives identify, investigate and hopefully remove dealers and their drugs from the streets.
In 2018 police seized 206 grams of heroin and 790 grams of methamphetamine from a Star City home. Two men from Philadelphia were arrested in that case.
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Walmart Pharmacy Layoffs Today (June 2019)
Posted on June 24, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Walmart Pharmacy Layoffs Today (June 2019)
Anyone hearing about pharmacy layoffs happening today? It seems that some techs got axed – not sure how reliable the info is, chime in if you have any info…
https://www.thelayoff.com/t/ZIIsPn5
9 replies (most recent on top)
Laid off today. Pharmacy tech. 11 months with the company. Was given the reorg rah rah as well. They blamed ‘the computer’ (something like your name popped up, it was not us selecting you which is stupid, why would you even say that)
Got the axe as Staff Pharmacist today. Same BS Restructuring, bla ,bla.The disingenuity is too much.That you may apply for other positions that may arise well knowing there will be none.Promising 60 days pay and an undetermined severance package.Heartless
my pharmacy manager was cut today
They fired my pharmacy manager today sadly.
It’s true, my wife just got laid off today.
Talked to a staff pharmacist that got laid off today. He said Walmart is cutting 1000 pharmacist across the company. Not sure how accurate.
Not just pharmacists, but PICs (which is generally a safe position).
Pharmacists, techs, cashiers affected. H&W also in a hiring freeze.
Could it be that Walmart’s reported new policy of reducing the quantities of all opiate Rxs for new/acute prescriptions and their use of Narxcare that creates a “abuse score” – much like a “credit score” from one of the credit rating companies – on any pt that is attempting to get a controlled substance Rx filled.. has impacted their prescription business and a number of pharmacists and technicians are finding themselves UNEMPLOYED from Walmart… just more collateral damage of the war on drugs ?
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