Poor Mojo's Newswire

It started at the Beuracradome, which is a public arena where the big political players fight to decide the laws of Vornheim. Whenever someone disagrees with your policy, you both elect champions to fight - good arguments give bonuses to your champion's AC and Damage. Whoever wins forms the precedent. The party had been refused some sweet armour by the church of Tittivallia so they were afire with righteous anger about the status quo. (The party elf needed a suit to stop the city's fatally iron-rich smog, but the church was using all their salvation suits against the flesh plague). The party warrior jumps down into the arena unannounced and starts laying into the leaders of Vornheim about their petty feuds, using the greatest speech. When they ask him his name he goes "I am... the Common Man!" (Actual name: Stoner). The peasant audience goes wild, the nobles get furious. The regent challenges him with a breach of court and goes into the depths of the Beuracradome to get a frost giant champion that would crush him. Luckily, the party thief shadows him and sabotages the elevator to trap him in the Frost Giant's room. When the regent doesn't show, he forfeits and Stoner can get on to the argument proper. He starts up an even better tirade against the church of Vorn- challenging him out for not helping Tittivallia fight the Flesh Plague. "We cannot sacrifice resources -" spits the Vorn Pope, and he answers "Is not sacrifice sacred in the eyes of Vorn? Do you consider yourself... ABOVE HIM?!" The peasant crowd's idolizing him like a folk hero now (His 0-level occupation was astrologer, too, so this guy is seriously some kind of warrior-poet). The Pope is screaming "My champion is Vorn! We will see who is sacred in his eyes!" and Stoner strikes a pose and yells "My champion is... The people of Vornheim!" Suddenly the whole place goes silent. . . .

To move large amounts of prescription painkillers in America, you need somebody to write the prescriptions. You need doctors. Hiring doctors to sell drugs is easy, says George. He found his doctors by posting ads on Craigslist. At their peak, when they were running the largest pill mill operation in the U.S., the George twins had roughly a dozen doctors working for them. George says not a single doctor he interviewed ever turned down a job offer. Although he was always younger than the doctors he was interviewing—he was in his late twenties at the time—George says he made a professional impression. “I had such a big office; it was an easy sell,” says George. “They didn’t walk into some hole-in-the-wall place. The hours were good. The pay was good.” What the jobs lacked in prestige, they made up for in wages. According to George’s indictment, doctors at his clinics were paid a flat fee for each opioid prescription they wrote—typically, $75 to $100 a pop. To help maximize their efficiency, doctors were given prescription stamps they could use quickly, over and over. It was common for physicians at American Pain to see 100 patients a day, he says. At that rate a doctor would earn roughly $37,500 a week—or $1.95 million a year. It was a doctor who first advised him to go into the industry. . . .