Heart Drugs May Affect Mood

http://www.pharmacypracticenews.com/Clinical/Article/10-16/Heart-Drugs-May-Affect-Mood/38254

Those with chronic pain have twice the rate of suicides than the rest of the population… and this study suggests that prescribers that under treat chronic pain that causes elevated blood pressure and elects to treat the hypertension… may be causing a higher probability of suicide by the pt. And the Hippocratic oath states FIRST DO NO HARM…

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Woman sues Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, claiming it discriminated against her because of a disability

http://www.denverpost.com/2016/10/14/university-of-colorado-hospital-disability-discrimination-lawsuit/

A physician diagnosed with fibromyalgia has sued Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs claiming a doctor discriminated against her because of her disability.

The civil rights lawsuit was filed in Denver U.S. District Court on Thursday on behalf of Dr. Elena Sumler by Arvada attorney Ralph Lamar. She is seeking back pay, including lost fringe benefits, compensatory damages, future lost wages and attorneys fees.

“Providing the very best patient care is the top priority at Memorial Hospital and throughout the UCHealth system of hospitals. We cannot comment on potential litigation,” hospital spokesman Dan Weaver said in a statement on Friday.

According to the Mayo Clinic, fibromyalgia is a disorder “characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain accompanied by fatigue, sleep, memory and mood issues.”

Sumler filed a discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Dec. 31, 2014, and received a “right to sue” letter on Sept. 29, the lawsuit says.

Sumler was trained as a pediatrician and gastroenterologist in Russia and met her husband when he was stationed in Korea. They married and she became a U.S. citizen in 2005 and moved to Colorado in 2010, according to the lawsuit.

A.S.A.P. Laboratories hired her as an emergency on-call sonographer in 2013. She was laid off in September 2014 when the company lost its contract.

Memorial Hospital offered her a position as an ultrasound technician the following month. The offer was contingent on her answering a health questionnaire.

“(She) did so even though it was clearly unlawful in that it asked questions about her health that were not pertinent to her ability to perform in the position,” the lawsuit says.

She disclosed in the questionnaire that she suffered from fibromyalgia and took prescription medications for the disorder, the lawsuit says.

It was explained to her that she would then need to speak with Dr. Henry Roth. He told her on Oct. 30, 2014 that “because you use narcotics you can’t work in the hospital.” Roth did not examine Sumler or ask her how she moved or felt, the lawsuit says. Roth said he would consult with an attorney.

Sumler explained that she takes medications prescribed by her doctor, had no adverse side effects that would impair her ability to work and that she had worked the past 18 months without any problems, the lawsuit says.

Roth conferred with Sumler’s physician, Dr. Joseph Brooks, who told Roth that Sumler “was in good shape, active and had no physical limitations that would interfere with her ability to perform the job of ultrasound technician,” the lawsuit says.

She was examined and given a drug test by the Occupational Health Clinic on Nov. 5, 2014. The next day, Roth told Sumler once again that she couldn’t work at the hospital because of the narcotics she took.

He refused to answer any further questions, including whether he had consulted with an attorney, the lawsuit says.

“Dr. Roth got angry and said it was not his responsibility to do so and would not continue the conversation,” the lawsuit says.

Sumler then received Roth’s medical report indicating several functional restrictions and range of motion limitations, even though he had never read her medical records and had not done an actual physical examination, the lawsuit argues.

Roth had never told her about the limitations so there had never been any type of “reasonable accommodation” for her disability discussed, the suit says. He conducted no tests to see what she could actually lift or move as a result of a “functional capacity evaluation.”

“Dr. Roth’s ‘visual examination’ of plaintiff and the concomitant physical restrictions he issued was a sham,” the lawsuit says. “Dr. Roth’s contention that he has the ability to note plaintiff’s functional limitations without even asking her to undergo a range of motion exam, or to otherwise physically examine her, is without any scientific support.”

She called an official in the hospital’s human resources office and a week later was told her job offer “had been rescinded,” the lawsuit says. She called the hospital recruiter back and was told her health screen was unsuccessful.

