Addiction Recovery Bulletin
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 20, 2021 – Members of the Sackler family who own bankrupt OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma LP are worth approximately $11 billion, documents released Tuesday by a congressional committee show.
Members of the Sackler family have agreed to pay $4.28 billion over the next decade as part of a proposal for Purdue to exit bankruptcy and settle thousands of lawsuits filed by states, local governments and individuals blaming the company and its owners for helping fuel the nation’s opioid crisis.
Summaries of the family wealth, turned over to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.), also were seen by Purdue’s creditors during settlement talks, according to representatives for the two branches of the company’s family owners.
A third branch of the family is no longer involved in Purdue Pharma and wasn’t included in Tuesday’s release by Rep. Maloney, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and reform.
The documents show the Sacklers’ wealth includes more than $950 million in cash, more than $1 billion in real estate, another $1 billion in private-equity investments and $250 million in art, jewelry and other collectibles.
The family owns stakes worth more than $1 billion in international drug companies, which are expected to be sold to help pay back creditors. The documents show much of the family’s wealth is held in dozens of trusts.
A spokesman for the descendants of the late Mortimer Sackler said no party in the bankruptcy has challenged the accuracy or completeness of the wealth disclosure and that “we hope the focus will now be on concluding a resolution that will deliver timely resources to individuals, families and communities in need.”
A lawyer for the late Raymond Sackler side of the family said the amount of the family’s settlement offer exceeds the profits they retained from OxyContin sales. He added that the family supports the release of company documents that demonstrate Sackler family members behaved ethically and legally.
The summaries from the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler branches detail their finances as of January 2020 and last month, respectively.
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 16, 2021 – J&J in a statement called its marketing of the drugs “appropriate and responsible,” Israel-based Teva said it will defend itself against these “unproven allegations.” Endo and Allergan declined to comment.
More than 3,400 lawsuits brought largely by states and local governments are pending against companies accused of fueling the opioid epidemic.
The state of Oklahoma in 2019 won a $465 million judgment against J&J in only such trial so far. Opioid cases that were set to go to trial in 2020 were put off as a massive new public health crisis made gathering jurors and lawyers in the same room untenable. Some plaintiffs’ lawyers said the delays benefited the companies at the cost of states, counties and municipalities who say they need settlements to help pay for the costs of addressing a painkiller addiction epidemic that only grew worse during the coronavirus pandemic.
The nation’s three largest drug distributors – McKesson Corp (MCK.N), AmerisourceBergen Corp (ABC.N) and Cardinal Health Inc (CAH.N) – and J&J have proposed paying a combined $26 billion to resolve the cases against them.
The proposal, a version of which was first put forward in 2019, has yet to be finalized, and some plaintiffs lawyers say that only with trials will they and other companies come to the table to finalize payouts.
“They keep putting off the day of judgment,” Elizabeth Chamblee Burch…
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 17, 2021 – Lost his business, his home, the car he was living in, and landed on the streets of Los Angeles. For about six years, home for him and his common-law husband was a lean-to near 7th and Hobart in Koreatown. And like a lot of L.A.’s sizable homeless population, Pleasants was addicted to methamphetamine, a cheap and abundantly available drug. “It always felt to me like I’d fallen off a fire escape, and once you get on the ground, the ladder is 12 feet up in the air,” Pleasants told me. “I always thought, ‘If I could just get to that first step.’ But the first step is so far away.” Not anymore. Pleasants found the bottom rung of that ladder in November of 2019, when he went into a residential rehab program. He now lives in an apartment with his husband and has been drug-free for more than 500 days. people on the streets — many of whom also struggle with mental illness — from the grips of drugs and alcohol. We’ve heard endless policy discussions about shortages of housing and mental health services, but not nearly as much about the addiction epidemic. I don’t see how we’ll ever make a serious dent in the growing homeless population without a better way of freeing people on the streets — many of whom also struggle with mental illness — from the grips of drugs and alcohol.
What are we doing right, what are we doing wrong, and what should we do differently? These are the questions I asked Pleasants and others. “We haven’t treated substance abuse and access to mental health care the same way we would cardiac arrest,” said Sarah Dusseault, a board member with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency. “If you scrape your knee,” Dusseault said, you’ve got your choice of multiple conveniently located urgent care centers, among other options.
But addiction treatment is harder to come by — and difficult to access and pay for. Dusseault said that when someone finally tells an outreach worker he or she is ready for rehab, the chance is often lost because there is no bed available at that moment.
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 15, 2021 – I remember receiving my diagnosis clearly; it was May 2014. I was 33 years old. I was seated across from a man I’d never met before, after being involuntarily hospitalized. One way to get involuntarily hospitalized, I discovered, is by attempting to flee the ER, wearing only a hospital gown and men’s tube socks, possessing the sudden belief that humans can fly. My sister took me to the ER after I announced on Facebook that I had a very important meeting with then-President Barack Obama; we were going to discuss health care. I was uniquely qualified to talk about health care because, I was, hello, mentally ill. Who better to chat with him about the gaps in coverage? The man, my doctor, tried to explain that Obama wasn’t coming. “You have bipolar 1,” he said flatly. Instantly offended, I told him I was certainly not bipolar; my life just sucked. While hospitalized, I’d lost my job and internship, and I would soon be homeless. My previous diagnosis had been clinical depression and I didn’t want to accept something more severe. He brought up that I had taken off all my clothes the night before in the hospital’s common room.
“Performance art,” I shrugged. What I didn’t explain was that I believed, in that moment, that I had to be in my birthday suit in order to be reborn the female Jesus Christ.
Artwork by Issa Ibrahim https://www.etsy.com/shop/IssuesGallery
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 3, 2021 – Peers are a growing workforce in behavioral health, with an estimated 30,000 or so workers employed nationwide. Additionally, over three-quarters of states reimburse peer services through Medicaid, but not all payers are as progressive.
