The MetroWest Daily News (Mass.), April 1:
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration, after an apparently exhaustive review, determined that immediate-release prescription painkillers, such as Vicodin and Percocet, should carry a strong warning on their packaging – perhaps setting a record for the longest lag time between an actual crisis and the underwhelming federal government response to it.
The fact that these prescription drugs have been laying the foundation for the current heroin epidemic for more than a decade provides deadly insight into the costs associated with an inefficient and ineffective bureaucracy.
The FDA effort involves the mandatory inclusion of a boxed warning on all of the approximately 175 immediate-release opioid painkillers available. The message calls attention to the fact that the use of such medications can lead to addiction, overdose, and even death. Pharmacists dispensing such drugs are also urged to offer a brochure that details the potential risks.
About three years ago, the fleet-footed FDA required a similar warning on extended-release painkillers, including OxyContin. One could reasonably ask why, in its infinite wisdom, the FDA felt compelled to wait until 2016 to issue such a directive. After all, if three years ago it realized that long-acting painkillers posed the threat of addiction, why would the collective brain trust not realize that their immediate-acting counterparts would represent, at the very least, a comparable danger?
The FDA, in the classic style of someone who is so unclear on the concept that they are only tangentially grounded in reality, heralded the move as a significant element of a multifaceted approach to rein in the increasingly deadly epidemic that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives, especially among those who have migrated to heroin after becoming addicted to opioid painkillers.
“Today’s actions are one of the largest undertakings for informing prescribers of risks across opioid products, and one of many steps the FDA intends to take this year as part of our comprehensive action plan to reverse this epidemic,” Dr. Robert Califf, FDA commissioner touted in a press release.
What Califf and his ilk seem to not understand is that this socalled comprehensive action plan is shutting the barn doors long after the horses have escaped. The heroin epidemic that has only recently captured national headlines has been moving inexorably toward being the tidal wave that it is today because too many people at the FDA and elsewhere took a myopic view of the problem until it was too late to stem the tide.
Law enforcement officials from across Cape Cod began seeing the impact of a rising tide of opioid problems about 20 years ago, when OxyContin first began migrating from prescription painkiller to common addiction. Despite the warning signs, physicians continued to prescribe, drug mills continued to process, and regulators continued to turn a blind eye toward what many recognized even then as a growing problem.
Today, enough white suburban young people have died to ensure that addiction stories regularly receive top-of-the-hour and frontpage attention. As a result, the federal government feels compelled to act, pledging more than a billion dollars toward treatment programs and committing itself to eradicating a problem that it seems to have only just recognized as even existing.
The FDA’s new labeling approach is not in and of itself a bad thing; the warnings may help reduce the likelihood of new cases of addiction in the years ahead. But that comforting news likely comes as little solace to the families of the nearly 30,000 individuals who did not live long enough to see it arrive.
The Providence Journal (R.I.), April 2:
Does Canada really believe that it’s not at war with ISIS?
Justin Trudeau, the country’s Liberal prime minister, seems to feel this way. Shortly after the Brussels terrorist attack, he told the media, “A war is something that can be won by one side or the other and there is no path for ISIL to actually win against the West.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion made a similar assessment. He said, “If you use the terminology ‘war,’ in international law it will mean two armies with respecting rules and it’s not the case at all.”
Considering how strongly Trudeau’s Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, supported the war on terror, the current government’s quibble over terminology is surprising.
The bloodthirsty leaders of ISIS, who have formed armies in the Mideast, hate Western values such as democracy, liberty and freedom with a passion. They have reportedly used chemical weapons, imposed Sharia, tortured and executed Syrians and Iraqis, beheaded people, raped women and turned children into soldiers and sex slaves.
Trudeau and Dion are surely aware of some or all of these atrocities and war-related crimes. They must realize what the terrorist group’s modus operandi is, irrespective of terminology.
By contrast, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, just after the terrorist attack on Brussels, made this short, direct and powerful comment about the state of our world: “We are at war.”
Valls argued that “we have closed our eyes throughout Europe, and also France, on the progress of extremist ideas.” His eyes are now wide open – and he realizes we’re at war against ISIS and all other terrorist groups who threaten our safety and security. The use of the word “war” implies that our side will fight back.
Perhaps the French prime minister could instruct his Canadian counterpart about the nature of the war the West confronts, and the threat posed by terrorism.
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