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Cigna Accused Of Cheating Prescription Drug Buyers

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-prescription-benefit-class-action-1015-20161014-story.html

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Medicare unveils far-reaching overhaul of doctors’ pay

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MEDICARE_OVERHAUL?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-10-14-09-09-49

WASHINGTON (AP) — Changing the way it does business, Medicare on Friday unveiled a far-reaching overhaul of how it pays doctors and other clinicians.

The goal is to reward quality, penalize poor performance, and avoid paying piecemeal for services. Whether it succeeds or fails, it’s one of the biggest changes in Medicare’s 50-year history.

The complex regulation is nearly 2,400 pages long and will take years to fully implement. It’s meant to carry out bipartisan legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama last year.

The concept of paying for quality has broad support, but the details have been a concern for some clinicians, who worry that the new system will force small practices and old-fashioned solo doctors to join big groups. Patients may soon start hearing about the changes from their physicians, but it’s still too early to discern the impacts.

The Obama administration sought to calm concerns Friday. “Transforming something of this size is something we have focused on with great care,” said Andy Slavitt, head of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Officials said they considered more than 4,000 formal comments and held meetings around the country attended by more than 100,000 people before issuing the final rule. It eases some timelines the administration initially proposed, and gives doctors more pathways for complying.

The American Medical Association said its first look suggests that the administration “has been responsive” to many concerns that doctors raised.

In Congress, staffers were poring over the details. Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., who worries that Medicare’s new direction could damage the doctor-patient relationship, said he’s going to give the regulation “careful scrutiny.” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of a panel that oversees Medicare, called it an “important step forward,” but said the administration needs to keep listening to concerns.

MACRA, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, creates two new payment systems, or tracks, for clinicians. It affects more than 600,000 doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and therapists, a majority of clinicians billing Medicare. Medical practices must decide next year what track they will take.

Starting in 2019, clinicians can earn higher reimbursements if they learn new ways of doing business, joining a leading-edge track that’s called Alternative Payment Models. That involves being willing to accept financial risk and reward for performance, reporting quality measures to the government, and using electronic medical records.

Medicare said some 70,000 to 120,000 clinicians are initially expected to take that more challenging path. Officials are hoping the number will quickly grow.

Most clinical practitioners – an estimated 590,000 to 640,000 – will be in a second track called the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System. It features more modest financial risks and rewards, and accountability for quality, efficiency, use of electronic medical records, and self-improvement.

Finally, about 380,000 clinicians are expected to be exempt from the new systems because they don’t see enough Medicare patients, or their billings do not reach a given threshold.

“Half of the physician practices under 10 (doctors) will not be reporting at all,” said Slavitt. Initially more doctors would have been covered.

Advocates say the new system will improve quality and help check costs. But critics say complicated requirements could prove overwhelming. The administration says some doctors will be pleasantly surprised to find out that reporting requirements have been streamlined to make them easier to meet.

With 57 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries, Medicare is the government’s premier health insurance program. The Obama administration has also been working to overhaul payment for hospitals and private insurance plans that serve Medicare beneficiaries. The unifying theme is rewarding quality over volume.

While some quality improvements have already been noted, it’s likely to take years to see if the new approaches can lead to major savings that help keep Medicare sustainable.

John Feore of the consulting firm Avalare Health said it appears many doctors are still unaware of the magnitude of the changes ahead.

“MACRA is a huge change in how physicians are paid, and there is a wide spectrum on whether they are ready,” said Feore. “By providing some options and a transition over a year or two, the (administration’s) intent is to allow them to get comfortable.”

Medicare also launched a new website with interactive features aimed at educating doctors about the changes.

Medicare’s previous congressionally mandated system for paying doctors proved unworkable. It called for automatic cuts when spending surpassed certain levels, and lawmakers routinely waived those reductions. MACRA was intended by lawmakers as a new beginning.

