Just this morning I read this article by The Guardian;

Doctor Who Was Paid by Purdue to Push Opioids to Testify Against Drugmaker

“In a newly released statement to an Ohio court hearing a combined lawsuit of more than 1,600 cases, Doctor Portenoy accuses drugmakers of underplaying the dangers of opioids and of pushing them on patients who did not need them. The doctor said the industry overstated the benefits of narcotics painkillers and ‘understated the risks of opioids, particularly the risk of abuse, addiction and overdose’”.

Apparently Doctor Portenoy was the hired gun for Purdue Pharma and others to promote the use of Opioids. Dr. Portenoy “did a study of only 38 patients and the results were mixed with more than one-third failing to benefit from the drugs. It also lacked the standard scientific rigor of control groups.

But the paper had a significant impact and tapped into a frustration among a group of younger pain doctors at their inability to offer anything more than superficial relief to patients whose lives were dominated by debilitating pain.”

Even though Portenoy’s study lacked the numbers that the Jick and Porter study had in their study, I am sure it had a tremendous impact on subsequent sales. It was a more recent study than the 1980 letter detailing the impact of Opioids in a hospital setting.

In the text of my post on April 7th;

The cause of the Opioid epidemic up till recently can be partially blamed on the misuse of a 1980 Jick and Porter letter to the NEJM. The letter cited the risk of addiction from the “use of Opioids in a hospital setting is rare.” Except when cited by people using this letter 608 times, 80.8% (491) of the citations to promote Opioids failed to mention the use of Opioids was in a hospital setting. Purdue Pharma, other companies, and doctors used this letter to promote the use of Opioids.

In 1996 with the introduction of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma, the use and abuse of the letter almost tripled. If we go back to the charts again, we can see that upon introduction of OxyContin in 1996 a year or so later the death rate per 100,000 doubles and continues to increase yearly. “The aggressive sales pitch led to a spike in prescriptions for OxyContin of which many were for things not requiring a strong painkiller. In 1998, an OxyContin marketing video called ‘I got My life Back,’ targeted doctors. In the promotional, a doctor explains opioid painkillers such as OxyContin as being the best pain medicine available, have few if any side effects, and less than 1% of people using them become addicted.” Increases in drug poisoning deaths involving prescription Opioids increases with 37% of all drug-poisoning deaths in 2013 being attributed to Opioids a 4-fold increase from 1999.

In the 2017 letter to the NEJM, The Jick and Porter Letter is cited in the Supplemental Appendix. The bibliometric analysis of the increased numbers of citations of this letter aligns with the introduction of OxyContin in 1995/96.

“the authors of 439 (72.2%) cited it as evidence that addiction was rare in patients treated with opioids. Of the 608 articles, the authors of 491 articles (80.8%) did not note that the patients who were described in the letter were hospitalized at the time they received the prescription”

The increased numbers of deaths due to Opioid use, as shown in the Joint Commission charts, occurred shortly after the introduction of Oxycontin.

The Guardian article affirms what many of us have been thinking over the last couple of years.

There a pretty detailed discussion of the impact of pharmaceutical companies on the use of Opioids at Naked Capitalism as written by Yves Smith; New York Sues Big Pharma for Opioid Crisis Bill Black, Marc Steiner, Letita James, discuss the study and how Purdue and other Pharma companies influenced the market.

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In writing about the increase in Opioid abuse since 1980 and looking around for additional information for Robert Waldmann, I ran across this information as developed by the US Senate Joint Economic Committee. The committee is majority led by Republicans with Democrats being a part. The committee had added additional yearly data pre-1980, when the Jick and Porter letter had been written to the NEJM on the rarity of addiction from the use of Opioids, to 1968.

The bar chart on the left represents the total number of deaths per year from Overdoses solely from Opioids and Overdoses from all drugs during the time period of 1968 to 2015. The bar chart on the right represents the numbers of deaths per 100,000 of population from Overdoses solely from Opioids and Overdoses from all drugs during the time period of 1968 to 2015. To be redundant, from both of those charts you can see the increase in the total numbers of deaths by the numbers per 100,000 and the increasing number of deaths per year from 1968 to 2015. During this time period, there were several coincidental things going on which helped to increase the increased deaths. To point out the obvious, drug overdoses really did not start to increase until about 1997.

