Ralph Abraham (R-LA)-- Far Right Congressman, Gubernatorial Candidate And Drug Pusher

Ralph Abraham is the ultimate politician scumbag. An anti-immigrant fanatic, his grandparents immigration to the U.S. from Lebanon. He studied to be a veterinarian, although he claims to be a people doctor now. He's also a Republican gubernatorial candidate who started serving in Congress in 2015, representing the very red (R+15) 5th district-- where Trump beat Hillary 63.5% to 34.1%. The district is the whole northeast of the state, bordering on Mississippi and Arkansas. Alexandria is the only actual city.

His gubernatorial candidacy was dealt a possibly fatal blow on Wednesday when the Bayou Brief exposed him as a drug dealer. Two small town pharmacies he owns in the district, one in Mangham and one in Winnsboro (12.5 miles away), sold 1,478,236 doses of opioids for towns with around 6,000 people. Lamar White, Jr. wrote that "Abraham has been openly enthusiastic about his support for opioid treatments, once suggesting that the drugs are far less dangerous and much more effective than medical marijuana. Five years ago, during an October 2014 debate for Congress, Abraham claimed he did not support 'the legalization of marijuana on any level... Again, as a physician, let me tell you. What I see in my practice, from any level of marijuana use, is bad,' Abraham stated. 'I’m against recreational, I’m against medical. In the medical profession, for these chronic pain, poor cancer patients that need help, we have other alternatives that work better, Dilaudid, OxyContin, you name it, Oxycodone, we have several options that do a much better job for chronic pain.'" That's what he was pushing on his (human) patients, in many cases, a death sentence.

“I’ve had hundreds of patients unfortunately with cancer that I’ve treated, they do well with these drugs,” he continued.

According to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, opioid overdoses surged an astonishing 14% in 2014, which was largely a consequence of physicians overprescribing the drugs. Abraham’s home parish of Richland is one of the least populated in the state, ranking 46th of 64, yet according to the most recent estimate, it ranks as the 8th worst in opioid prescriptions. As of 2017, for every 100 people in Richland, there were an astonishing 113 opioid prescriptions.

“Opioids-- mainly synthetic opioids (other than methadone)-- are currently the main driver of drug overdose deaths,” states the CDC. “Opioids were involved in 47,600 overdose deaths in 2017. A staggering 67.8% of all drug overdose deaths are due to opioids, and while nationwide these numbers have declined, Louisiana is one of a handful of states in which deaths from opioid overdoses have increased.

During the past year, overdose deaths went up by 4.7% in Louisiana.

“Louisiana also ranks among the top 10 states with the most opioid prescriptions written per capita, according to its state’s lawsuit against 17 companies, including Purdue Pharma,” according to a report published yesterday by APG Wisconsin. “Since 2007, the state has spent at least $677 million ‘for treatment of opioid use and dependence.’”

During the seven-year timeframe, Abraham’s pharmacy in Winnsboro doubled the number of opioids it dispensed to patients; opioid prescriptions filled at his pharmacy in Mangham, which is located near his former medical clinic, surged a staggering 67%.

In Mangham (2017 population: 638), Abraham’s pharmacy supplied enough opioid medication to provide every man, woman, and child 6.1 doses every year (or 43 pills in total) for seven consecutive years; his pharmacy in Winnsboro (2017 population: 4,652) could have provided every resident 4.4 doses per year (or 31 in total). (Note: Annual doses per person were based on Census estimates, not the most recent American Community Survey).

Thus far, the only publicly-available data concerns manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies filling the medications, but there is significant pressure for the government to also identify the physicians responsible for writing a substantial number of opioid prescriptions, particularly those who, like Abraham, also maintain ownership interests in nearby pharmacies.

...Aside from the staggering volume of opioids that Abraham’s two rural pharmacies dispensed from 2006 to 2012, there is one other detail that is impossible to ignore: With only one insignificant exception, he ordered all of his supply, nearly 1.5 million doses, from a single distributor, the Shreveport-based, family-owned company Morris & Dickson.

Morris & Dickson is the second-largest opioid distributor in the state of Louisiana, or at least it once was.

On May 2nd, 2018, the DEA suspended the company from distributing controlled substances, after a months-long investigation revealed it had been supplying pharmacies with massive shipments of opioids, in direct violation of the law.

