JUST A TASTE...

TOP OF THE NEWS:

- The Family That Built an Empire of Pain (New Yorker) "The bulk of the Sacklers’ fortune has been accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to most people as obscure as that of the robber barons. ...they almost never speak publicly about the family business, Purdue Pharma—a privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude [that the drug was highly addictive] and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown... Since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. By 2003, the Drug Enforcement Administration had found that Purdue’s 'aggressive methods' had 'very much exacerbated OxyContin’s widespread abuse.'

- El Chapo and the Secret History of the Heroin Crisis (Esquire) "Looking at the American drug market as it existed, Guzmán and his partners saw an opportunity. An increasing number of Americans were addicted to prescription opioids such as Oxycontin. The Sinaloa Cartel decided to undercut the pharmaceutical companies. They increased the production of Mexican heroin by almost 70 percent."

- Wave of addiction linked to fentanyl worsens as drugs, distribution, evolve (WaPo) "...the law enforcement community is racing to contain the spread of fentanyl, which has largely replaced heroin on the streets here in opioid-ravaged New England and is increasingly the cause of fatal overdoses nationwide (see chart below). Much of the fentanyl that winds up in New England is manufactured in Mexico using precursor materials obtained from China... To some addicts, a near-death experience is not an error. It’s the dream. 

- The shifting toll of America’s drug epidemic (Economist) "Every 25 minutes an American baby is born addicted to opioids. The scale of both use and abuse of the drugs in the United States is hard to overstate: in 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available, an estimated 38% of adults took prescription opioids. Of those, one in eight (11.5m people in total) misused their prescription. Around 1m Americans overdosed on opioids last year, and 64,000 of them died. The number of deaths from prescription opioids has continued to rise, from around 11,000 in 2013 to 15,000 a year now (see chart below). But the rate of growth has slowed, and many forecasters predict it may be nearing its peak. By contrast, the toll from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin, is soaring. After claiming just 3,000 lives in 2013, it killed 22,000 people in America last year, more than either heroin or prescription opioids. The highest rates of prescription-opioid abuse can be found among middle-aged rural whites, including women. By contrast, both fentanyl and heroin users tend to be much younger, more likely to live in cities, somewhat more racially diverse and overwhelmingly male..."

- Lawmakers to DEA: Use more legal muscle against opioids (WaPo) "The offers to Neil Doherty, deputy assistant administrator of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, which battles abuse of prescription opioids, came in the wake of a joint report by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” that Congress had stripped the DEA of its most potent enforcement weapon against giant companies whose drugs are sometimes illegally diverted onto the street."

NEWS:

- ‘I could live simpler’: Floods and fires make Americans rethink their love affair with stuff (WaPo) "Americans, even those outside the disaster zones, are starting conversations about how much stuff they have — and what they really need. Cris Sgrott-Wheedleton, a professional organizer in Tysons Corner, Va., has noticed a higher call volume at her office since the spate of natural disasters. Often people fail to focus on what’s really important to them until it’s too late."

- Majority Of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination (NPR) "More than half of whites — 55 percent — surveyed say they face discrimination on the job, in education and in a variety of other ways. Notable, however, is that while a majority of whites in the poll say discrimination against them exists, only a small percentage say that they have actually experienced it. Also important to note is that 84 percent of whites believe discrimination exists against racial and ethnic minorities in America today."

- Is $100,000 middle class in America? (WaPo) "The majority of Americans — 62 percent — identify as 'middle class,' according to a Gallup poll conducted in June. Just who exactly is middle class is in the national spotlight again as...Republicans in Congress craft tax cuts for individuals and corporations that they say will primarily benefit the middle. But amid this discussion, the middle class has been defined in different ways. So what is the middle class? In America, an income of $59,000 a year is smack dab in the middle, according to the U.S. Census. But it's not that simple. When Americans talk about the 'middle class,' they are usually thinking about a range, not just the specific income dead in the middle. Pew Research says the middle class runs from $42,000 to $125,000."

SCIENCE:

- The first data from a repository of living human brain cells (Economist) "...Christof Koch, and his colleagues, have managed to round up specimens of healthy tissue removed by...surgeons in order to get to unhealthy parts beyond them, which needed surgical ministration. The repository the cells from these samples end up in is a part of a wider project, the Allen Cell Types Database. The Allen database, which is open for anyone to search, thus now includes information on the shape, electrical activity and gene activity of individual human neurons."

THE STEELE FILE:

- Analysis | What the Trump dossier says — and what it doesn’t (WaPo) "Claim: Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government had sought to 'cultivate' Trump for a period of five years. There’s no evidence at hand that this cultivation took place. 

Claim: Trump campaign aide Carter Page met with the chief executive of fossil-fuel giant Rosneft, Igor Sechin, and Kremlin official Igor Diveykin, who American officials believe was in charge of collecting intelligence about the election. This report suggests that Diveykin offered to release the compromising information on Clinton to Trump’s campaign team — an offer that we now know was made before that June meeting in Trump Tower, as well. It’s not clear why Diveykin would make this offer after having already had the opportunity to release that information to Donald Trump Jr. a month earlier. 

Claim: The report claimed that Trump had sought a real estate deal in St. Petersburg as well and that the campaign was comfortable with attention being focused on Russia because it distracted the media from 'business dealings in China and other emerging markets' that included bribes and kickbacks. ... it’s clear that Trump did seek some business deal in St. Petersburg (perhaps including a reality show). There’s also been reporting by the New Yorker on projects in Azerbaijan and Georgia that may have raised questions about possible bribery and corruption. 

Claim: Russia has an extensive program aimed at hacking foreign adversaries. That the Russians were actively hacking Westerners is clearly true and was well-known even before the election. While it’s not clear how the DNC servers were accessed, it doesn’t seem to have been through the means described in this report. 

Claim: Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych told Putin that he’d paid Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under the table, but that it was untraceable. Report cites a Trump associate claiming that revelation of those payments were part of why Manafort left the campaign... The role of the alleged payments was widely reported as a reason for Manafort’s ouster. 

Claim: Russia had 'injected further anti-Clinton material into the ‘plausibly deniable’ leaks pipeline' which would keep emerging. Putin was angry about how the operation was progressing, though his administration had assumed direct control — to the extent that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s job might be at risk. The report indicates that the effort to intervene on behalf of Trump originated with Lavrov’s department and eventually made its way to Putin’s team directly. This comports with January reporting about Putin having a direct hand in the effort. That said, Lavrov still holds his position. 

Claim: One of the more significant reports, it again asserts that Page met with Rosneft CEO Sechin in July. At the meeting, Sechin offered Page and Trump a 19 percent stake in Rosneft in exchange for lifting sanctions on Russia if elected. ...Trump did seek to quickly lift some sanctions on Russia imposed after the country seized Crimea in 2014. 

Claim: Claims that Cohen traveled to Prague at some point in August to coordinate the relationship. There’s been no evidence presented to place Cohen in Prague.

TRUPMTELL:

- Trump's response to media criticism: "I'm a very intelligent person"

BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:

- The Future of Online Dating Is Unsexy and Brutally Effective (Gizmodo) "Just as dating algorithms will get better at learning who we are, they’ll also get better at learning who we like—without ever asking our preferences. Algorithms that analyze user behavior can also identify subtle, surprising, or hard-to-describe patterns in what we find attractive—the ineffable features that make up one’s 'type.' Naturally, we might not like the patterns computers find in who we’re attracted to. Today, dating apps don’t (openly) mine our digital data as nearly much as they could."

TODAY'S SONG:

- Cocaine (Eric Clapton)

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