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More Than 1 Million to Lose Obamacare Plans as Insurers Quit

Sign-ups for Obamacare coverage begin next month. Fallout from the quitting insurers has emerged as the latest threat to the law, which is also a major focal point in the U.S. presidential election. While it’s not clear what all the consequences of the departing insurers will be, interviews with regulators and insurance customers suggest that plans will be fewer and more expensive, and may not include the same doctors and hospitals.

It may also mean that instead of growing in 2017, Obamacare could shrink. As of March 31, the law covered 11.1 million people; an Oct. 13 S&P Global Ratings report predicted that enrollment next year will range from an 8 percent decline to a 4 percent gain.

Vanishing Plan

Last year in Minnesota, Theresa Puffer, 61, used Obamacare to sign up for a BlueCross BlueShield plan after leaving her job following a skin cancer diagnosis. “I would have had a hard time finding any sort of coverage before the ACA,” Puffer said by phone.

Next year, Puffer’s plan is disappearing from Obamacare — making her one of about 20,000 Minnesotans in the same situation. To make matters worse, premiums for other plans in the state will rise by at least 50 percent, though subsidies under the law can help cushion the blow.

“Trying to determine which would be the best plan for my situation is not easy,” Puffer said. Her dermatologist appears to be out of network in other plans, she said. “I’m willing to pay a higher premium to see him, because when you have cancer you want to stay with the same group of doctors,” she said. “I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out what my options are.”

Bloomberg contacted officials in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and the 1.4 million-person estimate includes 32 states and only plans sold on the individual “exchange” markets. In Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri, insurers have pulled out, but regulators couldn’t or wouldn’t say how many people are affected. Three states didn’t provide sufficient data.

Eleven states said they weren’t affected. In Washington, D.C., because one insurer withdrew some of its offerings, about 7,800 customers will need to choose new plans.

Normal Disruption

The U.S. agency that oversees Obamacare has said that some disruption is normal, and that choosing a new plan can help people get the best deal.

“It’s part of the normal business cycle for insurers to discontinue, change, and replace plans from year to year,” Benjamin Wakana, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said by e-mail on Oct. 5. “Such changes don’t prevent people from obtaining coverage. People can shop for new coverage through a transparent market.”

HHS said Thursday that it will contact people losing their coverage and encourage them to sign up with new plans. The law requires all Americans to have insurance or pay a fine.

Nationwide estimates of the number of people losing their current plans are higher. For example, Charles Gaba, who tracks the law at ACASignups.net, estimates that 2 million to 2.5 million people in the U.S. will lose their current plans, compared with 2 million a year ago. Gaba’s estimate is based on insurance company membership data.

Fewer Choices

For the people losing plans, there are fewer and fewer choices. One estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation predicts that for at least 19 percent of the people in Obamacare’s individual market next year there will be only one insurer to choose from.

In North Carolina, for example, a BlueCross BlueShield insurer will be the only option in 95 of the state’s 100 counties after Aetna and UnitedHealth said this year that they would leave. That will leave 284,000 people looking for a new plan, according to the state.

“Without any significant statutory and regulatory changes on the federal and state levels, we may face the crisis again,” said North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin, a Democrat who’s up for election this year. “There needs to be a wholesale re-evaluation by leaders in Washington.”

Losing Access

In Tennessee, UnitedHealth and the state’s BlueCross BlueShield plan are pulling back, and about 117,000 people will lose the plans they have now.

Amanda Page Cornett, a 34-year-old musician and athletic trainer in Nashville, is among them. For 2015, Cornett was careful to pick a BlueCross BlueShield plan that covered specialists at Vanderbilt Health, to treat nerve pain stemming from a 2013 accident. Her condition worsened recently, she said, and she’s worried about losing access to her doctor.

“I’m hopeful that he’s going to be able to help me,” she said of her current physician. “I feel like now I have two and a half months to figure it out before they shut me out.”