“In October 2017, DEA became aware of the high-volume sales of Oxycodone and Hydrocodone from Morris and Dickson Company to five of the top ten purchasing pharmacies within the state of Louisiana,” the federal agency announced in a press release. “DEA records indicated that Morris and Dickson Company had not filed any suspicious order reports on any of the pharmacies in question in Louisiana.”

It was the first time the DEA had issued a such a suspension since 2012. “Not only were numerous ‘independent’ retail pharmacies purchasing more Oxycodone and Hydrocodone than the largest chain pharmacies operating within the state, they were purchasing more narcotics than several of the largest chain pharmacies combined within the same zip code,” the DEA explained. “In some instances, DEA noted these ‘independent’ pharmacies were purchasing more than ten times the amount of narcotics the average Louisiana pharmacy purchased per month.”

Yet only sixteen days after it issued the suspension, the DEA withdrew it, according to an announcement made on the company’s Facebook page.

Only months prior, the company’s president, Paul Dickson, was Ralph Abraham’s guest at the State of the Union.

Dickson, a prolific donor to Republican politicians and PACs, has already contributed the maximum to Abraham’s gubernatorial campaign; so has Dickson’s wife. Dickson was recently named as a member of Abraham’s campaign finance committee.

In May of this year, his company agreed to pay $22 million in civil penalties to settle charges it had violated the Controlled Substances Act. “In addition to paying $22 million in settlement funds, Morris & Dickson also agreed during the course of the negotiations to make significant upgrades to its compliance program by investing millions of dollars to hire additional staff and implement new protocols and standards to ensure compliance with federal regulations requiring them to report suspicious orders of controlled substances,” the Shreveport Times reported.

Seven months ago, a person from northeast Louisiana posted a troubling and potentially explosive allegation as a comment on Facebook in response to one of the Bayou Brief’s previous reports on U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham. According to the individual, whose identity we have confirmed but are withholding out of concerns for personal and professional retaliation, the physician-turned-congressman had been known as a leading prescriber of powerful opioids, some of the most addictive and deadliest medications on the market.

The comment remained online for over 48 hours before the person, perhaps wisely, decided to delete it. I had reached out privately, both to express my appreciation for their courage and to caution them about the potential backlash they could receive.

The person, who lived in the vicinity of both pharmacies, claimed direct knowledge of the doctor’s preferred way to treat and manage patients suffering from pain, which Abraham has already essentially confirmed. They also offered to contact two others who were forced to seek treatment after becoming addicted to opioids they had allegedly received either from Dr. Abraham or through one of the two rural pharmacies he owned in the area.

However, speaking publicly about an addiction, particularly in the context of a political campaign, is incredibly challenging, and understandably, after thoroughly considering the potential public scrutiny, they decided to refrain from conducting an on-the-record interview. Still, for anyone who has read the Washington Post’s reporting or reviewed the DEA’s database, the details of this person’s experience should not be surprising; millions of Americans have had similar experiences and struggles.

One would think, at the very least, that Abraham would support the bipartisan effort to hold these pharmaceutical companies for misrepresenting a potentially and highly addictive lethal drug, creating what can fairly be characterized as an epidemic and a crisis, and pocketing billions of dollars in profit as a direct result.

Yet Ralph Abraham has repeatedly expressed his opposition to lawsuits filed against opioid distributors and manufacturers, arguing that these pharmaceutical companies are merely meeting the market’s demand.

In 2017, during an interview on Talk 1073, the congressman was directly asked his opinion on the lawsuits, and he twice claimed not to know of any “objective data” linking the misleading practices of opioid manufacturers with the proliferation of prescriptions and fatal overdoses.

“I wanna get some objective data first, and I don’t want it to be you know, like some of these large class-action suits that we have had in the past, where they just throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he said, presumably referring to either the class action suits against tobacco companies or against BP in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “So you know, let’s see where the problem lies. You’re correct, the manufacturers are simply meeting a demand that is being, maybe, abused by some physicians. Certainly abused, illicitly, by some street dealers.”

  Earlier in the same interview, Abraham acknowledged being fearful of having the Drug Enforcement Agency monitoring physicians who write “long-term” prescriptions for opioids.

He was not referring to himself when he spoke about the drugs “being, maybe, abused by some physicians,” and he has never disclosed how many of the opioid prescriptions he wrote for patients were filled at one of his pharmacies.

In fact, he has continually claimed that he gave up the practice of medicine in order to serve in Congress, though his own financial disclosure reports seem to directly contradict that assertion.

