Project Veritas founder and journalist James O’Keefe released a new hidden camera video this week showing VA employees, contractors and volunteers talking about the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the agency’s practice of prescribing veterans pain killers to cope with the physical and emotional cost of war rather than diagnosing and treating the causes of their pain.
According to Project Veritas:
Dr. Maureen McCarthy, the Deputy Chief of Patient Services for the entire VA, was caught on hidden camera telling a Project Veritas investigative journalist that: “It’s people that have drug problems, some of which are caused by us and our prescribing.”
In discussing the various cocktails of drugs given out by the VA, McCarthy stated: “That combination in particular is like candy for some people. It’s like they want it, they want it, they want it.”
Treating the symptoms of physical and emotional and emotional injuries suffered by veterans with pills rather than providing them with needed surgeries, psychological counseling and emergency intervention in times of crisis has led, in part, twenty-two U.S. veterans to take their own lives each day.
O’Keefe described the practice as the VA’s way of moving veterans through the system for numbers sake saying:
The VA appears to be a bit too eager to simply write prescription after prescription and move on to the next patient, rather than actually getting to the root of the problem many soldiers with P.T.S.D. (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) face.
Georgeann Davis, a senior VA volunteer based in Buffalo, NY, told a Project Veritas investigative journalist that: “In my opinion, they are creating drug addicts.”
In his new video, O’Keefe included clips from an on-the-record interview with Bob Cranmer. Cramer’s son David was a veteran who took his own life one month after being diagnosed with P.T.S.D. telling O’Keefe that his son’s death was preventable if the VA had given him the treatment he needed. O’Keefe said:
“This story truly saddened and humbled me”…“twenty-two veterans taking their own lives every day after they have returned home from the battlefield is incomprehensible and unacceptable.”
The acknowledgement by Dr. McCarthy, a high-ranking VA official, that the VA is essentially turning its patients, our veterans, into drug addicts is shameful and most certainly warrants both congressional and public scrutiny.
O’Keefe ended his statement with this promise. “Project Veritas will continue to expose the VA and fight for our nation’s heroes.”
