The White House has a pharmacy – and it was a mess, a new investigation found | Hacker News Reader

The White House has a pharmacy – and it was a mess, a new investigation found

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Somebody who served in the Carter administration was caught writing a prescription for low-level staffer with what was not the staffer's name on it. When the young woman was caught, the MD went also. He was the editor of what I recall as a very sensible book on substance abuse. My recollection is that this was Peter Bourne, the administration's "drug czar", but his Wikipedia entry makes no mention of the incident.

Imagine if someone really had narcotics in the White House and was discovered, the punishment would be severe and also very embarrassing.

It would probably be hushed up and the Secret Service would quickly close the investigation because investigating is hard.

Imagine the havok someone could cause by messing with the drugs taken by White House employees at all levels. There is so much potential for gain - just slowing response time on an important day for your mission, much less confusing it, causing critical staff to be out sick, etc.

More generally, sometimes I wonder about supply chain attacks on the White House. If the requirement of security is to make attacks more expensive than they are worth to the attacker, how do you secure the White House where issues are existential to many people and/or regularly worth trillions of dollars? Yet people in the White House must live normal lives, and have plenty of abnormal needs too (being the White House). The government can't custom manufacture everything internally from raw materials, nor secure every supply chain, so how can they secure the White House?

The primary reason it doesn't happen is because it's a lot harder to pull these things off than the public perceives.

The examples of supply chain attacks in the wild, or within some controlled environment discussed ad nausea in conference settings are completely different than a supply chain attack against a nation-state with sophisticated intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies. It's not even worth comparing them. The consequences for making a mistake in a supply chain attack against a nation-state are extremely grave, i.e., expect torture and execution in your future.

Imagine arriving in a foreign country and trying to gather the information needed to pull this off. How long before someone finds your behavior peculiar and reports it to the state for investigation. Now you have to accomplish your task knowing there's a good chance you're being watched closely.

I'm not suggesting it's trivial at all, but the value is extremely high and the attackers are the most capable nation states.

Also, I expect that these days reconnaissance can be done, to some increased degree, electronically and remotely and with much less risk.

The fear is well placed - I think this is a likely attack vector, especially with the rise of compounding pharmacies being used to skirt regulation for localized delivery. There's little to no oversight of compounding pharmacies due to their rapidly increasing numbers.

In before the media some how makes this about biden, even though it only goes through 2020.

> The probe was prompted by complaints the Department of Defense received in 2018 about a senior military medical officer, who is not named, engaging in “improper medical practices.” It covers only activity in the office through early 2020 under the Trump administration, but investigators interviewed staffers who also worked there under former President Obama.

It's a politically-motivated investigation focusing only on the Trump years, a tiny portion of the time this was going on.

American Presidents have been known to be on drugs to help them perform for many decades.

Consider FDR's cocaine use:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/06/cocaine-in-t...

And rumors were that papa Bush's vomiting in the lap of Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa had something to do with the chemical cocktail he was on at the time.

It's DC, where open secrets are hushed up for the sake of decorum. Or they used to be.

So what? The puritanical US could do with a lot less pharmacy drama all over.

Do we really think this is what made the cheeto psycho?

Did this harm the operation of the whitehouse?

This falls into the category of: "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, like the little baby jesus intended"

Anything else is dangerous and un-american...

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