The Supporting Facts Leading to the Cause

1) This particular bar chart details the citation of a letter sent to the NEJM in 1980 by Doctors Jane Porter and Herschel Jick about a Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program at Boston University Medical Center, Waltham, MA. The verbiage of this letter can be found in the Supplemental Appendix (scroll down). The published letter detail:

“Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.”

The letter says, we used Opioids in a “hospital” setting and there was no evidence of addition by patients except for one. From 1980 onward till 2015 the letter was cited 5 to 28 (1996) times per year affirming Opioids do not cause addition. The median number of citations of a letter in the NEJM is 11 times in total. There is nothing to indicate this letter had an impact until about 1997 when the numbers and rates of death due to Opioids doubled (see charts).

The bibliometric analysis of the citations and subsequent chart of the findings related to the Jick and Porter letter can be found in a subsequent 2017 letter to the NEJM entitled “A 1980 Letter on the Risk of Opioid Addiction,” dated June 1, 2017 authored by Doctors Leung, Macdonald, Dhalla, and Juurlink. The appearing and disappearing Supplemental Appendix which has the Jick and Porter Letter (cited) is a part of this article.

2) “In Prescription Painkiller Addiction: A Gateway to Heroin Addiction,” Recall Report organization documents the start of the explosion in opioid use tying it to the introduction of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma in 1995/96. Initially introduced here: Fighting Opioid and Painkiller Addiction Angry Bear September 2018. The increase in the citations of the Jick and Porter letter increases about the same time.

“An early manifestation of the opioid abuse, addiction, and overdose problem occurred largely in rural regions of Kentucky and other parts of Appalachia. OxyContin, a brand name for oxycodone, was introduced by manufacturer Purdue Pharma in 1996 and pushed hard to sell it to doctors. The company sold it as a less-addictive alternative to other painkillers because it was made in a time-release form, meaning users would get a slow onset of the drug, not a hit all at once which is more likely to lead to abuse.”

If a person wanted to abuse OxyContin, they would just grind it up and get the hit all at once.

3) In 2015, the US National Library of Medicine / American Health and Drug Benefits published the “New Perspectives in the Treatment of Opioid-Induced Respiratory Depression.”

“Overall, 44 individuals in the United States die from a prescription opioid overdose daily. In 2013 alone, an alarming 16,235 deaths were attributed to an opioid overdose, accounting for 37% of all drug-poisoning deaths in 2013 and a 4-fold increase from 1999. In addition, nearly 60% of all drug-poisoning deaths in 2013 involved prescription opioids and/or heroin. Furthermore, among individuals aged 25 to 64 years, deaths from a drug overdose—the majority of which were opioid-related—exceeded motor vehicle collisions as the leading cause of accidental death in 2013.”

4) Purdue Pharma pleads guilty in a DOJ lawsuit. In 2007 Purdue Pharma pled guilty in a lawsuit brought against the company by the Department of Justice. The charge was misleading doctors and consumers about how addictive OxyContin was. Purdue ended up paying over $600 million and three executives pled guilty to criminal charges.

5) People switched to Heroin to replace opioids as prescriptions for Opioids are reduced. The deaths from Heroin surpass the deaths by gun homicides. “OxyContin and other prescription opioids caused huge amounts of abuse, addiction, and overdoses. When doctors pulled back on prescriptions, a new epidemic began to arise. In 2015 heroin overdose deaths in the U.S. surpassed the number of deaths by gun homicide for the first time ever. In addiction treatment facilities around the country, heroin addiction is becoming the most common reason to enter treatment, surpassing even alcohol addiction.”

Summation

Robert brings forth a flawed argument made by Tom Nichols or Radio Free Tom; “‘A decaying country mired in poverty and addiction’. I am sorry you seem to have us confused with 1980, but with a positive message like this, you are a shoo-in Mike.” Robert argues back, “But Nichols really demonstrates his contempt for data and expertise by asserting that ‘poverty’ and ‘1980’ go together.” Of course Robert is correct in his facts. There is also no legitimate correlation between Opioids and poverty either. There is a lot of data to support Robert’s contention. The deaths from Opioids were less than one per 100,000 from 1968 until 1997 and from all drugs up till 1987. This can be seen in the charts at the top of the page.

