For 10 years, the government waged a behind-the-scenes war against pharmaceutical companies that hardly anyone knows: wholesale distributors of prescription narcotics that ship drugs from manufacturers to consumers.
The Drug Enforcement Administration targeted these middlemen for a simple reason. If the agency could force the companies to police their own drug shipments, it could keep millions of pills out of the hands of abusers and dealers. That would be much more effective than fighting "diversion" of legal painkillers at each drugstore and pain clinic.
Many companies held back drugs and alerted the DEA to signs of illegal activity, as required by law. But others did not.
Collectively, 13 companies identified by The Washington Post knew or should have known that hundreds of millions of pills were ending up on the black market, according to court records, DEA documents and legal settlements in administrative cases, many of which are being reported here for the first time. Even when they were alerted to suspicious pain clinics or pharmacies by the DEA and their own employees, some distributors ignored the warnings and continued to send drugs.
"Through the whole supply chain, I would venture to say no one was doing their job," said Joseph T. Rannazzisi, former head of the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, who led the effort against distributors from 2005 until shortly before his retirement in 2015. "And because no one was doing their job, it just perpetuated the problem. Corporate America let their profits get in the way of public health."
A review of the DEA's campaign against distributors reveals the extent of the companies' role in the diversion of opioids. It shows how drugs intended for millions of legitimate pain patients ended up feeding illegal users' appetites for prescription narcotics. And it helps explain why there has been little progress in the U.S. opioid epidemic, despite the efforts of public-health and enforcement agencies to stop it.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-drugs-intended-for-patients-ended-up-in-the-hands-of-illegal-users-no-one-was-doing-their-job/2016/10/22/10e79396-30a7-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html?
