OxyGiuliani

This one's personal for me. Those who've read me before know that I have a relative who has suffered under an addiction to OxyContin since he was 14, and is only now putting his life back together. Purdue Frederick, maker of the drug, knew that they were peddling an addictive product that could be easily abused, but intentionally hid the warnings from the general public for a decade. They got off with a slap on the wrist a few months back, after the Justice Department attempted to slow down the investigation and the prosecution produced such a poor case that even the judge yelled at them for failing to jail the executives for their crimes. Today in the New York Times, Barry Meier, who wrote a great book on this subject called Painkiller, has a long piece detailing Rudy Giuliani's business involvement with Purdue Frederick.

In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr. Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani’s missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him [...]

A former top federal prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani participated in two meetings between Purdue officials and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency investigating the company. Giuliani Partners took on the job of monitoring security improvements at company facilities making OxyContin, an issue of concern to the D.E.A.

As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it for OxyContin abuse.

Yes, I'm sure it was difficult to get Curt "Working For the Russians" Weldon to play ball.

Purdue Frederick is still a client of Giuliani Partners, and Giuliani still draws a salary from the business, so he continues to profit on the suffering of millions of addicted teens.

Read this shill-of-the-year quote:

“I understand the pain and distress that accompanies illness,” Mr. Giuliani said at the time. “I know that proper medications are necessary for people to treat their sickness and improve their quality of life.”

By the way, at one point Rudy assured the DEA that everything was fine, he's put his top man on the job.

The D.E.A. was not only critical of how OxyContin had been marketed, its inspectors had found widespread security and record-keeping problems at the company’s manufacturing plants [...]

At two meetings, the first at Giuliani Partners in early 2002, Mr. Giuliani and Purdue’s executives argued that they were already taking steps to eliminate any problems.

(Bernard) Kerik had been sent to Purdue’s manufacturing plants to revamp internal security, they assured Mr. Hutchinson. The federal investigators, they argued, should back down and give them a chance to prove they could handle the problem on their own.

Don't worry, Bernie's on it! The plant will have a numbers racket and a love nest suitable for affairs in no time.

Rudy's dead in the water for this election, as evidenced by his resorting to more 9/11 ads to energize his campaign. But the moral blackness of defending this indefensible pharmaceutical company is perhaps the most telling example of how this guy would run the country. It also informs this quote from the other day.

"I suspect that our Democratic colleagues would get that question more often in a Democratic audience than we get in a Republican audience," he said. "Maybe more Democrats are concerned about their health care than Republicans, maybe because Republicans have health care or maybe Republicans generally like the idea of private solutions."

Private solutions like a company who poisons the country and lies about it.

Meddling Justice Department

The more information that comes out about the Purdue Frederick case, the angrier I get. I think I've mentioned that I have a cousin who spent years addicted to OxyContin. Executives at the drugmaker knew their substance was addictive and kept on selling the drugs. The prosecution in the trial didn't even argue this, and the result was a fine that will be largely paid out of the company's vast sum of profits off of the ruination of people's lives.

Now we learn that the US Attorney for Roanoke, where the Purdue Frederick case was filed, was told to slow down on the prosecution:

The night before the government secured a guilty plea from the manufacturer of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a senior Justice Department official called the U.S. attorney handling the case and, at the behest of an executive for the drugmaker, urged him to slow down, the prosecutor told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.

John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, testified that he was at home the evening of Oct. 24 when he received the call on his cellphone from Michael J. Elston, then chief of staff to the deputy attorney general and one of the Justice aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Brownlee settled the case anyway. Eight days later, his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.

Brownlee wasn't fired. But this is a textbook example of politicization into cases of justice. And as I said, the prosecution, even in the view of the judge, blew the case.

In announcing the unorthodox sentence, Judge James P. Jones of United States District Court indicated that he was troubled by his inability to send the executives to prison. But he noted that federal prosecutors had not produced evidence as part of recent plea deals to show that the officials were aware of wrongdoing at the drug’s maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn.

So the Elston call may have actually worked. Meanwhile, here's the Justice Department's alibi.

Justice Department officials said it was not unusual for senior members to weigh in on major criminal cases, and a spokesman, Dean Boyd, said the department "encourages healthy internal debate and discussion on complex cases like this one."

Well, perhaps it SHOULD be unusual. Especially when you have a Justice Department as political as this one.

Others said Elston's timing and message were atypical. "Normally, there's a lot of deference given to U.S. attorneys in matters of timing," said Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general. "The kind of micromanagement that this suggests could easily have a chilling effect in some circumstances."

Turns out that Paul McNulty was talking to the defense attorney in the case and relaying information through DoJ to the US Attorney Brownlee. That appears completely untoward, as if the DoJ is taking sides with the defense in a criminal case.

