Drugs & Shut Down

Duke Robillard with Madeline Peyroux from the Duke Robillard and His Dames of Rhythm album the Missus got me for Christmas. There's some very good stuff on this one.

The weather was supposed to turn cold so I went to the library and got a couple of books the other day. Wise move since the temps went down to single digits. One of the books I picked up is American Overdose - The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal. I'm about two-thirds of the way through it and it's been a real eye opener. I knew areas like southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky and West Virginia were being hit pretty hard by opioids but I didn't have any idea how many people were affected and what was behind the epidemic. The book lays out the role big pharma has played and the lack of response from the federal government.

Here's a couple of quotes from the book to give you an idea as to the scope of the problem:

"Rogers said that if the agency needed more evidence of the destruction wrought by OxyContin, it should look at the corruption of the medical profession. Take the doctor who wrote 800 opioid prescriptions a month - one every ten minutes of the working day."

"The congressman had other examples: a Kentucky doctor who prescribed more than two million pills to 4,000 patients over 101 days, and the physician who saw 133 patients in a day in an office without electricity and was prescribing OxyContin and Viagra to teenage boys until the feds locked him up for twenty years."

I had no idea of the extent of all this. I've had several of my students die from overdoses over the years. Terrible tragedies, each and every one. And since this is still an ongoing problem through-out the country, we should all be better informed on the issue. Read the book.

Changing the subject, I received a letter from my congressman in response to my email I sent concerning the shutdown and the border wall. I wasn't looking for a response but it's nice to know it was received and he outlined his position on the matter in his reply. However, the best statement I've seen so far on the shutdown comes from Ol' Remus at the Woodpile Report.:

For nonessential federal employees the shutdown is a vacation with deferred payment, yet we're expected to weep in solidarity because they're being inconvenienced. Welcome to the real world. We Deplorables work without pay for the equivalent of several months of every year to fund DC's parasitic bloat. And we have to show up every day.

That's one way of looking at it. And now that the tax statements are starting to roll in, pretty easy to fall into that camp.

Planning on doing some work on the slip roll today. The parts I ordered should be here in a day or two. I've got to cut some parts out of a 3/4" plate, so I'll get them laid out and drilled, then go up to the college one of these cold days and cut the pieces out on the track torch, along with using the band saw to cut a few of the other parts I need.