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A recent report claims that the Trump administration had easy access to prescription medications in large amounts, with doctors behaving “like the Wild West”.
A follow-up to a report from the Inspector General of the Department of Defense that criticized the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration reveals that the unit doled out prescription medication with little to no oversight and messy record keeping. One source close to the matter stated to Rolling Stone, “It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this.”
According to the investigation, a tracking form in the report that was released in January contained numerous medications ordered in large doses such as Xanax, morphine, hydrocodone, diazepam and lorazepam (the latter two more commonly known as Valium and Ativan) and even ketamine and fentanyl. The report claims that there was no oversight exercised, with high scrutiny leveled at Ronny Jackson, who was the personal physician for former President Donald Trump at the time until 2019 after filling a similar role for former President Barack Obama.
It was also noted that many senior Trump officials would combine Xanax usage with drinking alcohol. “Knowledgeable sources say that samples of the stimulant were passed around for those contributing lines 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,” said the follow-up article. One former senior administration official said frankly of the situation: “You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol.” For those who wanted to raise complaints, they chose not to because “they feared they would receive negative work assignments or be “fired” if they did.
Jackson, who is currently a Republican congressman representing the 13th District of Texas, declined to comment when his office was reached. The physician has been regarded as an “eccentric” type in the past, with complaints about his behavior piling up including 56 of 60 subordinates interviewed testifying to the Pentagon that they “experienced, saw, or heard about [him] yelling, screaming, cursing, or belittling subordinates.” Other sources corroborated his actions. “Any practices existing at that time were all set up by Jackson, who’d been there for a dozen years. Though the med unit was led by an administrator, little happened without his say-so,” another source claimed.