The cause of the Opioid epidemic up till recently can be partially blamed on the misuse of a 1980 Jick and Porter letter to the NEJM. The letter cited the risk of addiction from the “use of Opioids in a hospital setting is rare.” Except when cited by people using this letter 608 times, 80.8% (491) of the citations to promote Opioids failed to mention the use of Opioids was in a hospital setting. Purdue Pharma, other companies, and doctors used this letter to promote the use of Opioids.

In 1996 with the introduction of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma, the use and abuse of the letter almost tripled. If we go back to the charts again, we can see that upon introduction of OxyContin in 1996 a year or so later the death rate per 100,000 doubles and continues to increase yearly. “The aggressive sales pitch led to a spike in prescriptions for OxyContin of which many were for things not requiring a strong painkiller. In 1998, an OxyContin marketing video called ‘I got My life Back,’targeted doctors. In the promotional, a doctor explains opioid painkillers such as OxyContin as being the best pain medicine available, have few if any side effects, and less than 1% of people using them become addicted.” Increases in drug poisoning deaths involving prescription Opioids increases with 37% of all drug-poisoning deaths in 2013 being attributed to Opioids a 4-fold increase from 1999.

The party began to end after Purdue Executives plead guilty in 2007 and Purdue Pharma paid an $800 million penalty. People began to switch to Heroin as the supply of Opioids diminished and prescriptions were for 7 days or less.

In 1980, the country barely knew what Opioids were and the death rate from Opioids was less than 1 per 100,000. Poverty was low then also. The Opioid and Heroin crisis can be traced back to the healthcare industry; its misinformation, lies, and misuse of drugs; and its abuse of people’s trust.

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run75441: I have been fortunate to run across incredibly intelligent people here and other places who continue to impress me with their command on particular topics. Esmensetoo has an excellent knowledge of healthcare and healthcare insurance and how it has evolved. I was not expecting quite this much. It does cover all of the bases and there is still more to be had. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

In the 1980s when managed care was just coming into being in a substantial way, I worked with every major insurer in my region — Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Group Health (a Kaiser-type care provider that is now, in fact, owned by Kaiser), as a marketing professional. I also worked with several major regional health care providers, including the Sisters of Providence, who were the founders of the first hospitals in our region in the mid-19th Century. In the 80s they were trying, under the new deregulated environment, to create a health insurance vehicle too — that would use their hospital network. Ultimately, they were never able to worked out the details of a plan that both met what they saw as their responsibilities to the community and thought would be financially viable.

By the end of the 80s the late-1970s and later deregulation that led to “managed care” also encouraged insurers, at that time that primarily meant Blue Cross and Blue Shield, that had been founded as non-profits and had operated as such for all of their history, to become for profit (earning those in the executive suites HUGE paydays. It) was also bringing a lot of questionable new for-profit insurers into the health insurance market — many were little more than scams; adopting all the questionable practices we are all later became too familiar with — for instance, finding all kinds of clever ways to deny coverage when premium payers became ill. Also, as “managed care” which was supposed to control the cost of premiums and care that had started inflating in the 70s drove non profit insurance out of the market premiums began to really soar while what and who was covered was becoming more restricted. Small businesses started dropping insurance for workers and large insurers started offering lesser benefits at higher cost.

By the early 90s people were demanding reform, again. (Which, in my opinion, played an important role in Clinton’s election — and then the Democrats failure to pass anything in his first 2 years, along with other things like the bank scandal, contributed to their loss of the congressional majority for the first time in 40 years).

In my state, Washington, demand for reform was a really big issue for almost everyone, certainly including me. In 1992 I went to work for a local Democratic political consulting firm that was running the campaign of a reform candidate for Insurance Commissioner. She ran on setting standards to keep the scammers out of the state, setting up a system of state support for low cost insurance for the employees of small businesses, and developing community clinics that would treat people on a sliding scale. The insurance companies of course pushed back and demanded things that compromised her vision. But she still got most of what she ran on done. We ended up with system that was far from perfect but that did, did keep the scammers out of the market and the community clinics were an important resource. But the state supported small business insurance had too much paperwork and was especially unworkable for people whose work hours varied from quarter to quarter — which is common for low wage workers. And, unfortunately, by the time Obamacare passed, with similar reforms in terms of what insurers were required to provide, we only had one insurer left in the state who was offering Individual Insurance. It was excellent insurance but very expensive.