Still, she stressed their importance to providers in the space.
“These are people with lived experience [dealing] with substance use and mental health,” Knutson said. “Bring in peers to help align with people [and meet] them in the community. These are … things that we can do to help improve the access and … the quality of care ultimately leading to better health outcomes and costs.”
Various published studies have made the case for the use of peers in behavioral health care, and Knutson noted that peer workers could be a novel way to assist health care systems burdened by limited resources. One reason for the lack of resources and personnel in behavioral health is the low reimbursement rates providers typically are paid on a fee-for-services basis.
“I would rather go to… a global payment model where we say, ‘This is the amount of money [providers] have … to deliver all the care that’s needed,’” Knutson said. “How can a provider deliver these services in a way to where they’re maximizing the resources and maximizing those health outcomes? That’s when you see those investments in peer support.”
Knutson also noted that the behavioral health care industry, in its move toward value-based care, needs to develop better measurement tools for patient outcomes.
“Right now, the true health outcome measures in behavioral health are the person-reported health outcomes [and] the symptom rating scales — so like the PHQ-9 for depression, for example — but that’s really limited,” she said. “You’re asking somebody to think back over the last two to four weeks and … measure their symptoms. If we had ways to measure outcomes in real time and symptoms in real time — even through passive devices — it would be a true game changer.”
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 16, 2021 – “There are people in my life now who have got sober, and now helping fucking crack addicts,” says Kerr. “It’s amazing. Someone reached out to me that way. I feel like I have a responsibility to myself through lyric-writing. It was important for me to be open about it, because I know I’m not alone in these experiences. I had the confidence to do that because I was clean and sober. I didn’t need to hide behind anything any more. When the album comes out I’ll probably feel like, ‘Oh my goodness! Here’s my diary!’ But I like to think it’s poetic enough to not be crass.” As so many touring musicians or just anyone who’s struggled with lockdown may have learned, the idea of sobriety can seem totally unfathomable, but now Kerr wants to normalise the conversation. “It can be a very lonely experience because you can be the only one doing it, especially in our country where drinking is a part of our culture. It’s so engrained, especially with guys; there’s a macho thing to it. There could be more voices, because I know there are a lot of sober people in the music industry.”
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 7, 2021 – “No one noticed at first,” the comic reads in the beginning. “The changes were subtle.” So subtle, in fact, that a basketball player emanates billowing clouds of green gas from his body as his teammate, terrified, looks up at him from the floor. It only gets worse. A girl who “usually maps out her whole year before breakfast” has no summer plans. The basketball player can’t make a shot.
Oblivious to this looming threat, two young scientists in the school lab—Javier and Amy—have meanwhile invented a device to see into the future.
The green vapor spreads. Eventually, a group of possessed students corner Amy and Javier in a parking lot, as the pair figure out that their classmates must be “being controlled.” Then Amy gets captured. What does this menace want? To control first the town, followed by the world—“until every teen was in its thrall.”
It’s not until Javier uses his device to help everyone see into their future—and the “true cost” of the “malevolent chaos” afflicting them—that they fight back and defeat the foe.
“If you vape, nicotine addiction can take control of you,” warns a final panel. The repercussions of seeing your future laid out before your eyes are not further explored.
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 12, 2021 – Audrey told me they fought a lot when he stayed with her. She didn’t want him doing drugs in her house, and often noticed cash missing. “I was so furious with him when you were there over the weekends and I could tell he was high,” she told me, her voice cracking a little.
She said that she was never sure if he actually liked her or if he just didn’t want to have to take a bus to work every day. She was not holding back. She was telling me all the little angry private thoughts that she had then, that she’d held onto. She was telling me what she really thought of my father, like I’d been trying to get everyone I’d interviewed to do. But now I felt defensive of him, suspicious that she was exaggerating, romanticizing the idea of having known a junkie once in her own artist heyday. Audrey described what she called his ‘lair,’ a little hovel tucked away in the corner of the Academy Studios warehouse where he would collect scraps of leftover materials and periodically hide to work on his own projects.
“He treated it like his personal art supply store,” Audrey said. “He stole so much stuff!”
He used to smuggle out supplies for us to play with: little Ziploc bags full of incredibly lifelike fake eyes, plaster molds of lizard scales, scraps of fake fur. It was one of the things that made him magical: pockets always full of treasure.
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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
April 14, 2021 – HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, New England non-profit, The Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR), has developed an industry-leading training department that has trained a total of 55,000 individuals and grown markedly during COVID-19. Building on a history of service to the recovery community, CCAR has worked since 1998 to support individuals and communities affected by substance use by providing recovery support services, advocacy efforts, and training initiatives.
The role of recovery coach as an integral part of systems of care for those affected by substance use disorder (SUD) has grown rapidly in the past ten years, with CCAR leading it’s development by way of personally providing this service in a variety of venues. In 2006, the organization’s leadership saw the need to personally begin creating and providing curricula specifically designed to establish a level of professionalism and legitimacy for this emerging role with the hopes of expanding its availability worldwide. What resulted was the creation of a new department within the organization – CCAR Training.
Since then, CCAR Training has provided recovery coach training to tens of thousands of individuals domestically in forty different states and abroad in Canada, Sweden, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom and created a new means for vetting competency among recovery coaches called the Recovery Coach Professional (RCP) designation.
The global leader in recovery coach training, CCAR Training’s catalog of curricula consists of seven different first-of-its-kind trainings, including the internationally respected “Recovery Coach Academy” (RCA) – a week long immersion in the tenets of recovery coaching, delivered by facilitators widely respected in America’s recovery movement and with extensive experience working in the addiction services field.
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