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www.pharmaciststeve.com/?p=17296#comment-18105

Don’t worry… she will never be charged or go to jail…

The first link is a comment on a post a made a couple of days ago… There is MAJOR DIFFERENCE in being ANTI-CLINTON and PRO-TRUMP..  There is a middle ground of “the devil we know” is probably worse than the “devil that we don’t know”

There is seldom a day goes by that some part of the media is publishing a article about the “OD epidemic”… yet has either the two Presidential candidates utter the first few words about it ?

Clinton has promised to make “the rich” to pay their “fair share”… but no one can really define “rich” nor “fair share”… yet she has endorsed WV Senator Manchin’s proposed “opiate prescription tax”… to help fund treatment for people who are dealing with substance/opiate abuse… 

Isn’t that great to take one group of chronically ill in our society to pay for the treatment of another chronically ill people. Since a recent survey stated that 90% of those families that have a chronic pain pt in the family.. .the family was struggling financially because one spouse can’t work and/or the cost of treatment/therapy of the chronic pain pts…. and it is highly unlikely that the pt’s insurance company will pick up that TAX… and it would appear that few of those chronic pain pts are “rich”.

She has also endorsed Philadelphia’s new “soda tax”…

TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS in national debt and not much of a discussion from either candidate.

Where were all of these women claiming mis-doing of Trump when he was in the primary. Where were they when he won the Republican nomination in July. Both the timing is suspicious and the fact that all of these women are pro-clinton ?

When FBI Comey testified before Congress.. he must have had to use a Thesaurus to come up with synonyms to describe Clinton’s actions/in-actions that would not match the wording of the laws that she had broke/violated so that he could say with a straight face.. that he would not charge her.

He stated in his testimony that “no one knew what he was going to say”… but did he have a meeting the AG Lynch and President Obama and since our President is the final authority on what laws will or will not be enforced… and Comey was told that he could charge her if he wanted.. but… prosecution would not be pursued… regardless of what his decision was…  What do you think that his chances of continuing being head of the FBI.. if he charged her and she is elected President ?

Here is the Republican’s platform    https://gop.com/platform/  All 66 pages

Here is the Democratic platform  https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Democratic-Party-Platform-7.21.16-no-lines.pdf   All 55 pages

Who has read these documents to see what is in them and who believes that any one expects the respective parties will begin to focus on them for the next two -four years ?

Maybe the chronic pain community should take their lead from Head of House Paul Ryan …and take his narcissist attitude and the other Republicans in Congress … IT IS EVERY MAN/WOMAN FOR THEMSELVES..  Members of Congress needs to do whatever they have to do .. to maintain their seat in Congress.

Apparently the most important thing to do is to make sure that “the political establishment” stay in power… it doesn’t matter if it is Republican or Democratic.. and anything can be said, done or promised… in order to achieve that.

The war on drugs/pt/prescribers is part of the agenda of the political establishment… as are many other policies.

IF your quality of life is better now than it was EIGHT YEARS AGO…. then go ahead and vote to keep the status quo and the political establishment in place…  if not … Obama 2.0 might not work out too well for you over the next 4-8 yrs.

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Gregg Jarrett: Sad and infuriating – FBI director’s tortured interpretation of the law

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/10/13/gregg-jarrett-sad-and-infuriating-fbi-director-s-tortured-interpretation-law.html

For those in chronic pain community… these are TWO OF THE GENERALS.. in the war on pts/prescribers… and apparently they will do just about anything to help assure that they keep their jobs.. and their help in leading the war on pts/prescribers.  How is your quality of life… compared to EIGHT YEARS AGO ?  How will it be in another FOUR to EIGHT YEARS…. if you are still alive and have not invoked the FINAL SOLUTION to end your pain.

By Gregg Jarrett

As evidence mounts that the Director of the FBI subverted justice, damaged the reputation of the Bureau and squandered the support of his agents, calls for his resignation will surely escalate. 

Can there be any confidence in his future judgments and decisions, as long as he continues to preside over the once-venerated Federal Bureau of Investigation?

That is the plight James Comey now faces in light of the exclusive story published by foxnews.com in which a person closely involved in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails revealed that career FBI agents and attorneys who dedicated themselves to the year-long probe unanimously believed she should have been criminally charged. 