Thanks to those reforms we were in a good position for an easy transition to the ACA. We had a little technical difficulty right out the gate (embarrassing for state that sees itself as a tech leader) but mostly the transition was painless. The nonsense the Republicans and Trump have been indulging in has created problems though.

This is already too long — so I have no time to back up these three points but here are 4 things that many misunderstand about the history of our health care system that makes it difficult to have intelligent conversation about reform:

1. Our health care system was not created by the “free market.” Americans traditionally saw health care as a community responsibility. Community taxes, in addition to charity, and at times some non-profit insurance-like schemes, were used to help support community hospitals from colonial days on, often these hospitals were associated with religious denominations or orders but not always.

2. The Federal government also was involved in health care AND insurance very early — creating a hospital system for seaman in the late 18th century and requiring those using the system to purchase insurance to help cover the cost of care. In the 19th century that Marine Hospital Service also began to support medical research. The NIH, which has been very important in both funding research and doing research, was created out of the Marine Hospital Service.

3. Health insurance was not created by the “free market’ either. IT IS NOT RISK INSURANCE — and the commercial insurance industry avoided it like the plague for most of our history because they understood that it wa sn’t risk insurance but rather a way of socializing costs — and that it was unlikely to be profitable (while actually insuring care). Health insurance was created by the hospital industry and it was non-profit until “reformers ” de-regulateded it in order to make it easier for insurers to profit by choosing who and what would be covered and what providers would be paid (something, obviously, the AMA objected to).

4. The connection between employment and insurance was not created by FDR. From the very beginning hospitals identified employment groups — people who, like the seaman, and like the loggers in my state that the Sisters of Providence provided with a crude-insurance plan — $1 a month would insure they would have care in the very likely case that they were injure d — while allowing the Sisters to provide care to the poor too. Illness and injury deprived people of their ability to work and earn. So it made sense to ask the employed, especially those in dangerous occupations — to pay something while they were well and earning, so there would be resources available to care for them when they were not.

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I had thought these types of treatment had gone by the wayside in treatment during the last year of life. According to an Medscape article they have not.

“‘Physicians should carefully consider whether the prescribed drugs are likely to achieve their benefit within the patient’s remaining lifetime,’ the authors concluded. The study included 151,201 patients ages 65 years and older who died in Sweden at a mean age of 81.3 years from 2007 to 2013. ‘The use and cost of preventive drugs during the last 12 months of life were the main study outcomes.’ The drugs of ‘questionable benefit’ assessed in the current study included antidiabetic drugs, antihypertensives, statins, and bisphosphonates medications for the treatment of chronic anemia and vitamin and mineral supplements.’

Receipt of these long term preventative drugs added 20% to the cost of treatment during the final year of life. ‘The median drug cost during the last year of life was $1,482 (interquartile range $700-$2,896).'”

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Spoiler: It isn’t working. Charles Gaba at ACA Signups had this up.

In an excellent scoop by Dan Diamond and Adam Cancryn this morning, Politico reports CMS Administrator Seema Verma, the person in charge of Medicare/Medicaid and who takes great joy in trashing Medicare and Medicaid, has spent millions of dollars on partisan consulting firms to boost her image.

The Trump appointee who oversees Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare quietly directed millions of taxpayer dollars in contracts to Republican communications consultants during her tenure atop the agency and including hiring one well-connected GOP media adviser to bolster her public profile.

The communications subcontracts approved by CMS Administrator Seema Verma was routed through a larger federal contract and described to POLITICO by three individuals with firsthand knowledge of the agreements. The move by the CMS Administrator represents a break from precedent at the agency. Managed by Verma’s deputies, the deals came over the objections of some CMS staffers who raised concerns about her push to use federal funds to pay GOP consultants to amplify coverage of her own work. CMS has a capable communications shop which includes about two dozen people who handle the press.

The good news is that Congress is finally on the case now that the Democrats have the reins.

On Friday, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone called for an HHS inspector general probe into CMS’ use of CMS funding for communications consultants, calling it a “highly questionable use of taxpayer dollars.”

IN a statement, the New Jersey Democrat said; I intend to ask the HHS OIG to immediately begin an investigation into how these contracts were approved, whether all regulations and ethical guidelines were followed, and why taxpayers are stuck paying for these unnecessary services.”

