Spectator/Stephen Tuttle

Continued from page 3 signatures. Several candidates confirmed they paid for signatures and verification of the signatures. There will certainly be breach of contract and perhaps criminal legal action. The Bureau of Elections reported many examples of these glaringly obvious forged signatures.

On June 2, the Michigan Appeals Court did not allow any of these five candidates to appear on the primary ballot. There is a short window for legal suits, but ballots must be printed and sent out by June 18. Election fraud is not “sexy” or sophisticated. It is usually the result of incompetence, laziness, and greed. While the firm that produced the fraudulent petitions is basically to blame, candidates are ultimately responsible for everything done in their name.

Linda Pepper | Grawn

What’s Best for the Kids

Do you have children or grandchildren in public schools? I think we can agree we all want our children to learn and develop so they will succeed in life to the best of their ability. Republicans however, are working hard to see that that does not happen. They are instead using their time to promote legal yet undemocratic processes to take money from our public schools and put it toward private schools.

For example, Betsy DeVos is touting a voucher ballot initiative that could circumvent Gov. Whitmer’s veto of voucherstyle education bills that would give tax credits to Michiganders who contributed to a scholarship program for non-public schools.

Others are introducing bills that would humiliate and shame LGBTQ students for being themselves by adding a transgender athlete ban to Michigan education budget bill or introducing “don’t say gay” bills that mimic what Gov. DeSantis signed into law in Florida. Extremist right-wing parent groups and Republican lawmakers are advocating school book-banning bills over curriculum and resources regarding race, gender, and sexuality. If successful, these measures would limit our children’s abilities to learn new perspectives and insights from people with life experiences different from their own by regulating what they can and cannot read in school.

Contrast these sorts of repressive, undemocratic attempts to control what children are exposed to in school with Gov. Whitmer’s introduction of the “MI Kids Back on Track Plan” to expand tutoring and other learning supports across the state to tackle COVID-related learning losses. Gov. Whitmer has also increased per-student funding in northern Michigan since taking office. These are real initiatives that will actually increase and support children’s learning experiences in our schools.

Before you vote, please educate yourself on your candidate’s and/or legislator’s voting record and support of children in our public education system.

Sylvia McCullough | Interlochen

Is the Majority Correct?

The letters sent to Northern Express have hit the nail on the head with the shootings in schools. So here are my questions: Is loading a bullet in a gun the same as loading a phone in a car? Is this the social norm? Is this the same horse of a different color? Wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it. Right is right even if no one is doing it. And no, I don’t own a gun or vehicle.

Paul Tremonti | Traverse City

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spectator

By Stephen Tuttle

The supply chain is something most of us hadn’t much considered until the various links started breaking. Now, that same broken chain is impacting almost every product we use or consume. In some instances, that impact can be life threatening for individuals and a national security issue for the country. Prescription drugs are the best example. We are a nation of prescription drug users. Though we are barely more than four percent of the world’s population, we consume nearly a third of all the prescription drugs. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a stunning 20,000 prescription drugs, and we use all of them. Some 66 percent of American adults take at least one prescription drug daily according to research by Scientific American. Nearly half of us take more than one prescription daily. The most prescribed drugs are for cancer

treatment, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and mental health. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), one in six of us uses some type of prescription psychiatric/ mental health drug, mostly for depression and anxiety. In fact, we consume almost all the psychiatric meds produced. As a bonus, we consume most of the antibiotics and more than 30 percent of all legally prescribed opioids. Clearly, we suffer from considerable pain, both physical and mental. We use more prescription drugs than any other country and pay way more for our drugs than any other country according to the Department of Commerce. Pharmaceutical companies tell us our elevated pricing is necessary because of the significant cost of developing new drugs and because we help subsidize countries whose citizens cannot afford the prices we pay. (Our use of prescription drugs—which certainly helps many individuals live longer and more productive lives—hasn’t helped much in terms of our collective longevity. Of the 35 developed countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US ranked 26th in average lifespan.) Okay, we have more doctors prescribing more drugs to more people. What does that long slog through our prescription drug use history have to do with the supply chain? We are completely dependent on others in the first links of the chain for a huge portion of our prescription drugs. According to the Department of Commerce, about 25 percent of finished drugs come from China. That doesn’t sound too bad until you discover about 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) used to make finished drugs come from either China or India. That accounts for nearly 95 percent of our antibiotics and more than half of our opioids not to mention significant percentages of most other drugs including cancer chemotherapy. It means we have to rely on China or India for both manufacturing and safety standards and for maintaining the first links in the supply chain so those drugs actually arrive. Some suggest we move away from China and toward India as a primary source of our pharmaceuticals. It’s true we have better diplomatic relations with India, so they are less likely to use our reliance on their drug manufacturing as a bargaining chip. (The Trump Administration excluded both finished pharmaceuticals and the raw ingredients needed to manufacture them

here in the $300 billion worth of tariffs slapped on Chinese imports.) The problem with the India-is-better theory is threefold. First, according to Commerce, drugs and raw materials from India are 3540 percent more expensive, a reality neither our insurance companies nor individuals like. Second, factories in India have had their share of quality control issues, including one noteworthy 2016 FDA inspection of a raw material plant that found holes in the roof and pigeons freely drifting over the production line. Third, and this is pretty ripe, they get about 75 percent of their raw material for the production of generic drugs from—wait for it—China.

In a minor irony, some of the drugs we do manufacture here using raw material imported from China, especially for noncommunicable diseases like cancer, we sell back to the Chinese.

Unfortunately, our dependence on China is not restricted to pharmaceuticals. According to Commerce, about 30 percent of medical supplies, including components of some sophisticated imaging devices, come from China. And despite a lesson we should have learned at the beginning of the pandemic, we still get more than 85 percent of personal protective equipment (PPE) from China. China is not an ally, but we count on them to help analyze our health and rely on them for life-saving medications and life-enhancing medical equipment. It isn’t hard to imagine how big a problem that could present in a worst-case scenario.

Broken supply chains have bedeviled us for the last two years. If the supply is medicine and the chain starts in China, it could get a lot worse.

We are a nation of prescription drug users. Though we are barely more than four percent of the world’s population, we consume nearly a third of all the prescription drugs.