INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Why Drugs Meant For Patients Keep Ending Up In Hands Of Addicts And Abusers, Who’s To Blame?

By Jessica Dafoe
Published on: 02:39 PST, Oct 23, 2016

Most people are not aware of the decade-long governmental war that has been waged behind the scenes against pharmaceutical companies. The DEA is also going after “the wholesale distributors of prescription narcotics” that are the middlemen shipping drugs from manufacturers to the consumers.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been targeting these middlemen for a good reason. If the DEA could convince the companies to comply and police their own drug shipments, it would keep countless pills from falling into the hands of abusers and dealers. This would be a much more effective way to ensure pills are reaching the right individuals.

As it turned out, many companies did hold back drugs and alerted the DEA about signs of illegal activity that was required by law. Others failed to do so. The Washington Post shares that 13 companies knew or should have known that millions of pills were winding up on the black market, according to DEA documents and court records, as well as legal settlements in administrative cases. The publication indicates that even when companies were alerted to suspicious behavior by pain clinics and pharmacies by the DEA and their own employees, distributors ignored all warnings and continued to ship the drugs.

Joseph T. Rannazzisi, former head of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, shares that it was simply a case of people not doing their job to curb the problem.

“Through the whole supply chain, I would venture to say no one was doing their job. 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 campaign initiated by the DEA against the distributors demonstrates how extensive the companies’ roles were in the diversion of narcotics into the wrong hands. It also helps to understand why there has been little progress in combating the current drug epidemic despite the efforts of public health and enforcement agencies to put a stop to it.

Not only was it a struggle to get the distribution companies to comply with the DEA’s expectations by reporting and following up on suspicions, but officials at DEA headquarters reportedly also were responsible for blocking and delaying enforcement actions against the wholesale distributors and others, which left investigators in the field quite frustrated.

Frank Yonker, a DEA supervisor in the Cincinnati field office, retired in 2014 after a 30-year-career and spoke with the publication about such frustrations.

“We could not get these cases­ through headquarters. We were trying to shut off the flow, and we just couldn’t do it.”

The DEA reportedly declined to disclose how many enforcement actions were brought against distributors. However, the 13 companies mentioned include McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen. Together, these companies control about 85 percent of the pharmaceutical distribution within the United States. Additional regional wholesalers include Miami-Luken, KeySource Medical, as well as Walgreens. Many distributors are small operations with only a few employees.

According to the Post, some of the 13 companies have fought the efforts of the DEA in court before the agency’s administrative law judges. All have lost or settled aside from two cases which are pending. Using civil authority, the DEA has managed to stop the flow of narcotics from some of the company warehouses.

Documents filed prior to the hearings outline reasons that the companies are finding it difficult to comply with the demands of the DEA. The publication relays reasons based on such documents.

“They have complained that it is difficult to police the activities of far-flung drug dispensers and have noted that drugs could not be sold to illegal users without prescriptions written by corrupt doctors. They also criticized the DEA’s past approach to the problem as punitive and its rules as vague and confusing.”

Despite small successes by the agency, the problem remains an ongoing one. Prescription narcotics are the cause of more overdoses and deaths each year than any street drug such as heroin. The opioid epidemic has been responsible for the deaths of 165,000 people since 2000, with the number of deaths rocketing from 3,785 in 2000 to 14,838 in 2014.

[Featured Image by Phil Walter/Getty Images]

Share this article: Why Drugs Meant For Patients Keep Ending Up In Hands Of Addicts And Abusers, Who’s To Blame?
More from Inquisitr