The Cindy McSame painkiller story that I talked about yesterday was spiked by the Washington Post Thursday, the proof coming from the website of (of all places) the Everett Daily Herald in Washington State. The website accidentally published the wire story late Thursday from the Washington Post that the Post itself spiked.
While McCain's accounts have captured the pain of her addiction, her journey through this personal crisis is a more complicated story than she has described, and it had more consequences for her and those around her than she has acknowledged.So we know now that the story exists (written by Kimberly Kindy) and that the WaPo spiked the story on purpose because of course it's greatly damaging to the McSame campaign. And I can see why, this one would basically ruin McSame.
Her misuse of painkillers prompted an investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration and local prosecutors that put her in legal jeopardy. A doctor with McCain's medical charity who supplied her with prescriptions for the drugs lost his license and never again practiced medicine. The charity, the American Voluntary Medical Team, eventually had to be closed in the wake of the controversy. Her husband was forced to admit publicly that he was absent much of the time she was having problems and was not aware of them.
"So many lives were damaged by this," said Jeanette Johnson, whose husband, John Max Johnson, surrendered his medical license. "A lot of good people. Doctors who volunteered their time. My husband. I cannot begin to tell you how painful it was. We moved far away to start over."
McCain's addiction also embroiled her with one of her charity's former employees, Tom Gosinski, who reported her drug use to the DEA and provided prosecutors with a contemporaneous journal that detailed the effects of her drug problems. He was later accused by a lawyer for McCain of trying to extort money from the McCain family.
"It's not just about her addiction, it's what she did to cover up her addiction and the lives of other people that she ruined, or put at jeopardy at least," Gosinski said in an interview this week.
Cindy and John McCain declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article. The McCain campaign also declined to comment.
Based on the limited details they have provided in earlier interviews, it is impossible to tell the full story of a difficult period in their lives. The following account of Cindy McCain's prescription drug abuse and her and her husband's efforts to deal with it is based on official records, including a report by the county attorney's office in Phoenix, and on interviews with local and federal officials involved in the probe.
But it's still a story.
Even far from Washington, politics took a toll on Cindy McCain. In 1989, she was pulled into a Senate investigation that focused on her husband and four other senators who had intervened with regulators on behalf of savings-and-loan owner Charles Keating.Remember folks, this story exists. It's leaked. The WaPo had it but spiked it, and it leaked anyway. We'll see if any media outlets dare to pick up on the story.
When questions arose about a vacation the McCains took to Keating's home in the Bahamas, Cindy McCain, as family bookkeeper, was asked to document that they had reimbursed the Keatings, but she could not. She has repeatedly cited the stress of the Keating Five scandal and pain from two back surgeries that same year as reasons for her dependence on painkillers.
Her charity, AVMT, kept a ready supply of antibiotics and over-the-counter pain medications needed to fulfill its medical mission. But it also secured prescriptions for the narcotic painkillers Vicodin, Percocet and Tylenol 3 in quantities of 100 to 400 pills, the county report shows.
McCain started taking narcotics for herself, the report shows. To get them, she asked the charity's medical director, John Max Johnson, to make out prescriptions for the charity in the names of three AVMT employees.
The employees did not know their names were being used. And under DEA regulations, Johnson was supposed to use a special form to notify federal officials that he was ordering the narcotics for the charity. It is illegal for an organization to use personal prescriptions to fill its drug needs.
"The DEA told me it was OK to do it that way," Johnson told The Washington Post recently, in his first media interview about the case. "Otherwise, I never would have done it."
The county report showed that Johnson told officials he knew it was wrong, but he wrote prescriptions at McCain's request at least twice.
After Johnson wrote the prescriptions, McCain, and sometimes her secretary, picked them up from his home. Once they were filled, Johnson was supposed to maintain custody of the narcotics, but he said he let McCain control them and carry the medications in her luggage on charity trips.
No one tracked the narcotics in between the charity's missions, the county report shows.
When the county investigator asked Johnson where the charity stored its narcotics, he said they were in a safe. When asked where the safe was located, Johnson said he had never seen it.
Officials with other medical charities contacted by The Post said it is unusual to distribute narcotics overseas, particularly in Third World countries where medical teams treat disease and infection rather than performing painful surgeries.
Some of the doctors and nurses who went on McCain's missions said they never saw narcotics on AVMT trips and would have discouraged carrying such medications. "You don't bring narcotics into a foreign country, especially with people who have machine guns around," said Michele Stillinger, a nurse during a 1991 AVMT mission to Bangladesh.
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