IG Report: White House Pharmacy In Trump Years Was Two Steps Away From Being Bad Stoner Movie
Ronny Jackson not named, but yeah, it was when he was in charge.
A new report from the Defense Department’s Inspector General says that the pharmacy at the White House ran for a time like something out of a bad stoner movie, only the report says that in far more measured terms. The record-keeping was awful, prescriptions for controlled substances like Ambien and Provigil were dispensed without verifying the identity of the patient, and, in one lovely incident, (we’ll use the summary by STAT News),
One former pharmacy staff member told investigators that a doctor once asked if the staffer could “hook up” someone with a controlled substance “as a parting gift for leaving the White House.”
In fact, it might be a little misleading to say there was a “pharmacy” at all at the White House, since there was no single accredited pharmacist running things, and officials in the White House Medical Unit “did not consider their operations to be a pharmacy,” relying instead on the unit’s internal guidelines for safety and record keeping, which the report concluded were, ahem, “ineffective.”
STAT News notes that the report grew out of complaints to the DoD in 2018 regarding an unnamed “senior military medical officer” who was accused of “improper medical practices.”
The report doesn’t name the head of the White House Medical Unit at the time, although STAT helpfully reminds us that Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson was director of the unit from 2010 to 2014, and that in 2013 he became the personal physician to the president, a job he held for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who was strong like bull, not overweight, and could also recognize “camel.” Trump named Jackson to head Veterans Affairs, but he noped out of the nomination after reports surfaced — false fake news from every single witness, according to Trump — that Jackson drank heavily on foreign trips and handed out prescriptions like candy. (We’d forgotten that the ridiculous “incredible genes” physical and Jackson’s departure were separated by just four months in 2018. Every week felt like a few centuries at the time.)
Jackson ran for Congress, and after he was in office, a 2021 DOD IG report confirmed that while he was in office, he was a drunken shitshow and allegedly took Ambien so he could sleep on long flights, during which Trump was lucky not to choke on a hamberder.
But that’s all in the past, and the new IG report covers problems at the White House pharmacy from the Jackson era up through early 2020, concluding 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. In addition, the Military Health System senior leaders did not oversee the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations.
Well no problem then! That must mean Jackson is off the hook since he wasn’t even paying attention, right?
The report is based on transcripts of 70 interviews with former White House employees who worked there between 2009 and 2018, as well as buttloads of documents (happily not literally). It found that, among other problems, providers at the White House Medical Unit “wrote prescriptions for controlled substances that often lacked the medical provider and patient information mandated by DEA policy,” and that, as STAT puts it,
it also had a policy — handwritten on a piece of paper dated March 2014 — to let certain, authorized staff pick up controlled prescriptions without the patient’s ID.
And oh, golly, there was a lot of handwritten record-keeping, much of it incredibly sloppy. Controlled substances are required by law to be meticulously tracked, but the IG report found that “medications, such as opioids and sleep medications, were not properly accounted for,” in violation of federal law. Worse, the handwritten controlled substance records, such as they were, “frequently contained errors in the medication counts, illegible text, or crossed out text that was not appropriately annotated.”
And while military regulations require that even over-the-counter meds not be dispensed without a prescription, the White House Medical Unit “left over‑the‑counter medications in open bins for patient retrieval and use.”
If you’re a fan of “government bureaucrats live it up too much” stories, the report also found that while procurement guidelines mandate that generic meds be prescribed to cut costs, providers at the White House “routinely requested brand‑name drugs rather than generic equivalents when ordering controlled substances from Walter Reed,” because “their patients prefer using the brand name drugs.” That really added up, because in the case of Ambien, the name brand cost 174 times as much as the generic, and Provigil is 55 times as much, resulting in costs of $144,520 just for those two drugs between 2017 and 2019. The generics would have set the government back only $2,064 for the same period. But come on, what’s $142,000 in the overall context of government spending? Pfft. Joe Biden probably spends that much replacing furniture chewed by his damn dogs, we just made up. See, it’s a good thing that dogs never like Donald Trump.
All told, the review had difficulty coming up with a total amount the White House Medical office wasted, because of the sloppy records, but when combined with less-common goofs in the far better-managed military health system in DC overall, the total might be more than $640,000 from 2017-2019. But who knows how many receipts were just hastily copied onto gum wrappers and tear-out subscription cards from magazines?
The report also found that several former military medicos expressed frustration that they “were not empowered to deny requests from senior White House Medical Unit leaders,” and that “multiple” former White House providers “stated that they requested an early departure from the unit due to the unit’s practices.”
STAT reports that a “Defense Department agency that coordinates health care for the military has agreed to establish oversight and pharmaceutical and eligibility policies for the White House Medical Unit and pharmacy,” so we kind of hope things are getting fixed over there. At least Dr. Feelgood is no longer running things.
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[STAT News / Inspector General report]
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Will this report hurt Ronny Jackson's congressional career? TheIG report specifically about him doesn't seem to have had any effect, so prolly not.
Like they say, the past is another country, and everyone was goofy on Ambien for the whole visit.
WH Staffer: Dr. Jackson, Dr. Jackson, I think I have Covid!
Dr. J.: Here's a bottle of bleach. And be sure to shove this UV light up your ass twice a day.
WH Staffer: Goddammit, I want Clorox, not this generic shit.