No Just Cause: A Decades-Long Strategy of Deception and Secrecy that Enabled America\u27s Deadly Opioid Crisis

This Essay examines the national epidemic of prescription opioid addiction and overdose deaths that began in the mid-1990s and continues to the present. Litigating from West Virginia—ground-zero of the opioid crisis—the authors draw from their experiences providing pro bono representation of a West Virginia newspaper and The Washington Post to successfully uncover long-buried facts. If revealed to the public, that hidden information could have stopped the epidemic in its tracks, saving millions of Americans from addiction and hundreds of thousands from cruel overdose deaths. The Essay highlights how political influence and industry capture hindered effective oversight of prescription opioid profiteers. The authors reveal the two-decade strategy of drug companies whose pernicious abuse of Civil Procedure Rule 26(c) protective orders and sealing of court records manipulated the courts and conned government regulators. That strategy effectively concealed the corrupt, unlawful corporate actions that created and fueled the opioid epidemic. Importantly, the Essay also identifies and documents the largely overlooked actions of judges, lawyers, federal and state law enforcement, and regulatory agencies that effectively prevented public disclosure of the intentional, unlawful and corrupt activities of prescription opioid manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and “pill mill” doctors. These prescription opioid supply chain actors lined their pockets with enormous profits while fully aware of the unfathomable number of addictive pills—one hundred and ten billion pills—one billion in West Virginia alone—that inundated communities throughout the nation from 2006 to 2014. Ultimately, the authors provide a critical examination of the systematic failures and corruption that enabled the epidemic and reveal the devastating costs of corporate greed and governmental failures and complicity

Traumatic Brain Injury and Substance Use Disorder: A Clinic Based Exploratory Study

Background: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and substance use disorders (SUD) are common co-occurring conditions that have been investigated in isolation over the past several decades. Research regarding the conditions in unison have yielded conflicting results; however, there is a clear correlation linking negative implications of one condition on the other. Objectives: To explore factors contributing to SUD among persons screening positive for a history of TBI and to validate the importance of screening for TBI as part of the SUD treatment program intake process. Setting: Outpatient SUD treatment programs across West Virginia. Design: Exploratory Study. Methods: Those who screened positive for history of TBI according to the OSU-TBI-ID were included in the study. The Mental Health Assessment by a Non-Physician (ASAM) was incorporated in the program admission process and used for data collection. Results: Data was analyzed from 183 SUD admissions who screened positive for a history of TBI. Most of the subjects were male (72.7%) and identified as white (87.9%). The most common referral sources were probation/parole (43%), court (21%), and self (27%). 91% of individuals had a criminal background. Participant SUD triggers were difficulty dealing with their feelings (76.5%), being in the wrong places (74.3%), and boredom (68.3%). Negative implications of drug and alcohol use were legal implications (90.7%), relationships (89.1%), finances (84.2%), and mental health (77%). Conclusion: The significant findings indicate a need to screen individuals for TBI upon admission to SUD treatment facilities to provide appropriate and holistic care to reduce relapse and readmission rates

Typha × glauca

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/typhaceae/1077/thumbnail.jp

Drowning in the Patent Pool: Is Statutory Invention Registration a Lifeguard?

Patents for inventions, available since the first Congress enacted the Patent Law of 1790, have been controversial. Defenders justify patents on the grounds that they are necessary to protect inventors from free riding—copying that would deprive the inventors of an opportunity to recover the costs of development. Detractors attack patents as unnecessary monopolies, thwarting innovation. The debate continues, even as the law itself has remained remarkably constant. Technology and industry structure have not remained constant, however. Patents have proliferated, resulting in patent thickets that make it impossible to create and market any innovative product without infringing hundreds of patents. Patent trolls have arisen, salivating at the money they can earn from holdups when they threaten infringement suits. Innovative firms struggle with defenses. They engage in cross licensing arrangements and patent pools to deal with the patent thicket problem. They encourage state legislatures to enact statutes giving them new defenses against patent trolls. Increasingly, at least in some industries, they look for ways to disclaim patent protection. Even then, they also must erect defenses against other patent holders that might sue them for infringement. For nineteen years, the Patent Act provided a way to do this, but the Statutory Invention Registration (“SIR”) alternative was little used. Now, the problem has gotten worse, and it is time to bring back the SIR, or to erect a private substitute for it

Thuja occidentalis

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cupressaceae/1117/thumbnail.jp

An Evaluation of a Human-Operant Effort Manipulation and Effects of Effort Disparity on Renewal

The relative effort of target and alternative responses during treatments using differential reinforcement of alternative behavior may impact the likelihood that a previously reduced target response will reemerge following a context change (i.e., “renewal”). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of an effort disparity between target and alternative responses in a human-operant arrangement. Eighteen college students clicked on one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) circles moving on a computer screen for points. In Experiment 1, the speed of the circle was manipulated as an index of effort such that three circle speeds (i.e., 50, 100, 200 mm/s) were used across conditions. Nearly all participants engaged in differential response rates, depending on the speed of the available circle. Criterion response rates (clicks on the target circle) were highest when the speed was slow. Subcriterion response rates (clicks on the background of the computer screen) were inversely related to the speed of the circle. In Experiment 2, a three-phase renewal arrangement was executed across three experimental conditions in which the target response was either the same, easier, or more difficult than the alternative response. The effects of the relative effort of the target response to the alternative response on the occurrence and magnitude of renewal were mixed across participants. The clinical and conceptual relevance regarding the relative effort of target and alternative responses will be discussed