More than 100 agents and analysts were assigned to the case.  They all thought Clinton committed crimes.  And maybe Comey believed it, too.  But he chose to ignore both the evidence and the law. It is sad and confounding and infuriating, all at the same time.

The FBI, as the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, is badly damaged. Its reputation tarnished. Its image corrupted.

A second source, a high-ranking FBI official, confirmed the crux of his colleague’s stunning revelation.  He said that while it may not have been a unanimous belief, the vast majority felt Clinton should be prosecuted.  Stripping her of her security clearance was unanimous, he explained. 

But none of that appears to have mattered to Comey.  He didn’t care what his lawyers told him.  It didn’t matter that his skilled agents painstakingly uncovered overwhelming evidence that Clinton mishandled classified documents in clear violation of federal statutes.   

In my column on July 5^th, the day Comey announced he would not recommend to the Attorney General that Clinton be criminally prosecuted, I argued that Comey’s decision made no legal sense.  I recited the language of the relevant statute… and compared it to Comey’s own words describing Clinton’s conduct.  They were nearly identical. 

I wrote then how Comey exhibited an astonishing ignorance of the law.  He laid out a case of gross negligence constituting a crime, defined it with the words “extremely careless” and then promptly proceeded to ignore the law.  

Now, some 3 months later, we learn that just about everyone who worked on the case agreed with that assessment.  “We were floored while listening to the FBI briefing because Comey laid it all out and then said ‘but we are doing nothing,’ which made no sense to us,” said the source.   It still makes no sense.  His decision defies common sense and makes a mockery of legal sense. 

So why would Comey do it?  Was he influenced by the Obama White House?  Did he get his “marching orders” from Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who was already ethically compromised when she met privately with Bill Clinton just days before Comey’s announcement? 

The Fox News source offers this explanation: staffers at both the Department of Justice and the FBI believe Comey and Lynch were motivated by ambition, not justice.  In other words, they wanted to keep their jobs. 

The FBI, as the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, is badly damaged.  Its reputation tarnished.   Its image corrupted. 

James Comey is to blame for that.  It will serve as an indelible, ugly stain on his legacy.  

Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News Anchor and former defense attorney.

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“Get out of jail free” Card

Even though Trump stated that he would appoint an special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s actions/deeds as to their legality.

No matter when candidate becomes our next President… NOTHING WILL HAPPEN TO CLINTON…

If Trump becomes President… current President Obama has about 8-10 weeks to grant her and all of her co-harts a PARDON.  Once that PARDON is granted… it can’t be rescinded/revoked.

If she becomes President,  is she going to investigate her own actions — as to their legality ?

I expect to see numerous PARDONS for current and previous members of Obama’s administration before he leaves office.

Another good example of EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL ?

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Criticism Has Delayed a Kratom Ban but Probably Won’t Prevent It

The DEA’s backtracking underlines the arbitrariness of the government’s pharmacological taboos.

The Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to withdraw its ban on kratom, a pain-relieving leaf from Southeast Asia, underlines the arbitrariness of the federal government’s pharmacological taboos, which are based on undefined terms subjectively interpreted by bureaucrats with broad discretion to decide which substances Americans may ingest. The DEA’s backtracking was prompted by complaints from kratom consumers, the companies that serve them, researchers who study the drug, and members of Congress. But despite the agency’s newfound interest in public input on the question of kratom’s legal status, it seems likely that we will end up with the same prohibitory result after a somewhat more elaborate process of post hoc rationalization.

When the DEA announced at the end of August that it was temporarily placing kratom’s main active ingredients in Schedule I, the most restrictive category under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), it declared that a ban was “necessary to avoid an imminent hazard to the public safety.” When the ban did not take effect on September 30 as expected, DEA spokesman Russell Baer assured Washington Post drug policy blogger Christopher Ingraham that “it’s not a matter of if—it’s simply a matter of when, in terms of DEA publishing the final order to temporarily schedule kratom.” Since Acting DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg “has determined that kratom represents an imminent hazard to public safety,” Baer said, “I have a sense that publishing our final order will be sooner as opposed to later.”