There is at least one prominent Republican in Louisiana who adamantly agrees with the lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and prescribers: state Attorney General Jeff Landry. He calls it “one of the (state’s) most challenging and complex problems,” estimating that the opioid epidemic is already costing Louisiana more than $160 million every year.

More importantly though, it’s costing Louisiana more than 1,000 lives annually and thousands more to seek treatment for drug dependency. Incidentally, drug and alcohol addiction facilities have also poured big money into Abraham’s campaign. They apparently believe he’s good for their business, and it’s difficult to argue otherwise.

America Meets Its Darkness: A Look at HBO's Westworld

Maryann Price singing "I'm an Old Cowhand" with Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. She knows all the songs that the cowboys know, 'bout the big corral where the dogies go, 'cause she learned them all on the radio, yippee-i-o-ki-ay. There are fake cowboy visitors in HBO's new series Westworld too, but they're not so nice.

by Gaius Publius

I'm a fan of science fiction, especially when it reflects and comments on the state of our national affairs — and our national affairs are definitely in a state. Which brings me to the new HBO series Westworld.

Westworld is derivative in some ways. It takes off from a pleasant mid-1970s film entertainment by Michael Crichton and starring Yul Brynner, also called Westworld, in which an android-populated theme park goes chaotic and androids starts killing the visitors. But this new version adds in much of the violence and dark tone from HBO's excellent, realistic Western drama Deadwood, plus a lot more brutal sexuality than the earlier film, similar to that in Game of Thrones and other recent productions.

Yes, the visitors to the original Westworld theme park could "encounter" the saloon girls at will, all of whom would be willing, and shoot up the android locals, but that part was downplayed in the film. As Rick Perlstein amply documents in Nixonland, America of the 1970s was starting to come to grips with its darker self, with the world of the My Lai massacre and police brutality, of brutal sexism and incentivized social conformity, and it dealt with that encounter by trying to turn away, by trying to re-enter the world of American myth that Ronald Reagan ultimately shepherded us to.

Just one example: The 1968 My Lai massacre was prosecuted, sort of, but what was done, there and elsewhere, was never absorbed, understood or metabolized as a wider problem within the American psyche — particularly the male American psyche, since the soldiers involved in all these massacres were indeed male. So the pushback, the effort to start the forgetting, began. As early as 1970 mainstream propagandists were working to blunt Vietnam era awarenesses and counter-cultural challenges with, for example, "folk" groups like entirely anodyne New Christy Minstrels, who were introduced at Super Bowl IV as "young Americans who demonstrate — with guitars."

Bottom line, in the 1970s the country was in the process of trying to sanitize itself, and there was an ongoing public "discussion," both explicit in public conversation and implicit in the media and public entertainment. The original Westwood was part of that effort, if unconsciously. As I said, a pleasant entertainment, and in fact a watchable film.

America Meets Its Darkness

America today is a much different place. The Reagan Revolution is over — Reagan, the agent who engineered our re-entry into American counter-factual myth — and the brutal facts of our darker nature are now coming home to stay, in the form of murderous counter-strikes from abroad and at home, and an economically induced opioid-and-suicide crisis that won't cease until our rulers cease the economic pressure that drives it.

Which they will never do. And which everyone knows they will never do, everyone at least who watched the determined effort to destroy the Sanders campaign by anyone with a stake in the status quo. Trump voters, those not driven mad by demons of race, have parallel fears.

In short, America is having dark dreams about itself, and those dreams are beginning to be represented even in mainstream entertainment, like the new Westworld.

Here's what Rolling Stone critic Rob Scheffield says about this series:

What 'Westworld' Says About America Right Now

HBO's big-budget reboot of the Seventies sci-fi movie is really about masculinity – and Rob Sheffield thinks it could not be more timely

In a better time for this country, Westworld would feel a lot more like science fiction. Instead, this HBO show is a bloody, pulpy, breast-intensive satire of the American male psychosis at its most demented. It's set in a futuristic theme park where guests pay thousands of dollars a day to live out their Wild West fantasies, which mostly involve shooting or torturing the robot "hosts" who populate the park. Saloons, whorehouses, six-shooters and Stetsons: all an excuse for the clientele to act on their most depraved urges. One of the human masterminds behind the park sums up the guests as "rich assholes who want to play cowboy." The robots bleed real-looking blood – buckets of it, in fact – but it's all fun and games as long as they don't really feel or remember anything, right? Like the replicant hunters in Blade Runner would say, they're just skin jobs.