For the record, Seema Verma is also the one who slashed the HealthCare.Gov marketing and navigator program budgets by 90% and 80% respectively over the past year and a half, allegedly in the interest of . . . “providing more efficient, targeted outreach” (via one of her press releases from last year).

Charles; I’m not sure exactly what sort of “bolstering of her public profile” these taxpayer-funded GOP image consultants are doing, but I would imagine, it is crap and similar to sending out promotional mailers like this one which showed up in my in box yesterday . . . sent from the official CMS Press Office:

Click on image to enlarge it.

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In an earlier post, My Education In Going to College, I commented:

what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Thornton Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) audacity, offered to pay full ride and make a sizeable donation to the school. Maybe I am wrong; but, I do not know of many schools who would turn down a half a $million donation or so and a student who is willing to pay full price at the same time. Schools are short of funding. I am pretty sure this is going on today with little being said about the donations. Perhaps, others here would disagree with me?

It appears my comment is more correct than wishful thinking as detailed in The Atlantic’s “Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong.”

The Atlantic article explores Anthony Jack’s “The Privileged Poor” and gets into the detail of the prevailing wealth at top-tier schools. For instance, it is no secret, many of the students come from elite origins. For example:

“Led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty a team of researchers found students coming from families in the top 1 percent of household incomes (those who make more than $630,000 a year) are 77 times more likely to be admitted to and attend an Ivy League school than students coming from families who make less than $30,000 a year.” I do not consider this to be a new discovery. Most people go to where they can and to what they can afford. And many end up at for-profits with a hope of achieving some type of equivalency and a chance to succeed.

“The study found that 38 elite colleges have more students who come from families in the top 1 percent than students who come from the bottom 60 percent or families making less than $65,000 a year.” Granted those 1 percenters are not the “real” rich in income as the 1 tenth of 1 percent comprising 115,000 households but, they do have enough money available to influence a school. They do count in the scheme of influencing outcomes.

14% of all the students at the elite colleges such as Stanford, Princeton, or Columbia come from the bottom half of the US income distribution. Before I go on, the author (Jack) details what he identifies as the privileged-poor and the doubly-disadvantaged. Privileged poor students come from low-income backgrounds and more than likely attended wealthy private high schools which gives them familiarity with and an acquired access to the social and cultural capital making people successful at elite universities. In other words, they know the ropes and how to get about. Doubly disadvantaged students arrive at these top institutions from neighborhood public schools many of which are overcrowded and underfunded. These students have excelled, however they are ill-equipped and lack the sociocultural tools necessary to understand the nuances of how these elite colleges operate. The doubly disadvantaged lack the social capital many students the 77-percenters and the privileged poor, the faculty, and the administrators have taken for granted. There are few mentors, councilors, or whatever you want to call them to guide them.

The advantage of the 77-percenters have is in the exposure to better schools, neighborhoods, and economics. For all intents and purposes their parents buy their way into the elite schools through private-school tuition, test prep, donations to colleges, and a myriad of other advantages which opened doors and prepared them to compete. They also rarely experience the same level of skepticism as to whether they have ‘earned’ their place as would those who enter the elite schools as a privileged poor of doubly disadvantaged.

Back to the controversy . . . rather than buy their way into the university with full price tuition and “Thorton Mellon-like” donations, these parents tried a cheaper route to getting their children admitted. Historically, the elite have used wealth to get their kids into top colleges via legal and widely recognized means—legacy, athletic admissions favoring the wealthy, and the use of test preparation to gain an advantage. Some followed the route of Thornton Mellon from “Back To School” and made or offered some nice donations meant to influence the school regardless of whether it paid for a new School of Business building or a revamped sports field.

The parents caught up in the illegal bribery opted instead for a different scheme of conspiracy and bribes. These bribes were cheaper than a building, less costly than paying for years of student preparation, going to sports games and having your child coached, and personally guiding and working with your children. Many were the vacations we took focused around soccer tournaments and many were the meetings we had with teachers and colleges.

Upfront here is the deal; a $million plus full tuition or meet me tonight at such and such place for $500,000 and full tuition. The only difference is how the bribe is made as the thumb is still on the admissions scale of yea or nay.

What is the difference? A bribe is a bribe and while one is illegal, I would say both face a test of morality.

