Congress Perpetuated The Opiate Crisis

The recent 60 Minutes episode, which exposed Drug Czar, Tom Marino, was eye opening for many Americans, who are awakening to the severity of this epidemic.  It was exposed that U.S. Congress prohibited the DEA from taking action against large drug companies violating many laws, aimed to regulate and thwart overuse of these drugs.

The DEA and Justice Department proposed specific laws to pursue action against the companies violating the laws.  Congress advocated, at the pursuing of lobbyists, for more “industry friendly” regulations, allowing the drugs to continue unregulated.  These efforts were presented in 2016.  At that time, over 200,000 deaths had been directly attributed to these drugs.

Proof has been released in the Washington Post of millions of dollars in campaign donations on behalf of the drug companies, specifically responsible for producing the highly potent opiate medications.

The chief advocate of the law that circumvented the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican who was Trump’s nominated Czar. Marino spent his time trying to move the law through Congress. It was passed after after Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) negotiated a final version with the DEA.

The new law stifles the DEA’s ability to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to an independent assessment by the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article.

For More Detail See the Below Reports

Political action committees representing the industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the 23 lawmakers who sponsored or co-sponsored four versions of the bill, including nearly $100,000 to Marino and $177,000 to Hatch. Overall, the drug industry spent $106 million lobbying Congress on the bill and other legislation between 2014 and 2016, according to lobbying reports.

“The drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and chain drugstores, have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before,” said Joseph T. Rannazzisi, who ran the DEA’s division responsible for regulating the drug industry and led a decade-long campaign of aggressive enforcement until he was forced out of the agency in 2015. “I mean, to get Congress to pass a bill to protect their interests in the height of an opioid epidemic just shows me how much influence they have.”

Besides the sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill, few lawmakers knew the true impact the law would have. It sailed through Congress and was passed by unanimous consent, a parliamentary procedure reserved for bills considered to be noncontroversial. The White House was equally unaware of the bill’s import when President Barack Obama signed it into law, according to interviews with former senior administration officials.

Top officials at the White House and the Justice Department have declined to discuss how the bill came to pass.

Michael Botticelli, who led the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy at the time, said neither Justice nor the DEA objected to the bill, removing a major obstacle to the president’s approval.

“We deferred to DEA, as is common practice,” he said.

The bill also was reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

“Neither the DEA nor the Justice Department informed OMB about the policy change in the bill,” a former senior OMB official with knowledge of the issue said recently. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal White House deliberations.

The DEA’s top official at the time, acting administrator Chuck Rosenberg, declined repeated requests for interviews. A senior DEA official said the agency fought the bill for years in the face of growing pressure from key members of Congress and industry lobbyists. But the DEA lost the battle and eventually was forced to accept a deal it did not want.

“They would have passed this with us or without us,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Our point was that this law was completely unnecessary.”

Loretta E. Lynch, who was attorney general at the time, declined a recent interview request.

Obama also declined to discuss the law. His spokeswoman, Katie Hill, referred reporters to Botticelli’s statement.

The DEA and Justice Department have denied or delayed more than a dozen requests filed by The Post and “60 Minutes” under the Freedom of Information Act for public records that might shed additional light on the matter. Some of those requests have been pending for nearly 18 months. The Post is now suing the Justice Department in federal court for some of those records.

Hatch’s spokesman, Matt Whitlock, said the DEA, which had undergone a leadership change, did not oppose the bill in the end.

“We worked collaboratively with DEA and DOJ . . . and they contributed significantly to the language of the bill,” Whitlock wrote in an email. “DEA had plenty of opportunities to stop the bill and they did not do so.”

Marino declined repeated requests for comment. Marino’s staff called the U.S. Capitol Police when The Post and “60 Minutes” tried to interview the congressman at his office on Sept. 12. In the past, the congressman has said the DEA was too aggressive and needed to work more collaboratively with drug companies.

Drug industry officials and experts blame the origins of the opioid crisis on the overprescribing of pain pills by doctors. The industry notes that the DEA approves the total amount of opioids produced each year.

Industry officials defended the new law as an effort to ensure that legitimate pain patients receive their medication without disruption. The industry had long complained that federal prescription drug laws were too vague about the responsibility of companies to report suspicious orders of narcotics. The industry also complained that the DEA communicated poorly with companies — citing a 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office — and was too punitive when narcotics were diverted out of the legal drug distribution chain.

“To be clear — this law does not ‘decrease’ DEA’s enforcement against distributors,” said John Parker, a spokesman for the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, which represents drug distributors. “It supports real-time communication between all parties in order to counter the constantly evolving methods of drug diversion.”

But DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge John J. Mulrooney II has reached the opposite conclusion.

“At a time when, by all accounts, opioid abuse, addiction and deaths were increasing markedly” the new law “imposed a dramatic diminution of the agency’s authority,” Mulrooney wrote in a draft 115-page article provided by the Marquette Law Review editorial board. He wrote that it is now “all but logically impossible” for the DEA to suspend a drug company’s operations for failing to comply with federal law. The agency declined to make Mulrooney available for an interview.

Marino, now in his fourth term, continues to represent northeastern Pennsylvania and Lycoming County, population 116,000.

His nomination as drug czar, which would put him in charge of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is pending.

Marino declined to be interviewed for this story, but last year he told The Post:

“We had a situation where it was just out of control because of [Rannazzisi],” Marino said. “His only mission was to get big fines. He didn’t want to [do] anything but put another notch in his belt.”

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.

On a warm night in July, four families gathered in a large, manicured back yard in Marino’s district to share their sorrow over the children and siblings they had lost to opioids.

Around the table they went, each with a different story, each death leaving the same wreckage behind.

“I got the phone call Nov. 12 at 2:39 in the afternoon,” Tina Snyder recalled. Her 24-year-old son, Lee Winder, had been found in a shopping center parking lot near his car outside a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Winder had become addicted to pain pills and died of a heroin overdose.

“All I remember hearing is ‘Ms. Snyder, this is Chuck Kiessling, the Lycoming County coroner,’ ” she recalled. “I could literally feel my heart breaking, and I didn’t say anything. He said, ‘We found your son at 7 o’clock this morning.’

“And I just kind of like melted to the floor, started crying. And the girl I was working with took the phone and was talking to him. And I just kept begging her to tell me it wasn’t true.”