Why Does Jen Have to Die?
A True Story About a 35-Year-Old Whose Hospital Bed Need Not Be Her Deathbed--Does Anybody Care?
Update: “Jen” is still alive as of Feb. 9, but the civil right being afforded to her is to refuse treatment. If her doctors can reassure her that they will be able to manage her pain after surgery, she will of course let them proceed with saving her life.
Guns have always scared the daylight out of me, which is why I did my best to gently slip the weapon pictured (with pretty AI; the gun she brought home the other day is more gruesome.) I snatched it from her hand before she returned to the room I’d been renting her free of charge for two years.
You've been housing whom! I’m often asked, but you’ll have to wait until I file Part Two of this piece later this week.
Here, I’d like to present Jen as the perfect metaphor to illustrate some ways government regulators often muck up even when they try to do good.
But before I proceed, I should emphasize that Jen suffered a much more severe tragedy on Feb. 8: a car smashed into and over her much like the one that did so in 2016. Her life now hangs in the balance.
In the case of Jen and thousands of other bright young women like her, federal regulators managed to turn a pain reliever used (mostly) safely for millennia into a toxin that ended up killing tens of thousands of Americans by the late 1990s.
Only tens of thousands? you wonder. If so, read on and you’ll see why the scourge is emblematic of a few of our nation’s deepest, shameful and recondite social problems
The familiar story starts, of course, in 1996, just months after the FDA’s “years of independent…rigorous and long-term analysis” plagiarized Purdue’s preposterous claim that that Oxycontin’s addiction rate was “well under 1%.”
As we know, the drug was making little more than $1 million for Purdue in 1996,when Jen gassed up her scooter one August morning and headed off as usual to her job at Apple’s Century City store.
She never made it. Halfway there, a maroon-colored van ran over her, fracturing her skull and shattering her pelvis. Surgeons at nearby Cedars replaced the bones with metal plates. After some PT and speech therapy, Jen returned to Apple two years later, fortunately with 80 mg. of opioids blocking the stabbing pains she felt whenever the plates hit a nerve.
She lost her job to Covid in 2020, but far more calamitous, her doctor phoned to say he had to zero out her Oxycontin or risk losing his medical license.
Little did Jen know but just a few months earlier the DEA reversed course and launched “Operation Hypocritical Oath,” an aggessive posse of gangsta-style prosecutions that earned just a few pill-mill docs up to 100 years of jail time for over-prescribing.
Jen and millions of dependent others were forced to mitigate their pain on the black market with cheap pain relieving proxies like fentanyl, which was often stuffed with toxins.
As a completely predictable result that D.C. didn’t see coming, nearly half a million Americans died from the synthetics.
As should be obvious by now, execs at both the DEA and FDA are ethically compromised by industry ties and all but unable to dream boldly as our science-rich era requires. Here are but two of the agencies’ many shortcomings:
IGNORANCE: THe FDA in 1995 said there were no established medical uses for opiates; in fact Sumerican physicians left extensive reserch on clay tablets about the “Hul Gil” plant’s powerful ability to palliate pain because of the genetics it shares with opioids.
Reached for comment the FDA told me agency official would begin studying the Sumerian innovations once tech support managed to get them “on Youtube.” (Confession: I made up that quote tp get a laugh in this grim piece). But the FDA in reality is just as funny. Just two weeks ago, for instance, the agency said it might consider moving pot from schedule 1—chemicals with have no accepted medical use—to schedule 2. That’s not a joke.
INDISCRETION: From 1999 to 2019, nearly half a million Americans died from overdoses mostly of illicit opioids they bought on the black market. But the feds offered scant guidance to help doctors distinguish between people whose somas were irreperable and the sort of stylishly bleak teens featured in most magazine pieces about young people seeking suicide by fentanyl.
Jen would love to raise her self-esteem by putting her pain aside and getting back to work, and Americans should want her skills. In 1995 untreated pain cost American biz more than $201 billion in 2023 dollars, including 50 million workdays.
But the high-profile hospital where she lies in pieces either won’t or can’t alleviate her pain effectively (with opiates, the use of which is legal in California for people whose lives would be agony without it). And our collective indifference to her suffering is as cruel and immoral as it is unforgivable.
Update: “Jen” is still alive as of Feb. 9, but the civil right being afforded to her is to refuse treatment. If her doctors can reassure her that they will be able to manage her pain after surgery, she will of course let them proceed with saving her life.