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As I explained in a conversation, what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) audacity and offered to pay full ride and make a sizeable donation to the school. Maybe I am wrong; but, I do not know of many schools who would turn down a half a $million donation or so and a student who is willing to pay full price at the same time. Schools are short of funding. I am pretty sure this is going on today with little being said about the donations. Perhaps, others here would disagree with me?

Unfortunately, I was never so well-funded to initiate a back door funding approach such as what we are reading about today. My field of endeavor being Purchasing, Logistics, Distribution, and other similar disciplines did not command the type of salary to allow me to even hint at $hundreds of thousands or even $tens of thousands. In my field, we did not have the respect and admiration the reported actors had in their fields and accumulate such money. I was also caught in the 10 year economic cycle and one year spent time gaffing up trees and cutting them down. As Rodney would say; “Where does one go to get some respect around here?” It kept my family in one place and it paid the bills.

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby tells us what his mother said to him while a sophomore in high school; “If you want to go to college, you’d better get a scholarship.” I never had such a discussion with my parents other than my dad telling me not to do what he did. At 19 I was in the military, got out at 22, and married this pretty woman from NYC who in the beginning made more money as a Paralegal than I did with a college education. It paid the bills until such time as I caught up.

Suddenly I had responsibility for more than just myself. So I picked out a small Lasallian Catholic college, used my VA bennies and the state grant to pay for it, and finished up in three years. Never thought of Northwestern or University of Chicago as neither were in the cards and my parents would not have understood it much less pay for either. As a good Baptist I chose a Jesuit University over a Vincentian University for my Masters. Going to school at night then seemed to drag on forever. It was years later when I found out the high school and colleges I attended were pretty good schools. Each year, I donate a few hundred and get invited to various functions which I do not attend. I do not know anyone at these schools other than the Deans.

As advice to my own children, I suggested they go to where the money was. If they offered you grants and scholarships, they wanted you. If all they could conjure up was a subsidized Stafford loan at $3,000/year for a $30,000/year education, they were telling you something. Thank the school for their time and move on to the next one. In the end, it worked and we were also able to finagle a few more $thousand yearly at some pretty good small colleges for each. They do well for themselves and have paid their school loans.

As I sit here in my Levi jeans and ratty-looking Jesuit University sweat shirt writing this, I find myself agreeing with Jacoby and confirming what I already know; “No one needs to attend an elite university to get a decent education or to make a success of their lives, just as no one needs to wear a Dolce and Gabbana sweater to keep warm or drive a Ferrari Enzo to get from here to there.”

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In parts of Livingston and Oakland counties, the people have been warned not to eat the fish from the Huron River and Kent, Strawberry, Zukey, Gallagher, Loon, Whitewood, Base Line and Portage lakes as well as Hubbell Pond due to the fish being contaminated with PFAS and similar chemicals coming from industries. In 2016, Michigan started to tell people about the impact of PFAS and how dangerous the PFAS and PFOAs are.

PFAS/PFOA are part of a class of man-made chemicals used in many industrial and consumer products to make the products resist heat, stains, water, and grease. Product Examples include: Teflon® cookware, waterproofing fabric and coating on fast food wrappers.

Former Army reservist Spc. Mark Favors, his relatives, and family have lived around Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base for years drinking and bathing-in base and off-base water for years. The level of PFAS and PFOA on base around Peterson Air Force Base has been established at 79 to 88,400 parts per trillion on-base wells and 79 to 7,910 parts per trillion in public and private drinking wells off base.

It was not until the EPA published its 70 parts per trillion guidelines did the DOD claim it began to understand how harmful exposure could be and voluntarily took action. Spc. Mark Favors does not buy the excuse. The issue has been explored in-depth by the Colorado Springs Gazette, which produced a timeline dating back to the first concerns about the foam used to fight fires in 1962. Fort Carson stopped using the firefighting foam in 1991 stating, “Firefighting operations that use AFFF must be replaced with nonhazardous substitutes.”

In Michigan, it will take a Flint-sized emergency before it begins to take aggressive action with businesses dumping contaminated water in company drainage pipes going to water reclamation plants. Then too, Livingston County is the richest in income in the state and is also 96% white, an advantage the county has over the City of Flint.

Fifty year old Mark Favors can count at least 16 relatives from around the area who have been diagnosed with cancer; 10 have died. Six of those relatives have died since 2012, including his father at age 69 and two cousins, ages 38 and 54.