Except what happens if these hosts develop their own consciousness – androids who dream of electric tumbleweeds?

In this Westworld, the androids who permanently inhabit the park are not the villains, but the victims of "rich assholes who want to play cowboy" — victims of wealthy visitors who see others in the world as toys for their entertainment (sound familiar?). And now those toys, previously unaware of their own low status in a world they thought was theirs, are starting to wake up.

How's that for a concept that perfectly captures the times?

More from Scheffield:

Evan Rachel Wood, by the way, is easily the best thing about Westworld – she's the spark of raw humanity who makes it all compelling. Her Dolores is a doe-eyed rancher's daughter who exists to be either rescued or abused, depending on the whims of the paying costumer. And since it's usually abused, she lives out the same loop over and over again, a loop that ends as her blood gets wiped away and her memory gets reset. But before the technicians send her back to work on the bunny ranch, they test her with one query: "Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?" As long as she keeps saying no, she qualifies as a good little robot sexpot. Except she's unmistakably showing signs of logging memories and figuring out what's going on, which means she's showing signs of becoming disturbingly human.

And something else, something that Scheffield isn't saying, is that Wood's character is learning to lie to the technicians about what she knows — a detail that gives the series an added dramatic punch.

You'll need to be clear about the premise before you begin to watch, though; the pilot is confusing. I think the film-makers were counting on the grit and gore to keep you tuning in until the tragedy of that world becomes clear. It's not immediately obvious, for example, who's not an android and who is, and I almost stopped watching. But if you're forearmed with enough information, you won't make that mistake.

"Minds destroyed by madness"

This isn't so much a movie review as a nation review. Like Allen Ginsberg, we are watching, not just the best minds of this generation, but also the worst "destroyed by madness," trapped in a world they can neither tolerate nor change. The Sanders-side electoral rebellion has failed, for whatever reason, and the Trump-side uprising, fueled by the radical mix of forces that drove that rage, will likely be snuffed there as well.

Where do the American people go from here? Do they endure till they die in the hole they live in, dreaming of "freedom" via thirty-second offroad truck commercials? Or do they do something else? What will Evan Rachel Wood do after the third or fourth brutal rape, somewhere in midseason, when she realizes she doesn't have to execute her programming and can execute ... something else? Will her reaction be sanctioned by law, or by the keepers of the world she can't escape? The dramatic possibilities, in the series at least, are endless and exciting.

I don't expect to say the same for the larger Westworld that created the smaller one, certainly not with the word "exciting" attached.

"But I saw you and you saw me, mostly"

Let's end, however, on a cheerier note, with the scat-singing of the above-mentioned Maryann Price, performing a song I call "But I Saw You and You Saw Me, Mostly," but which Dan Hicks called "Shorty Falls in Love" or here, "Another Night."

Ignore the odd laughter and applause — it's a rehearsal for the Flip Wilson comedy show on what may be a crowded practice set.

We sped around the world
To see what we could see,
But I saw you and you saw me mostly

Eyes for each other and not for the world. Maybe there's a lesson there.

GP
 

Reporters are starting to look into Rudy G's influence-peddling, which means that some reporters are starting to do their job

Yes, it's the famous Giuliani Partners, in 2004--with Rudy's right-hand guy Bernie (where else?) at his right, before moving on to his new career as a public embarrassment.

"It was all because of Giuliani. And he got to take the money."
--Ed Bisch, "whose son died of an OxyContin overdose," as reported by Barry Meier and Eric Lipton in today's New York Times, and who "said that he believed that [OxyContin maker] Purdue [Pharma] got a free pass for years thanks to Mr. Giuliani"

Okay, let's stipulate that the Mayor of 9/11 didn't do anything illegal, and possibly even--by prevailing standards--nothing egregiously unethical. There are even suggestions that in allowing his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to take on Purdeu Pharma as a client, and in playing an active role himself in pushing back against a rising tide of public outcry and legal jeopardy, was acting honorably.

"Everything I did with Giuliani Partners has been totally legal, totally ethical," Mr. Giuliani recently told The Associated Press. "There's nothing for me to explain about it. We've acted honorably, decently."

In the OxyContin case, Mr. Giuliani's supporters suggest that as a cancer survivor himself, he was driven by a noble goal: to keep the company's proven pain reliever available to the widest circle of sufferers.

"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."

