House Energy and Commerce Committee grills DEA chief over free flow of opioids
The acting director of the Drug Enforcement Administration said a database that monitors the flow of powerful prescription painkillers from manufacturer to distribution point was compiled manually during the height of the opioid crisis, making it a reactive, not proactive, tool.
The information contained in the drug-reporting database, known as ARCOS, is key to figuring out how many painkillers were distributed to pharmacies across the country from around 2006 to 2010. The data is confidential, but some information that has been released and analyzed is staggering: In two instances, millions of pills were shipped to pharmacies in tiny West Virginia towns.
Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who spent two hours aggressively questioning acting DEA director Robert W. Patterson in Washington on Tuesday, wanted to know how so many pills flowed freely, creating conditions for the opioid crisis, and why, they said, the DEA hasn’t been forthcoming with information about how it handled opioids.
“Your agency doesn’t appear to be willing to aggressively try to help us solve, or at least deal with, this crisis,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) said. Time, he told Patterson, is of the essence. “You just remember 80 people a day are dying because of legal prescription drugs. Remember that.”
Patterson, who has been acting director since October, said the agency has modernized how it uses the ARCOS data in recent years. It is now computerized, and the DEA has the ability to paint a fuller picture of how many pills are being shipped by also analyzing data from state prescription-drug-monitoring programs and the Department of Health and Human Services. Drug distributors are responsible for reporting their data to the DEA.
Patterson said that the modernization of the database has allowed it to be used in a “much more proactive manner” than in the past. He also said that some anomalies cannot be spotted using the database alone — it needs to be employed in concert with other data.
“I can say repeatedly in ’08, ’09, ’10, we did not use this data in the way that we are now using it, and I think that’s the key,” Patterson said. “Where we fell short, we’ll take responsibility for it.”
When asked, Patterson said that the same thing would not happen today.
“What we wish to do . . . is stop public harm,” he said.
Committee members expressed extreme frustration with the DEA, claiming that the agency dragged its feet in turning over documents and redacted many of those it did give up.
“Your agency needs to be turned upside down,” Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) said. “There is no doubt there is an abject failure in the DEA going back 10 years.”
As Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), a medical doctor, said of the agency: “You screwed up.”
The agency also questioned Patterson as to why there was a decrease in orders preventing pharmacies or doctors that were suspected of rogue prescribing from dispensing opioids. Patterson said it was, in some cases, because U.S. attorneys asked that they complete criminal cases before shutting down the pharmacies. The names and the locations of the prosecutors were not specified.
“People continued to die, die during this period,” Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said.
The testimony came during a week when Washington is focused on the opioid crisis. The Energy and Commerce Committee will hear more than 20 bills on opioids this week. On Monday, President Trump laid out his plan to solve the opioid crisis, which was filled with tough talk but few details on how he plans to carry it out.
Trump’s plan includes executing some drug dealers, while also pledging to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable for their role in fostering addiction. He said he wants to cut the number of opioid prescriptions by one-third nationwide but did not lay out a blueprint for getting there.
When Trump called for eliminating drug dealers, he said he wants to “get tough” on them, an approach that has alarmed some public-health experts.
Trump’s administration still has not filled numerous vacant positions that deal with the opioid crisis. Patterson is the DEA’s acting director. Trump named Jim Carroll, who worked in the White House Counsel’s Office, to be director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, but he is only in an acting capacity and his nomination has not been sent to the Senate.
Filed under: General Problems
Kel b on March 22, 2018 at 4:02 am
Regardless of other manufacturing issues, which have always been there & always will be there and that goes for any & all products produced in any country. Thats just part of manufacturing.
But when you are talking about medications in America, its absurd!!! Its 2018 !!!! Not 1818 !!!! Should we go back to biting a bullet and taking a shot of whiskey? Shit! Why not just go back to sterilizing the knife & wound with whiskey?? Take anesthesia away too!!!
Don’t get me started on alcohol consumption!!
Most people would feel differently if it was your loved one laying in a burn center and there’s no pain meds to give them intravenously!!! Imagine patients throat damaged & can’t swallow a pill, a pill that would do absolutely nothing for a burn victim!! That’s what they are giving patients, a pill. Big deal.
I’ve been in serious car crashes and thank God for pain meds in the emergency rooms! That was in 1985, 1996 and no one said take an aspirin and tough in out!! Mr sessions!!! Hopefully you or your loved ones don’t ever get into a car crash or become a burn victim!
Limiting medication in a hospitall where its desperately needed all the time is NOT going to effect the so called opioid epidemic one little bit!!
Just because one is prescribed a opiate in the ER, Surgery or while admitted, does not mean one bit that they will be given a script to take home.
And if they are given a script at discharge, it is the patients problem to be accountable & responsible for that script!! Don’t blame all the other pain patients for the immaturity of others!!
A hospital/ pharmacy should be a place where meds are monitored the closest to prevent stealing or mishandling, if not better look at your employees better!
Stop blaming pain patients for every little tho g associated with opioids!! Drug dealers ate going to sell drugs no matter what!
The “death penalty”? For drug dealers, you got a catch them and convict them first! You can’t catch n convict them all now or we wouldn’t have the problems we have!!
But you know that! That’s why you take meds away from people who have managed for years on them without issues. But its the easiest to take it away so you can say “look what we did”! We stopped all these scripts from being filled. If pain patients were the ones over dosing there wouldn’t be any patients left to get scripts, we would all be dead by now!!
So that shows you you got the wrong people!!! Let the hospitals have their meds for patients, let the pain patients have their scripts so they can get back to work to support their families, and you try and kill the drug dealers……never going to end! Supply & Demand. Economics 101.
All these databases being monitored by the government are reminding me of Big Brother! First our legal drugs and now they are talking about our guns. What’s next.I am Glad the DEA got yelled at in this meeting.
They are all a bunch of idiots.