Wonder what Alberto Gonzales knew about this? Oh, wait, he doesn't know anything.

Things That Make Me Scream

• Iraq war veterans have to take the step of suing the Veterans Administration and its recently-resigned Administrator Jim Nicholson over them being denied disability pay and proper mental health treatment. These bastards are actually trying to classify PTSD symptoms as "pre-existing" conditions. Right, from that other war they fought at home in Arkansas.

• Executives from Purdue Frederick, the company that marketed OxyContin as a cure-all for pain years after they recognized it was horribly addictive and ruining the lives of thousands of Americans, got a slap on the wrist from a federal judge, with no prison time and a fine that sounds hefty ($634 million) until you realize that the bulk of it will be absorbed by a company that raked in tens of billions selling OxyContin over the years. The worst part is that the judge clearly was sympathetic to the idea of putting these bastards (I seem to be fixated on that word today) behind bars, but...

In announcing the unorthodox sentence, Judge James P. Jones of United States District Court indicated that he was troubled by his inability to send the executives to prison. But he noted that federal prosecutors had not produced evidence as part of recent plea deals to show that the officials were aware of wrongdoing at the drug’s maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn.

That evidence is pretty available and supported in Barry Meier's book on the subject, so I'm guessing the prosecution just dropped the ball... or, given that this is the Bush Justice Department we're talking about...

• An NBC correspondent received $30,000 for a speech in which he proceeded to attack John Edwards on personal grounds. Not only is it unethical to accept speaking fees, how can this correspondent ever go back and report on Edwards again, knowing what we know?

• On a related front, this is three years old but I never knew this story, and it fits in with the idea of the press choosing sides in political fights:

An edgy moment of own-expense laughter is the best that reporters and an about-to-drop-out presidential hopeful can hope for, as a campaign enters what everyone knows is its final hours.

Hence, candidate -- and media critic -- Howard Dean reacted with humor Tuesday in Milwaukee as journalists presented him with a long-sleeve white T-shirt. It carried the motto "Establishment Media" in front, and a slogan swiped from Dean in the back: "We Have the Power, Dean Press Corps 2004."

Losers.

• Here's another story that this media which is so concerned about picking winners and losers is missing: the US government is poisoning Americans by providing FEMA trailers to the citizens of the Gulf Coast which have unacceptable levels of formaldehyde inside. The real outrage here is that TWO YEARS after Hurricane Katrina, people are still living in FEMA trailers.

That's about all I can stand right now...

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

Giuliani 2.0 was rolled out last week, the new pro-choice conservative that wants everybody just to pipe down about those pesky social issues and take a look at his record. Problem is, people are taking the wrong look:

An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.

“The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

See, just like a conservative, what was important to Giuliani was the appearance that something was getting done at Ground Zero, and damn the consequences. Actually, the consequences were hundreds of sick workers who apparently have only Michael Moore willing to help them.

In addition, the Washington Post reports that Rudy's performance making people sick after 9-11 was most useful to his own bank account:

On Dec. 7, 2001, nearly three months after the terrorist attack that had made him a national hero and a little over three weeks before he would leave office, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took the first official step toward making himself rich.

The letter he dispatched to the city Conflicts of Interest Board that day asked permission to begin forming a consulting firm with three members of his outgoing administration. The company, Giuliani said, would provide "management consulting service to governments and business" and would seek out partners for a "wide-range of possible business, management and financial services" projects.

Over the next five years, Giuliani Partners earned more than $100 million, according to a knowledgeable source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the firm's financial information is private. And that success helped transform the Republican considered the front-runner for his party's 2008 presidential nomination from a moderately well-off public servant into a globe-trotting consultant whose net worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

You might remember that one of the clients of Giuliani Partners was Purdue Frederick, the makers of OxyContin who dragged out an investigation into the addictiveness of the drug for years before having to pay a petty fine. And key partners in the company included Mafioso figure Bernie Kerik and a former FBI exec who was found to have stolen pieces of granite from Ground Zero as souvenirs.

And while his campaign is crumbling around him, Giuliani thinks that he can follow the WEsley Clark '04 path to the nomination:

Republican Rudy Giuliani has been stuck for weeks on a key decision in his presidential campaign: whether to compete in the Iowa Republican Party's straw poll in Ames this summer.

The former New York City mayor's top Iowa advisers have encouraged him to take part in the year's marquee national GOP event as part of building what Giuliani has said he hopes will be a winning campaign for the leadoff Iowa caucuses in January.

But the final say belongs to Giuliani, who plans to decide in the coming weeks how the event could benefit or cost him.

