In the wake of a report coming out of West Virginia this week on a veritable flood of opioids being sold in the state’s rural communities, Vermont senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is calling for an investigation and prosecution of the distribution companies involved.
This situation was recently exposed by reporter Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in a two-part story last week. Based on sales records from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Eyre discovered that three major drug distributors had been flooding rural West Virginia with 780 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone over a six-year period – during which more than 1700 people died from opioid overdoses. Eyre wrote:
“As the fatalities mounted—hydrocodone and oxycodone overdose deaths increased 67 percent in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012—the drug shippers’ CEOs collected salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. Their companies made billions.”
Responding to the story, Senator Sanders issued a tweet: “Large, multi-billion dollar corporations should not make billions pushing addictive drugs. They should be investigated and prosecuted.”
Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. In an interview with The Guardian, former DEA official Joseph Rannazzi said that a corrupt Congress is too beholden to the pharmaceutical industry. Lobbyists have spent millions of dollars in order to prevent lawmakers from passing strong regulations that would restrict physicians in writing prescriptions for opioid medications. He points out that
“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive…s long as the industry has this stranglehold through lobbyists, nothing’s going to change.”
Unfortunately, Rannazzi is correct. While Senator Sanders’ efforts to hold drug distributors are admirable, the reality is that that Big Pharma will continue to feed off of people’s addictions in order to increase their profit – and bought-and-paid-for legislators will do little, if anything, to stop them.