But the NYT reporters, in their extended look at Giuliani Partners' and Giuliani's hugely profitable involvement with Purdue Pharma, "the company's first and longest-running client," suggest that it "provides a window into how he used his standing as an eminent lawyer, a Republican insider and a national celebrity to aid a controversial client and build a business fortune."

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.

Purdue turned to Giuliani Partners in 2002, six years into

what D.E.A. officials described as perhaps the most aggressive promotional campaign for a high-powered narcotic ever undertaken. It promoted the drug not only to pain specialists, but to family doctors with little experience in treating serious pain or recognizing drug abuse.

As a result of the expanded access, critics charged, OxyContin wound up in the high schools and street corners of rural America where curious teenagers crushed the pill, defeating the time-release formula, and ended up addicts, or in some cases, dead.

Complicating the company's problem was a rising tide of charges regarding not just its marketing of OxyContin but what the reporters describe as D.E.A.'s inspectors' finding of "widespread security and record-keeping problems at the company's manufacturing plants." Giuliani Partners "became involved in every aspect of the company's problem."

Of course, to deal with Purdue's plant security issues, Giuliani Partners could deploy its own Mr. Security, Bernie "Love Nest" Kerik, who of course hadn't yet become the public embarrassment we know and love. And Giuliani's own active participation--both publicly ("It is clear to us," Purdue lawyer Howard R. Udell was quoted as saying in a Giuliani Partners promotional brochure, "and we hope it is clear to the government, that Giuliani would not take an assignment with a company that he felt was acting in an improper way") and in the form of personal contact with government lawyers including D.E.A. chief Asa Hutchinson--seems to have been worth whatever Purdue paid, however much that was. "Giuliani Partners would not say how much Purdue had paid it, but one consultant to the drug maker estimated that Mr. Giuliani's firm had, in some years, earned several million dollars from the account."

The D.E.A. official in charge of the Purdue inquiry is said to have recommended a $20 million fine for the record-keeping problems. In 2004, two years into the Giuliani Partners pushback, the company paid a $2 million fine, naturally without admitting any wrongdoing.

About the one person the company couldn't neutralize was the fairly obscure U.S. attorney for western Virginia, John L. Brownlee.

For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics. The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving its abuse.

Clearly Giuliani and his clients expected Brownlee to be awed by Rudy's stature.

Between June and October 2006, Mr. Giuliani met or spoke with the prosecutor on six occasions. During those conversations, Mr. Giuliani was cordial but pointed in arguing against what he felt were flaws in the case.

Mr. Brownlee would not change course, though, even when the Purdue legal team appealed, unsuccessfully, at the 11th hour to his superiors at the Justice Department in Washington.

In October 2006, Mr. Brownlee told Mr. Giuliani and Purdue that he expected to ask for a grand jury indictment by the end of the month. Plea discussions ensued and Mr. Brownlee ultimately agreed that the three executives would not have to do jail time.

In the settlement, Purdue and the targeted executives agreed to pay $634.5 million, and the company "after years of denial and a high-profile public relations campaign, was forced to admit that it had misled doctors and patients.

Measured against Purdue's presumed billions in OxyContin profits, and especially in the absence of any jail time, a lot of people--including parents of children who had become casualties of OxyContin abuse--cried out that the company had bought its way out of much bigger trouble, with particular focus on the role of Giuliani, prompting this rather remarkable statement from U.S. District Court Judge James P. Jones: "It has been implied that because Mr. Giuliani is a prominent national politician, Purdue may have received a favorable deal from the government solely because of politics. I completely reject this claim."

Among those unpersuaded was Ed Bisch, whose son died of an OxyContin overdose. He's the fellow who said, "It was all because of Giuliani. And he got to take the money."

Indeed he did. As the Times reporters point out, growing attention has been paid recently to the clients serviced and services performed by Giuliani Partners:

Giuliani Partners carved out a lucrative niche in corporate consulting, crisis management and security.

In the process, Mr. Giuliani, a Brooklyn native whose legal career had largely been spent in government, became a corporate trouble-shooter with homes in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side. According to financial disclosure forms filed in May, his net worth was more than $30 million.

Again, there may have been no illegal activity involved, and our Rudy insists there was nothing unethical either. But at the very least, it's unsavory. How many stories like the Purdue one await public airing? What it amounts to is the good old American practice of taking the money and running.

Well, maybe Rudy is entitled to cash in on his years of public service. It seems to me an appalling qualification for any future public office. Like the presidency, to pick a random example.

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