Rosenberg’s determination was based on an unpersuasive, weakly supported analysis that dismissed kratom’s benefits and exaggerated its hazards. Critics pointed out that the DEA’s emergency scheduling authority, which Congress approved in 1984 at the agency’s behest, was aimed at dangerous new synthetic drugs that might cause many injuries and deaths during the time required by the standard scheduling process. Here is how then-DEA Administrator Francis Mullen explained his understanding of “imminent hazard to the public safety” in a letter to legislators:

The “imminent hazard” implies a need for immediate response to a drug trafficking and abuse situation that has occurred with such rapidity and with insufficient warning that normal control mechanisms would result in a large number of deaths and injuries or the continuance of an uncontrolled trafficking situation….The burden would be on the Government to prove that such an urgency exists and that the public safety would be jeopardized during the period that a drug would remain uncontrolled during routine scheduling action.

As examples of substances that would be covered by the new provision, Mullen cited “newly synthesized drugs or uncontrolled analogs of existing drugs such as PCP and fentanyl,” which “can cause widespread deaths and injuries in a very short period of time following their synthesis.” Kratom, a “minimally toxic” natural substance that humans have used for centuries with little evidence of serious harm except in exreme cases, hardly fits that description. “The use of this emergency authority for a natural substance is unprecedented,” noted Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in a September 29 letter to Rosenberg.

Whatever legislators may have had in mind when they created this prohibition shortcut, they did not define “imminent hazard to the public safety.” The CSA says only that the attorney general (who has delegated his scheduling authority to the DEA) should consider a substance’s “history and current pattern of abuse,” “the scope, duration, and significance of abuse,” and “what, if any, risk there is to the public health.” That formulation leaves bureaucrats like Rosenberg free to describe any uncontrolled psychoactive substance, no matter how favorable its risk-to-benefit ratio, as “an imminent hazard to the public safety.”

The unscientific nature of that determination is clear from the fact that the DEA has reconsidered it in response to political pressure, as opposed to new evidence. Suddenly Rosenberg’s contrived kratom crisis no longer exists, giving the DEA time to solicit comments it supposedly had no time to consider before announcing its ban. According to a Federal Register notice published today, the DEA will be accepting public comments on the subject through December 1. The agency also has asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “expedite its scientific and medical evaluation and scheduling recommendation for these substances.”

Guidance from the FDA is part of the standard scheduling process but is not required for a temporary ban, which lasts at least two years and can be extended to three. During that time the DEA is supposed to decide whether the ban should be made permanent. In theory, the criteria for permanent scheduling are more demanding, but they are still elastic enough that the DEA can put pretty much any psychoactive substance it does not like in Schedule I, unless that substance has been approved by the FDA as a medicine or is excluded by statute from the CSA’s schedules (as alcohol and tobacco are).

The process described in the DEA’s notice sounds like an amalgamation of temporary and permanent scheduling. “Once DEA has received and considered all of this information [i.e., public comments and the FDA’s advice],” the agency says, it “will decide whether to proceed with permanent scheduling of mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine [kratom’s main active ingredients], or both permanent and temporary scheduling of these substances.” Note that not scheduling kratom does not seem to be an option as far as the DEA is concerned, although the FDA theoretically could say there’s not enough evidence to justify treating it as a controlled substance.

The fact that the DEA still seems determined to schedule kratom should give pause to anyone celebrating the withdrawal of the original ban notice. According to the DEA’s position on marijuana, which remains in Schedule I despite multiple petitions urging its reclassification, a controlled substance belongs in that category unless it has a “currently accepted medical use,” which can be proved only with the sort of large, expensive clinical trials that the FDA requires before approving a new pharmaceutical. The DEA already has said there are no such studies of kratom, which means kratom has “no currently accepted medical use”—notwithstanding DEA spokesman Melvin Patterson’s seemingly contradictory statement that kratom is “at a point where it needs to be recognized as medicine.”

