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How pharmacies built a pill town in Celina, Tennessee

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How pharmacies built a pill town in Celina, Tennessee
Opioid disaster: How pharmacies constructed a capsule city in Celina, Tennessee

Brett Kelman

Kaiser Well being Information

CELINA, Tenn. — It was about 1 a.m. on April 19, 2016, when a housebreaking alarm sounded at Dale Hole Pharmacy in Celina, a tiny city within the rolling, wooded hills close to the Kentucky border.

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Two cops responded. As their flashlights bobbed within the darkness, shining via the pharmacy home windows, they noticed an indication of a break-in: capsule bottles scattered on the ground.

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‘They took our vote for granted’: immigrants abandon Kamala Harris in New York

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‘They took our vote for granted’: immigrants abandon Kamala Harris in New York

Yahay Obeid, who arrived in the US from Yemen aged 8, trained as a pilot, and now controls air traffic at JFK airport, is more than just a model American immigrant.

At the height of the first administration of Donald Trump, he was held up in a speech by his Democratic representative, the Bronx’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as a victim of the “Muslim ban”, the government shutdown, and the “anti-immigration sentiment” flowing from the White House.

But on Tuesday, Obeid and probably thousands of fellow members of the Muslim community in the Bronx — which contains both the poorest and bluest Congressional districts in the US — voted for Trump, as did many of the area’s Hispanic and Latino inhabitants.

“What we have done right now is hold the Democrats accountable,” said Obeid of the borough’s 65,000 new Trump voters, who the Republican candidate targeted with a pledge to fight inflation and illegal immigration. “They have taken our vote for granted.”

In a swing that shook the Democratic establishment in New York City, Kamala Harris won just 73 per cent of the vote in the Bronx — 10 percentage points lower than Joe Biden achieved in 2020. Voting patterns across the borough, where more than 70 per cent of registered voters are Democrats, suggest the party shed support among communities that once formed its core base.

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Yahay Obeid voted both for Trump, a Republican, and for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat © Karen Dias
A poster of Ibrahim al-Hamdi, Yemen’s third president, on a street named after him in Little Yemen in the Bronx, New York
A poster of former president of Yemen Ibrahim al-Hamdi on a street named after him in Little Yemen in the Bronx © Karen Dias

For many in the Bronx, which has the worst public health record in the state, the calculation was, “how much worse can it get?”, said former firefighter Mike Rendino, chair of the Bronx Republican party. “At some point they realised Democratic policies no longer worked.”

Rubén Díaz Sr, a former state senator and registered Democrat who introduced Trump at a rally in Crotona Park in May and spent the past few weeks driving around the Bronx in a truck campaigning for the Republicans, said the backlash against his own party was long coming.

“We Hispanics, we are not liberal, we are conservatives”, the ordained minister said. Even among a community of first and second generation immigrants, illegal migration “was one of the main issues”, he added.

Rubén Díaz Sr stands outside his home in the Bronx
Reverend Ruben Diaz Sr outside his home in the Bronx © Karen Dias

Díaz said there was anger at measures such as the debit cards handed out by the city administration to migrant families to purchase food.

While the Bronx, which has been governed by Democrats for decades, suffers from high rates of homicide and violent crime, the Republican stronghold of Staten Island “has the better security, the better street cleaning, the better services”, Diaz added.

Even before Trump’s re-election bid, a slight shift towards the Republicans was in the offing. Last year, the Bronx voted in its first Republican on the city council in 40 years.

Although the Republican party itself did not spend money campaigning in the Bronx, Trump sought to capitalise on his growing support in the borough, visiting once for his rally, and once to film a Fox & Friends segment in a local barbershop, during which he told patrons: “You guys are the same as me.” He was the first Republican presidential candidate to campaign in the Bronx since Ronald Reagan, who went on to win New York.

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Sammy Ravelo
Sammy Ravelo, a retired police officer, at a diner in the Bronx © Karen Dias

Conversely, Harris and the Democrats forgot that people in the Bronx were “just like any other any regular American”, according to Sammy Ravelo, who came to America from the Dominican Republic in his teens and went on to serve in the US Army and as a New York police officer. “They know their pocketbook, how much they are paying for eggs.”

A local Democratic politician’s exhortation that Trump would imperil social security payments was taken as an insult by some, Ravelo added, for the implication that their community was reliant on government handouts. “The Dominican community is not a monolith,” he said.

Far from being put off by Trump’s pledge to implement mass deportations of illegal immigrants, a small but growing number of Dominicans welcomed the tough stance, Ravelo claimed. “You know who wants mass deportation most?” Ravelo, who was one of the first responders during the September 11 attacks, asked. “Legal migrants.”

A shopkeeper in the Morris Park neighbourhood of the Bronx, who asked not to be named, said she had agreed with Republicans on cultural issues such as their opposition to “Proposition 1”, a proposed amendment to New York’s constitution that conservatives claimed would allow transgender children to play on girls’ sports teams, which passed on Tuesday night.

A sign saying ‘Protect Girls Sports Vote No Prop 1’ on a street in the Bronx
An election sign stating ‘Protect Girls’ Sports’ on a street in the Bronx © Karen Dias
Street view of the Bronx showing pedestrians, a man sitting on the pavement outside a fast-food restaurant, and a police car waiting in traffic
Harris’s share of the vote in the Bronx was 10 percentage points lower than Biden’s in 2020 © Karen Dias

Trump’s courting of the Bronx vote had its hiccups. At an October rally in Manhattan, a comedian sparked outrage by referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage”.

