The Real News Network has the interview Trump’s Would-Be Drug Czar Helped the Drug Profiteers.

Rep. Tom Marino has withdrawn his nomination as President Trump’s new drug czar after revelations he pushed through a measure that worsened the U.S. opioid epidemic. White-collar criminologist Bill Black says Marino and other lawmakers have been bought off by pharmaceutical companies he says have acted as “illicit, criminal, drug dealers”

This is essentially the video version of my previous post It is Impossible to Compete with Unintentional Self-Parody: Trump and Opioids.

This has implications from Obama and his Department of Justice, Donald Trump, and on through the two chambers of Congress. These people are as corrupt as the Mexican politicians who are bought off by their drug dealers.

New Economic Perspectives has the article It is Impossible to Compete with Unintentional Self-Parody: Trump and Opioids.

The diversion and dealing of prescription opioids is a major part of the problem. In the U.S., three big pharma companies control the distribution of opioids. They have readily available data that allows them to identify quickly, cheaply, and reliably the primary sources of diversion and dealing because these drug stores and pain clinics purchase opioids in amounts that are nonsensical given the size of the local population and stores making the purchases. The first scandal, therefore, is that the big three distributors continue to sell to firms that they know are diverting and dealing opioids in ways that are illegal and murderous. We should not need laws or rules to prevent the distributors from profiting from sales to obvious diverters and dealers. The people who run big pharma are experts in what opioids do to humans. All of big pharma firms have senior officers who are doctors and chemists. They know the human misery and murder their sales to the diverters are certain to produce in staggering numbers. When elite doctors and chemists are willing to profit by selling to those they know to be dealers and diverters who will maim and murder their countrymen and women you know the rot lies deep in our elites.

How could we have ignored for so long the cause of the problem? The aftermath of the Savings and Loan crisis was the last time that these elite white collar criminals were held accountable for the damage they did. The aftermath of the collapse of the real-estate bubble may have been one of the seminal cases of rewarding the criminal predators for the damage they caused. The opioid crisis is just the latest example of the Republican’s (and Democrat’s) policy of being soft on crime.