Nobody has skipped Iowa and won the nomination in either party (Clinton '92 being the exception because nobody really went up against local boy Tom Harkin), and if Rudy thinks he can do it, in a year where the primary calendar is MORE front loaded, he's smoking something. Missing the straw poll would be a major setback.

I'm more and more convinced that nobody will win the Republican nomination. Or John McCain, which is effectively the same thing.

Unforgivable

Right now I have a relative in a rehab facility trying to get clean. He's been using since he was 14 years old and it's going to be a difficult road ahead for him. His drug of choice was one of the most powerful addictive substances this nation has seen in the past few decades, and it wasn't made in a field in Colombia or Nicaragua or Afghanistan. It was processed in a lab and placed into a small white pillbox.

He was hooked on OxyContin.

Yesterday Purdue Frederick Co., makers of the painkiller, finally admitted in federal court, after years of obfuscation and lies, that they intentionally deceived the public and hid the warnings about the addictive properties of OxyContin. They settled with a $635 million dollar lump-sum payment (They made nearly $10 billion in sales off of OxyContin this decade, so it's money well spent).

"Even in the face of warnings from health-care professionals, the media and members of its own sales force . . . Purdue continued to push a fraudulent marketing campaign," U.S. Attorney John L. Brownlee said.

The drugmaker knew as early as 1995 that health professionals feared the addictive potential of OxyContin, an opium derivative, but looked the other way, according to court papers. From 1996 to 2001, Purdue claimed that the "miracle drug" was safer than rival medications despite repeated studies that suggested patients had developed a risk of abuse and had serious trouble withdrawing from OxyContin. Purdue collected $2.8 billion through sales of OxyContin during that time, court papers said.

In one instance, supervisors decided against sharing information about difficult OxyContin withdrawal out of fear that it would "add to the current negative press," according to documents presented in an Abingdon, Va., courtroom yesterday.

"Purdue put its desire to sell OxyContin above the interests of the public," Assistant U.S. Attorney General Peter D. Keisler said.

The makers claimed for years that their pill was time-released, and could therefore never be manipulated to create an overwhelming high. Turns out you could bite down on the capsule and crush it in about two seconds, freeing the drug and eliminating the time-release method. The drug became an epidemic, particularly in the Southeast. Doctor's offices and pharmacies were being robbed with regularity. Corrupt physicians were writing prescriptions for kickbacks. Hundreds of users died and tens of thousands more became hopelessly addicted.

And there's another thing you should know, maybe the next time you go down to your primary election polling place and take a look at the candidates for the Republican nomination.

Since 2002, Purdue has been a client of Giuliani Partners, the consulting firm headed by former New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani. Giuliani, who was one of Purdue's lawyers in the case through his law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, met with government lawyers more than half a dozen times and helped strike an agreement in principle to settle the case in October, people involved in the case said.

That's right. Rudy Giuliani has been defending these scumbags for 5 long years, stalling and stonewalling and trying to minimize the penalty for ruining untold numbers of lives. In addition, Giuliani was using his political contacts to try and get DEA tointervene on behalf of his client:

Drug Enforcement Administration officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com Giuliani personally met with the head of the DEA when the DEA's drug diversion office began a criminal investigation into the company.

According to the book "Painkiller," by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, both Giuliani and his then-partner Bernard Kerik "were in direct contact with Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of DEA."

Hutchinson told the Blotter on ABCNews.com today that Giuliani asked for a meeting, "and we gave him a meeting." Hutchinson says he was aware the company was under investigation at the time, and "any time a company is under investigation I like to give them a chance to make their case."

Kerik told New York Magazine at the time that Giuliani had raised $15,000 in donations for a "traveling museum operated by the DEA."

Some officials told ABC News there were questions inside the agency of whether the donations were an attempt to influence the DEA.

Ya think?

Giuliani successfully slowed this investigation for five years, while Purdue Frederick continued to profit off of addiction. This is no different than defending Pablo Escobar IMO. And by the way, this is supposed to be Mr. Law and Order hardass Rudy Giuliani? Oxy is a magnet for lawlessness. Like many drugs, it's progressively more difficult to maintain the same high, and so it becomes a more and more expensive habit. My relative was stealing from his roommates, falling behind on rent, all to get one more pill - a pill that Mr. Giuliani kept well within his reach.

Rudy Giuliani can rot in hell for the pain and suffering he has caused thousands of families, including my own. I will never forgive these craven actions on behalf of big Pharma, underwriter to the Republican Party.

More here. By the way, I've read Barry Meier's book, and it's shocking what this company Purdue Frederick did to get out of being held accountable. That Giuliani was a part of it makes it all the more gut-wrenching.