“In my family alone, we have had five kidney cancer deaths,” Favors said. “And those people only lived in the contaminated area.”

Many of Favors’ relatives lived near Peterson Air Force Base, where scores of both on-base and off-base water sources have tested significantly above the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended exposure of 70 parts per trillion of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFAS) or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The compounds were part of the military’s firefighting foam until just last year. The same compounds in the foam have been linked to cancers and also developmental delays for fetuses and infants.

In a recent March 6, 2019 House subcommittee hearing, Mark Favors was among those in attendance as the subcommittee was questioning the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Defense representatives over the decades long use of PFAS, the failure to regulate it’s usage, provide adequate protection from its usage, and monitor the safe disposal to prevent contamination of ground water and the environment. Knowing its dangers, a reasonable person would have found an alternative to its usage as demonstrated by Fort Carson in 1991. Obvious, some elements of the military were not of that mind.

With a large degree of politeness, House Oversight and Reform subcommittee on the environment chairman Rep. Harley Rouda, D-CA commented:

“To put it charitably, it is unclear why DoD feels justified in passing the buck to the EPA, particularly in light of the evidence suggesting DoD’s awareness of the toxicity of the chemicals since the early 1980s.”

If stationed at a military bases (and who has not been for some period of time?), this is a big issue as many of us were using the water supplied to us at places such as Camp Lejeune where we were drinking and showering in water contaminated with chemicals such as benzene. For those who were at Camp Lejeune for at least 30 days, there is now a list of disorders which the VHA will accept as being attributed to exposure to base water. Some of us have disorders on that list and some of us do not. There are many other military sites where former military and civilian personnel have complained of disorders and illness which they believe is attributed to the bases they were stationed during their enlistment or working as civilians.

In Michigan, there is a site where you can get an idea of how bad the issue is in and around your community. All known PFAS sites in Michigan and check your own area (at the bottom you scroll to find your county and township/community).

Many knowledgeable sources believe the 70 parts per trillion is still too high.

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Click on the picture to get a great, detailed view of these magnificent and architecturally significant structures. Claude Scales’s Photo of the day: there is a lot of Brooklyn Heights literary history in this photo.

The poet W.H. Auden lived in the top floor apartment of the brownstone row house at One Montague Terrace, nearest the corner of Montague Street and Montague Terrace, in the winter of 1940-41 when he wrote his “New Year Letter.” If you go to the right two doors, to 5 Montague Terrace, you find the house where Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with the recently deceased Tom Wolfe) worked on his novel “Of Time and the River.” On the left of the photo, the building with the cylindrical tower and turreted top is where the playwright Arthur Miller and his first wife, Mary Slattery, lived during the early years of their marriage, and where he began work on his first Broadway play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck”. — in New York, New York.

Love the buildings and maybe because I worked on a few similar to them using rope or cable suspended scaffolds and ladders in downtown or near downtown Chicago. Harvard attorney Claude Scales is the photo-artist-author of this snapshot and commentary stolen from Facebook. I know him from when I would comment at Slate Magazine (along with JackD) when it was a cool place to be. Editor Moira Redmond (not to be confused with the English actress) described the Best of The Fray site, “the place I would tell the other editors to go to if you wanted to find out what Americans were actually thinking.”

Hope you enjoy . . .

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“Legal observers were surprised by the relatively light, 47-month sentence received Thursday by President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted in August on charges of tax and bank fraud.

The 69-year-old, who appeared in the court in Virginia in a wheelchair and pleaded for compassion, could have been sentenced to up to 24 years in federal prison.

With time served, Thursday’s sentence means Manafort could spend a little more than three years behind bars for this case.

NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner: ‘As a former prosecutor, I’m embarrassed. As an American, I’m upset … I am just as disappointed with Judge Ellis. It’s an outrage and it’s disrespectful of the American people.'”

I have been in level 4, 2, and 1 prisons. I used to chase prisoners a long time ago. None of these prisons are a walk in the park. The prison up in Pugsley, Michigan was a level 1 and one of the most dangerous ones in the state as they transferred a bunch of long timers there who did not give a . . . . . you know what I mean. For this peace of garbage ‘Manafort’ it has to be a huge let down having to associate with the lesser human beings who will be making fun of him. Lets see what the next sentencing brings. If they run it consecutively and it goes over 10 years, he will go to a Level 4.

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