December 20, 2016

An act of war

In case you missed it, please take a look at this great reporting from Gazette-Mail journalist Eric Eyre about WV's opioid epidemic. It's really hard to get your head around. Or my head, anyway.

Teaser: a handful of drug companies poured 780 MILLION pain pills into WV over a few years, even while our overdose rate increased. They specifically targeted a handful of rural communities in the coalfields.

It reminds me of Great Britain's shameful behavior towards China (or is that Jina?) during the opium wars, when that empire forced addictive drugs on the Chinese people.

If another country did this to us, we'd go to war. Unless it was Russia, which apparently gets a pass from the president elect.

1 comment:

Mary Wildfire said...

You, too, Rick? Jumping on the red-baiting bandwagon? (never mind that Russia is not the USSR and is not red). There has been no evidence yet produced that Russia had anything to do with the email leaks; Craig Morris states that he knows where they came from and it was an insider leak, not foreign hacking. In any case, the US government has a long history of interfering with elections in other countries, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly, and of simply making war on a country to change its leadership. Furthermore, the CONTENT of the leaked emails showed that the DNC and the Clinton camp colluded to be sure she, and not Sanders, would be the nominee--if they hadn't, we'd likely have a President Sanders meticulously ensuring that he had no possible conflict of interest, rather than, I think it was Wikileaks saying the words for the day are "surreal" and "fascism." Thus, all this howling about Russia (supposedly) interfering with our election is overloaded with hypocrisy. The fact that Trump is friendly with Putin rather than jumping on the insane saber-rattling of the current administration is about the only positive from him.