Non-Issue

The left thinks that they have a smoking gun because the White House medical unit ordered thousands of narcotic pills during the Trump Presidency, and the Pentagon says that they were not tracked very well. It isn’t smoking, nor is it a gun.

The White House Medical unit maintains a health clinic for all of the staff members of the White House, the Naval Observatory, Air Force 1 and 2, as well as assisting the Secret Service in setting up and maintaining emergency trauma centers everywhere their protectees go. The office also maintains fully stocked pharmacies at the White House, Naval Observatory, Old Executive Office Building, and aboard Air Force 1. There are 1800 staff members of the White House alone. The WHMU also provides emergency coverage for more than 1.5 million annual visitors to the White House and guests of the President, as well as national and international Heads-of-State and diplomats when they are in Washington, DC. So the amounts ordered aren’t really that remarkable.

The same doctor has been assigned to the WHMU since1995, and has been its director since 2000- more than 24 years. He is an Air Force Brigadier General by the name of Richard Tubb.

As an ED nurse, I see between 10 and 30 patients a day, most days. On any given day, I give controlled substances like Fentanyl, Dilaudid, Morphine, Norco, Xanax, Valium, Versed, and others a dozen or more times per day, and I am not filling prescriptions like a pharmacy, I am personally administering them.

The difference here is that our medical staff at the hospital have a pharmacist who checks every medical order for safety. The doctor writes the order, the pharmacist checks to make sure it is safe, then releases it. The nurse retrieves it from the automated dispenser, then administers it to the patient after also checking to make sure it’s a safe and appropriate medication. That’s right- at least three different people check to make sure it’s safe.

Not so in the WHMU. The providers are directly administering the medications without a pharmacist or nurse backstopping them. This makes errors more likely, but it doesn’t mean that the drugs are being abused.

The fact that some drugs weren’t well maintained doesn’t mean that Trump or someone on his staff was abusing them, it just means that government workers, being immune from fines for not tracking narcotics or lawsuits from improperly dosing or prescribing them don’t bother to do so. They track their controlled medications like law enforcement tracks their firearms. That is to say, not very well.