Holy both sides of the fence, Batman! Remember the dramatic and mysterious cancellation of Mike Pence’s visit to New Hampshire to speak on an opioid panel at the Granite Recovery Center, a few weeks ago? Well, wonder no more. Pence was on his way to meet with Jeff Hatch, a former New York Giants player and opioid addiction clinic worker, who also happens to be the target of a DEA investigation for being an interstate drug dealer. Politico:
If Pence stepped off the vice presidential aircraft, one of the people he would have seen on the ground was under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration for moving more than $100,000 of fentanyl from Massachusetts to New Hampshire.
Jeff Hatch, who agreed in federal court Friday to plead guilty and will face up to four years in prison, works for an opioid addiction treatment center in southern New Hampshire that Pence was set to visit. A former New York Giants player, he has spoken publicly for years about his own challenge with drug and alcohol addiction, which ended his football career.
He has been on stage with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and is known throughout the state for warning students about the dangers of using drugs. “He has been beaten down in the past, but now stands tall in front of audiences to personally share his compelling story,” says a listing offering him to speak to groups.
No doubt he’s got a compelling pitch, but more compelling still is the fact that in 2017 he was caught with 1,500 grams of fentanyl, which he allegedly purchased from a supplier in Lawrence, Massachusetts and then brought back to New Hampshire and began selling. Fentanyl is sold in baggies of one tenth of a gram so that’s 15,000 sales units.Talk about a win/win situation. Hatch was getting a paycheck from Granite Recovery and making a tidy sum on the side dealing the very drugs that were supplying the recovery centers with clientele. Can’t miss with that formula. Hatch was the Chief Business Development officer for Granite Recovery Centers and develop business he did.
Shocking as this is, it’s unfortunately par for the course. In Los Angeles the number of “recovery centers” and hospital programs has mushroomed in the past 30 years, providing a tidy profit center, working in conjunction with pharmaceutical companies who have flooded markets with pain killers. Read the Washington Post article just linked to, and you’ll see how opioids are a self sustaining industry, made possible by big pharma and all about greed and money. Recovery centers may do some good for some people, but in this particular case, they are part of the problem, not the solution.
FWIW, each of the surgeries I’ve had used 0.1 mg of fentanyl. That’s how powerful it is.
Wow. I’ve never had it, to the best of my knowledge. is this something that the anaesthesiologist would administer?
It’s in the IV drugs that you get, so probably comes under their control. (That’s also how they give you antibiotics and other stuff.)
(I only found out because it’s on the Medicare statement.)
No wonder people are dying from overdose … micro doses require extremely accurate, expensive and sensitive scale systems …. I did some system designs for a food quality lab, where they were using those very types of scales for food quality for amounts of pollution and contaminants … I noticed that at the end of the day’s work schedule, the scales were put in a large safe, like the long gun safes used by wealthy hunters … the scales themselves were encased in glass boxes to prevent any incorrect readings because of moving air in the lab …
Then there is the complicated methods of physically handling such small amounts and isolating them and then mix them into a delivery system … hauling this much crap around HAD to mean it would go into a high quality lab to build useful doses … one little twitch by guys running these illegal labs could kill hundreds …
I asked the company’s lead lab lady about the safe … she said all the microscopes, spectroscopes and other exotic equipment was pretty safe from attack of the lab, because the druggies making junk up for the street want those scales and would bust into their lab if they thought they were going to find and get them out
What, did Pence have moral objections to scoring Trump’s next hit of Adderall?
Poor Pence, he was all set to do a photo op. He and the drug dealer probably would have talked about Gawd. If I sound more cynical than usual today, you need to know that I had a landlady and a boyfriend who were AA hypocrites. They talked the talk but the way they actually lived was something else. Not to say everybody in recovery is that way. A great many people are on the up and up and trying to be of service. But unfortunately enough of the people in recovery have been following self-serving principles in the past 20 years or so, to where the entire AA concept, which once was so good, has become a racket like everything else.
Eric Hoffer said, “It starts out as a movement, becomes a business and then becomes a racket.” That’s what has happened with drug and alcohol recovery, most regrettably.