GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS:
Shot: Trump’s White House Pharmacy Handed Out Drugs Like Candy: Report.
White House pharmacists reportedly distributed uppers and downers like candy to Trump administration officials during his time in office, according to a new report from the Department of Defense Inspector General.
The 80-page document, which was released on Jan. 8, found that “all phases of the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations had severe and systemic problems due to the unit’s reliance on ineffective internal controls to ensure compliance with pharmacy safety standards.”
The investigation, which began in 2018 after the Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) received complaints about improper medical practices within the White House Medical Unit, found a slew of compliance issues and improper safety standards. The medical unit’s operations fall under the jurisdiction of the White House Military Office. The report covers a period between 2009 and 2018, with a majority of its findings coalescing around 2017- 2019, during the height of the Trump administration.
While Trump lived under the White House roof, the pharmacy reportedly kept messy, handwritten records, spent lavishly on brand-name medications, and failed to comply with a slew of federal law and Department of Defense regulations governing the handling, distribution, and disposal of prescription medication.
Through in-person inspections and interviews with over 120 officials, the report concluded “that the White House Medical Unit provided a wide range of health care and pharmaceutical services to ineligible White House staff in violation of Federal law and regulation and DoD policy. Additionally, the White House Medical Unit dispensed prescription medications, including controlled substances, to ineligible White House staff.”
One witness told the DoD OIG that pharmacy staff regularly prepared go-bags of prescription medication to White House staff in advance of overseas trips. “One of our requirements was to go ahead and make packets up for the controlled medications. And those would typically be Ambien or Provigil and typically both,” the witness said. “So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag. And so traditionally, too, we would hand these out.”
—Rolling Stone, today.
Chaser: Drug Possession: United States Needs to Decriminalize Now.
—Rolling Stone, November 26, 2018.
Hangover:
With every controversy he stirred, Wenner’s sense of himself was expanding. Jann Wenner for president. Given the obstacles, it’s remarkable how seriously the idea was being entertained. Wenner, after all, was a draft dodger with a “concomitant history of psychiatric treatment, suicidal ideation, homosexual and excessive heterosexual promiscuity, and heavy use of illegal drugs.” Nonetheless, Wenner said that in the late 1970s Sidney Harman, the founder of Harman Kardon, the stereo maker and Rolling Stone advertiser, offered to back Wenner if he wanted to run for president of the United States. “He said he would fund me if I wanted to do it,” recalled Wenner. “You never want to say no to people who think that because it enhances your mystery. And it’s true, I did have quite a little political team there—[Dick] Goodwin, Anne Wexler, Hunter, the writers. I could have done it. I could have tried it. I don’t think I could have gone very far.”
“I didn’t have the temperament for it,” Wenner said. “I couldn’t get up at six in the morning and shake hands outside a shoe factory.”
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On the twenty-second floor at 745 Fifth Avenue, Rolling Stone’s camera room—a darkroom with a buzzer for entering and a revolving light-trap door—had become a de facto cocaine emporium, run by two employees who doubled as dealers. The room, a version of which had existed in San Francisco, was dubbed “the Capri Lounge” after the bar in the TV comedy Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Wenner was the biggest customer of all, but he also used grams of cocaine as bonuses for employees who pleased him. “The deal was,” said Karen Mullarkey, Annie Leibovitz’s photo editor in the late 1970s, “if I got Annie through a deadline, and everything worked out okay, I would come in and find a bindle, one of those little folding envelopes of coke, on my light box. That was a gift from Jann.”
When Wenner threw parties at Rolling Stone, there were lines to the camera room, which Wenner manned like a velvet rope. “Anybody who came down there to buy drugs from them, they would take a Polaroid,” recalled Wenner. “They would sit around, do a little blow, and they had a whole hall with like four hundred or five hundred Polaroids of all their visitors.” Here was a common image of Jann Wenner in most stories told about him from the late 1970s: curled up in his swivel chair at the round table that Jane bought for him in 1968, snorting a line of coke and swigging straight from an open bottle of Polmos Wódka Wyborowa. This was the preferred cocktail of the jet set: vodka, which took the edge off the cocaine, which prompted more cocaine, which prompted more vodka.
—Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, 2017.
UPDATE: The White House Mystery Drug.
Tucked away under a list of medications in the report on President Obama’s recent physical exam is this intriguing notation: “Jet lag/time zone management, direct physician prescribed program, occasional medication use.” Obama’s doctor, Navy Capt. Jeffrey Kuhlman, didn’t say what drug the president might be taking to fight the mind-numbing effects of crossing too many time zones. But sleep doctors we consulted say one possibility is Provigil, a stimulant that is regularly prescribed to help people fend off excessive sleepiness.
Fans claim you get all the benefits of a triple shot of espresso without the jitters or anxiety that can accompany a massive hit of caffeine.
“If they’re going to give him something to wake him up, Provigil is the way to go,” says Dr. Lisa Shives, medical director of Northshore Sleep Medicine in Evanston, Illinois.
While the White House won’t say what the president is actually taking, Provigil (also known by its generic name modafinil) is an intriguing possibility. The drug has acquired an almost mythic status in recent years as a pill that makes it possible for the user to bypass the all-too-human need for sleep and work 24 or even 36 hours at a stretch. Manufactured by Cephalon, it’s in a class of medications called “wakefulness promoting agents.” Fans claim you get all the benefits of a triple shot of espresso without the jitters or anxiety that can accompany a massive hit of caffeine. It’s reported to be increasingly popular among sleep-deprived cohorts like long-distance truckers, fighter pilots, and students pulling all-nighters—and brought in $1 billion for Cephalon in 2008.
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Ambien has had bad press in recent years—and it might be a riskier choice for the president. There have been reports of patients on Ambien sleepwalking and sleep-eating, and even occasional stories about people who drove while on Ambien and didn’t realize they were behind the wheel. When her patients complain of side effects, Shives simply tells them to stop taking the drug. “You do hear reports of some strange and bad behavior but you have to put that in the context of how many millions of people take this drug” without these problems, she says.
Again, we don’t know exactly what the president has taken to fight jet lag. But if these drugs are indeed part of his treatment, it’s easy to see why his doctors might have resorted to medication. Scientists have been studying jet lag for years and they’re just beginning to understand how body rhythms work to help us fall asleep and stay awake at regular times. It’s a very delicate system and you mess with it at your peril. The sleep-wake cycle shifts slowly; you can’t push it around more than an hour or two a day, says Charmane Eastman, director of the Biological Rhythms Research Lab at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “It’s very hard to get it to go faster,” she says.
—The Huff Post, March 4th, 2010.