INSIDE THE DRUG INDUSTRY'S PLAN TO DEFEAT THE DEA
Faced with pressure to curtail suspicious opioid shipments, an alliance fought back with every weapon in their disposal
The Washington Post
By Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz, Steven Rich and Meryl Kornfield
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/drug-industry-plan-to-defeat-dea/
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Newly unsealed documents in a landmark civil case in Cleveland provide clues to one of the most enduring mysteries of the opioid epidemic: How were drug companies able to weaken the federal government's most powerful enforcement weapon at the height of the crisis?
The industry enlisted members of Congress to limit the powers of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It devised “tactics” to push back against the agency. And it commissioned a “Crisis Playbook” to burnish its image and blame the federal government for not doing enough to stop the epidemic.
The new information is emerging through the efforts of lawyers in the massive federal lawsuit against two dozen drug companies in Cleveland who have obtained depositions from high-ranking company officials, internal company emails and confidential memos. The documents were unsealed in July after a year-long legal fight by The Washington Post and the owner of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia.
In 2016, the drug companies convinced members of Congress and Obama administration officials to rein in the DEA and force the agency to treat them as “partners” in efforts to solve the crisis. The crowning achievement of the companies was a piece of legislation known as the “Marino bill,” named after its original sponsor, which curbed the DEA’s ability to immediately suspend the operations of drug companies that failed to follow the law.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
now imagine that the ALE office has been so underfunded and had most of its ability to enforce anything removed by paid off legislators who smell a good deal, as once this is done there will be no real accountability regardless of future actions.
Insipid to say the least. And, as before, I have to stress that it is not just the drug people who are part and parcel to what happened. There are so many doctors who were bribed/coerced/schmoozed into becoming a rubber stamper that the pervasiveness of the opioid flood would have never been this bad were it not for their actions, as well as their ability to look away while knowing what was happening. There is much blame for what has happened and we need to refrain from 'tunnel vision' so we can actually resolve the situation as opposed to frothing at the mouth over one aspect of it. (Not that you were doing that, I just wanted to reiterate that thought.
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