Assuming the DEA has ruled out leaving mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine uncontrolled, which seems to be the case, the only way it can avoid banning them is by reconsidering its longstanding, court-approved interpretation of “currently accepted medical use,” which is a criterion for every schedule except Schedule I (and another crucial CSA phrase that Congress left undefined). It seems quite unlikely that the DEA will take that step, which would cast new doubt on its classification of marijuana and various other Schedule I drugs. Hence it looks like the uproar over prohibition of kratom will delay but not prevent that outcome.

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In Indiana, Sloppy Casework Carried $31 Million Pricetag

chronicleofsocialchange.org/blogger-co-op/indiana-sloppy-casework-carried-31-million-pricetag/21962

On Oct. 6, 2015, a federal jury in northern Indiana awarded $31.3 million to the Finnegan family of five in their case against the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) officials and an Indiana State Police detective. On Sept. 30, 2016, the same federal court denied the state’s motion to reduce the award, citing the jury’s careful consideration of overwhelming misbehavior.

As I testified in the first hearing: “The people empowered to protect against child abuse became the abusers.”

One of four Finnegan children, 14-year-old Jessica Salyer, died in her Francesville, Ind. home in December, 2005. But for the Finnegans, the heartbreak was only beginning. Almost immediately, a local DCS official threatened to launch “children in need of services” investigations of her three siblings because the parents declined the agency’s offer of grief counseling.

DCS suspicion fell on the Finnegans, despite the fact that emergency responders reported no sign of abuse or neglect. Experts who later examined Jessica’s body saw nothing suspicious. They said a more likely cause was related to Jessica’s anti-clotting medication, Coumadin, prescribed due to a heart condition she’d had since birth.

Nevertheless, on the very day Jessica died, DCS workers removed the other children from their home and took them to the Pulaski County office in Winamac. They questioned them for up to six hours and refused to allow the Finnegans to see their children after they came to collect them. They questioned the parents separately.

The Finnegans ultimately were charged with neglect, and their children were placed in foster care. DCS filed a “substantiation” in March 2007, stating Jessica had received inadequate medical care and her siblings were in danger. The agency claimed she died from physical abuse that caused a skull fracture and internal hemorrhages. The Finnegans were arrested and imprisoned.

The DCS case began to crumble after attorney Heather Kirkwood quickly found a prescription error. Jessica’s Coumadin dosage had been doubled shortly before her death due to medical malpractice, and the coroner subsequently ruled that error had caused her fatal hemorrhage. The skull fracture was found to have occurred during the autopsy.

Charges against the Finnegans eventually were dropped. Since the Finnegans’ alleged roles in Jessica’s death had been the sole cause for their removal, their children were reunited with them after nine months in foster care.

But DCS was undeterred. In doubling down on its abuse case, the agency falsified evidence and withheld conclusions about the medication mistake from its own experts.

In 2010, Special Judge Patrick Blankenship in Pulaski Circuit Court ordered the Finnegans’ names removed from the Child Protection Index. In a damning 71-page order, Blankenship blasted the agency for misstating conditions in the family home and the medical attention Jessica received. DCS also ignored volumes of proof the Finnegans provided in their defense, expert opinions about the cause of death and other supporting evidence.

“Because DCS did not consider any of this contrary information in substantiating physical abuse, the substantiation is arbitrary and capricious as a matter of law,” Blankenship wrote. “(I)t relied on information DCS knew to be incorrect. … For four years, DCS has unreasonably delayed and unlawfully withheld findings consistent with the medical evidence, causing irreparable and continuing harm to the family.”

Among the most egregious problems were brazen alterations of documents. For instance, a post-mortem report submitted to a DCS fatality review team said Jessica’s injuries were consistent with a fall, but it was altered by adding the word “not” before the conclusion.

Despite the large size of the award for damages, the Finnegan case has received only minimal national attention. My hope is that it will serve as a warning to all welfare departments about making uninvestigated charges against birth or foster parents.

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