“Trump should have fired whoever allowed that person to go on,” said the Republican party’s Rendino, who thought that he lost significant support in the borough as a result.

But attempts by Democrats to talk up the threat posed by Trump to democracy itself increasingly fell on deaf ears, said Obeid, especially among his Yemeni community, whose elders strongly endorsed the Republican candidate just days before the election.

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“We grew up in dictatorships, you can’t fool us by calling someone who is outspoken a dictator,” he said. Instead, with what he saw as a tacit endorsement of the “genocide” unfolding in Gaza, “we felt the world would end under Biden”.

In response to Trump’s win, the Bronx’s Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres blamed “the far left”, adding that the working class was “not buying [their] ivory-towered nonsense”.

That was not true for Obeid. On Tuesday, while voting for Trump, he also chose to re-elect Ocasio-Cortez, one of the few senior New York City politicians to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

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Jacky Rosen wins reelection in Nevada Senate race

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Jacky Rosen wins reelection in Nevada Senate race
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WASHINGTON – Incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen prevailed over Republican Sam Brown in Nevada and will head back to the U.S. Senate for six more years.

Rosen beat Brown by 1.4 percentage points, the Associated Press reported Saturday, despite President-elect Donald Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the state by 4 points.

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Rosen is one of three Democratic senators in swing states who managed to win reelection despite their state supporting Trump for president. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., also won Senate seats this year. Rep. Reuben Gallego, D-Ariz., is also on track to win his Senate race against former TV broadcaster Kari Lake.

Rosen was first elected to the Senate in 2018 after serving one term in the U.S. House.

Brown has never held political office. He is businessman and a former Army captain who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in 2008 while serving in Afghanistan, which left him permanently scarred.

Republicans retook the Senate in this election. For the next two years, they will have at least 52 votes. Republicans will also hold the White House and will likely also control the House, though the lower chamber has not yet been called.

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Slinging mud at King Felipe leaves no stain

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Slinging mud at King Felipe leaves no stain

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Exquisite tailoring takes you only so far. Felipe VI, king of Spain, is known to the internet for the perfect hug of his suits — the right-length jackets, the gently rolled lapels.

A monarch could scarcely look more the part. Felipe is nearly two metres tall. He has the posture for which a desk-bound worker would sacrifice a year’s salary, and a visage you’d expect to see chiselled into a medieval cathedral. No sausage fingers in the House of Bourbon.

But last weekend, the king’s new clothes were about as much use as the emperor’s. Walking the streets of Paiporta, a suburb of Valencia, hours after deadly floods, Felipe and his wife Queen Letizia found themselves pelted with mud and subjected to cries of “Murderers!”

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Inevitable, perhaps, that mass death should strip away the aura of monarchy. Inevitable, too, that the king’s decision to face angry crowds, while prime minister Pedro Sánchez retreated to his car, should be seen as both too much and too little. That’s constitutional monarchy: you can’t send out emergency alerts but you can take the blame for other people’s failure to do so.

No one can deny victims’ right to express their anger. But is it too much to hope that the anger might only be a temporary stage of the grieving process? Logically, disasters should define us. Sheep learn from electric fences. Yet we humans, collectively, cannot make the same course correction.

Crises leave only an inconsistent mark on society. The financial crisis spawned various political impulses, most of which (shrink state spending, cut trade ties) worsened the malaise. Westminster’s expenses scandal — and subsequent sleaze — simply deepened public hostility, further deterring talented people from choosing politics as a career. A plague on all their houses quickly becomes a plague on your own.

In 2020, it looked inconceivable that we wouldn’t learn lessons from Covid: surely we would do whatever it took to avoid this happening again. But our medium-term response has been denial. No one is a libertarian in a crisis, but quite a few are libertarians shortly after. Americans just re-elected a man who suggested they drink bleach.

Even in saner Britain, the Conservative party has elected a leader who says that Covid restrictions were too strict. Kemi Badenoch also wrongly said that the furore around Boris Johnson’s parties at Downing Street was overblown. But her critics should ask themselves if the anger at Partygate would now be better channelled into calls for a pandemic warning system and a move away from factory farming. Or is the only way that we can process disasters to focus on humiliating the powerful?

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In his novel The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a catastrophic heatwave in India catalysing climate action. The country’s ruling party is thrown from office, the political elite is discredited. A new consensus takes hold, with investments in renewable energy, battery storage and geo-engineering.

Satisfying fiction, but not reality. If it were, then every car destroyed by the Spanish floods would be replaced by an electric vehicle, every regional housing plan would stop building on flood plains, and no politician would be elected without committing to climate action. Don’t bet on it. Valencia’s government has included the climate-denying party Vox. Floridians are happily electing climate-denying Republicans, even as extreme weather makes parts of their state uninsurable.

The humbling of Felipe will lead nowhere. Anti-monarchists should check their delight. We assume one day that the Spanish and British monarchies will go the way of the French, but the date does not appear imminent.

The king will come out of this fine, if his advisers have any sense. He will espouse a special bond to the victims of the flood. He will meet some of them again when anger has subsided. And he will be perfectly tailored, and politely received, in Wimbledon’s royal box next summer.

But if an individual becomes the story, the opportunity for society to learn from disaster will be lost. For a better model, look to sport. After England narrowly lost at rugby to New Zealand on Saturday, their fly-half Marcus Smith excused a teammate who missed a match-winning kick. Defeat was a team responsibility, and the team would emerge stronger, he promised.

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In politics, slinging mud often becomes an end in itself. But if you want success, it must be a means to an end — or it is as pointless as Felipe’s lapels.

Henry Mance is the FT’s chief feature writer

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