Drugs! Drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs!
Where were we?
Oh right, drugs! More specifically, all the drugs that the entire White House was reportedly high as a Russian nuke satellite on for the four years Donald Trump was heading up that asylum.
The Defense Department’s Inspector General reported a few weeks ago that the White House’s in-house medical unit was apparently tossing out all sorts of controlled substances to administration officials with a rapidity and generosity normally seen in aquarium workers tossing fish to seals at feeding time. Rolling Stone has followed up that report by noting that many, many Trump associates who were not named Donald Trump Jr. took advantage:
Knowledgeable sources say that samples of the stimulant were passed around for those contributing lines [Ed. Note – tee-hee] to major Trump speeches, working late hours on foreign policy initiatives, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, coping with the deluge of media inquiries about that investigation, and so much more.
The stimulant in this particular quote was modafinil, which military pilots normally use to stay awake during long missions. And given how much White House insanity could fall under cover of the umbrella that is the clause “and so much more,” we can only hope that there was any modafinil left over for the pilots while White House staffers were apparently plowing through its national reserves.
Or as one Trump official told Rolling Stone, the White House was “awash in speed.”
Of course it would be highly, highly irresponsible of yr Wonkette to speculate whether, say, Kellyanne Conway was taking enough speed to keep an entire air wing flying, or that Stephen Miller was gobbling enough horse tranquilizers to get his trainer banned from the Kentucky Derby for life. So we won’t do that, because we just don’t know who was eating which fistfuls of drugs.
But it wasn’t just speed. Xanax, you will be shocked to learn, was also very popular, especially when taken with an alcohol chaser:
As one former senior administration official puts it: “You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol.”
Shoot, man. We could say the same thing of writing about him every day in our sweatpants.
Anyway, in case it was not already obvious, the rigidity with which prescriptions for controlled substances like Xanax are dispensed in the rest of America was nonexistent in the Trump White House:
Pills were often handed out without a specific need or diagnosis. Black-and-white procedures that doctors and pharmacists routinely follow when prescribing controlled substances were ignored. Orders for pills were often written down incorrectly, or not at all. One former White House Medical Unit staffer told Pentagon investigators that the unit “work[ed] in the gray… helping anybody who needs help to get this mission done.”
Of course it wasn’t just the Medical Unit handing out these drugs directly. Rolling Stone quotes sources who say staffers who had gotten hold of these drugs routinely gave them to their co-workers. The whole place sounds as if it was functioning like a college dorm during finals.
And behind all of it was Ronny Jackson, the lunatic physician to the president (now Republican congressman) probably best known for claiming Trump was the healthiest hunk of man-meat to ever walk the White House halls, even though the entire public knew the man ate so much McDonald’s that he was approximately 75 percent cheeseburger. (Related: Ronny Jackson thinks Joe Biden’s physical was a “complete joke.” That’s it, that’s the punchline.)
Jackson has been the subject of several Defense Department investigations detailing what an enormous asshole he was to his subordinates, both before and after Trump came into office:
On a trip to Argentina in March 2016, one of those reports notes, Jackson’s “intoxicated behavior in the middle of the night, pounding on [a female subordinate’s] hotel room door, screaming, yelling, and overall loud behavior in his hotel room exhibited less than exemplary workplace conduct … The Pentagon interviewed 60 of Jackson’s former subordinates; 56 “experienced, saw, or heard about [him] yelling, screaming, cursing, or belittling subordinates.”
In 2018 Jackson saw his nomination to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs squashed because he was reportedly turning half the White House staff into a bunch of pillheads. Sources told Rolling Stone that the White House Medical Unit was staffed by his “minions” and “loyalists.”
Luckily for everyone, Jackson left the White House and got elected to Congress as a member of the GOP caucus, where his lunacy struggles to stand out from the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Jim Jordans he has to share space with.
The sloppiness of the record-keeping and prescription-filling is the sort of thing that in the real world would get patients sent to rehabs and the credentials of doctors and pharmacists revoked. In the Trump White House, it’s simply one more ridiculous scandal.
OPEN THREAD!
No wonder Trump and his people want him to get re-elected so badly. What addict doesn’t want to get handed the keys to the hospital’s pill closet?
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My kitties are happy I’m home. I’m getting lots of snuggles this morning. 😻
Okay, so today at work was pretty awesome. Foot traffic was on the slow side, but the guests we did have were, for the most part, awesome. Aside from the two kids who were having birthdays and were super cool and curious, the absolute highlight of my day—and probably my week—was a family, a mom and her two kids.
I asked the standard question “what brought yall in today,” and the mom says they’re in Baton Rouge because the older daughter had to see a bunch of specialists. I empathized with her and said I had to deal with a team of specialists as a kid myself. She explains her daughter has Prader-Willi Syndrome, so I offer up that I have Klippel-Feil Syndrome. We chat for a minute, I give this absolutely cheerful girl even more than just my usual attention, and you can tell she is having a blast. They go to check out, and the mom asks for me. My boss finds me, says the guest wanted to thank me in person, and then this girl very shyly asks if she can give me a hug.
SHE HUGGED ME. AND I HUGGED HER BACK. I started the run-up to happy crying. Mom said I work wonderfully with special needs kids, and I just blurted out “it’s because I’m special needs myself,” and the mom smiles and shakes my hand. I excused myself as soon as they left and cried a bit in the back room.
Oh, and there is a photo of that hug because my boss wanted to show the rest of our management team.