In the middle of a deadly opioid epidemic, Congress virtually shut down a key way the Drug Enforcement Administration can stop drug companies, pharmacies, or doctors from flooding towns with prescription painkillers. Just a few years ago, the DEA was aggressively going after drug companies and pharmacies for distributing suspiciously large numbers of pills, but an April 2016 law sponsored in Congress by the man Donald Trump has nominated as his drug czar and passed by unanimous consent made that enforcement much more difficult.
A bombshell Washington Post investigative piece by Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein shows how key former DEA employees cashed in by going to work for the drug companies and more or less wrote a law sponsored by Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA), a law changing the standard the DEA has to meet to shut down a company’s drug shipments. The end result:
John Mulrooney, the chief DEA administrative law judge, has been documenting the falling number of immediate suspension orders against doctors, pharmacies and drug companies. That number has dropped from 65 in fiscal year 2011 to six so far this fiscal year, according to the DEA. Not a single order has targeted a distributor or manufacturer since late 2015, according to Mulrooney’s reports, which were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. [...]
In his article planned for the winter issue of the Marquette Law Review, Mulrooney wrote: “If it had been the intent of Congress to completely eliminate the DEA’s ability to ever impose an immediate suspension on distributors or manufacturers, it would be difficult to conceive of a more effective vehicle for achieving that goal.”
From 65 to six. For context, that late 2015 case, which is still pending, involves a company that shipped 258,000 hydrocodone pills in a single month to a single pharmacy in a town of less than 3,000 people. Stuff like that is going on but the DEA suddenly can’t find any more companies that deserve immediate suspension orders? Sure.
In the district represented by Marino, the anti-enforcement law’s sponsor and Trump’s drug czar pick:
Since 2014, the year Marino first introduced his bill, 106 people have died of opioid overdoses in Lycoming County. Over six days this summer, 53 people in the county overdosed on opioids. Three of them died.
Doesn’t that make you confident the government will be taking strong action to end the opioid crisis?