President Trump pledged months ago to declare the nationwide opioid crisis a national emergency. He now says he’ll do so this week. The crisis has claimed well over 200,000 lives and the death rate continues to climb.
Declaring opioid deaths a national emergency would be nice, but taking effective action is even more important. So far, the Trump administration and key Republicans in Congress have shown no interest in doing so.
Trump recently nominated Representative Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, to be his national drug czar. Marino withdrew his name from consideration last week after it was revealed that he had spearheaded a successful effort in Congress to block the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) efforts to stop fraudulent distribution of prescription opioids. [1]
In April 2016, as the deadliest drug epidemic in US history raged, Congress passed a bill stripping the DEA of its ability to stop the distribution of large quantities of prescription narcotics. Drug industry experts blame the origins of the opioid crisis on the over-prescribing, some of it fraudulent, of narcotic pain killers. [2] The pharmaceutical corporations’ marketing of these drugs has also come in for blame, as they downplayed the potential for addiction to the drugs and promoted the supposed under-treatment of pain.
At the behest of the drug industry, Representative Marino in the House and Senator Hatch in the Senate (a Utah Republican) led the efforts by a handful of members of Congress to undermine DEA enforcement efforts aimed at blocking the supply of narcotic pain killers to corrupt doctors and pharmacists who were selling them on the black market. They passed a law making it impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious shipments of narcotics by drug distributors who had repeatedly ignored DEA warnings while selling millions of pills for billions of dollars. Marino had spent years working to pass such a law.
The drug industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the campaigns of the 23 members of Congress who sponsored the bill and spent over $100 million lobbying Congress.
Besides the sponsors of the bill and the drug industry, few members of Congress or others outside of Congress knew of the impact the bill would have. It was passed in Congress by “unanimous consent,” an expedited process supposedly reserved for non-controversial bills. Former White House officials say they and President Obama were unaware of the bill’s impact when it was signed into law. Requests for interviews with current and former officials, as well as dozens of Freedom of Information (FOI) Requests, have been submitted to the DEA and the Justice Department by the media to try and find out who knew what when. The interview requests have been declined or ignored, and the FOI requests have been denied or delayed; some have been pending for 18 months. [3]
This is a powerful example of the incredible influence and control our large corporations have over policy making in Washington, D.C. The large pharmaceutical corporations and their distributors have gotten Congress to make their profits from illegally selling narcotic painkillers more important than the 60,000 deaths that are occurring each year from opioid use. These deaths are roughly twice the number that occur due to gun violence or car accidents. The number of deaths last year was roughly 50% more than occurred at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Drug overdoses have become the leading cause of death among those under 50. [4]
I urge you to contact your US Representative and Senators and ask them to take real action to fight the opioid crisis. This includes spending money on addiction treatment and drug enforcement. And it requires repealing the 2016 legislation that undermined the DEA’s efforts to control the distribution of prescription, narcotic pain killers. We must assert that people’s lives, as well as recovery from and avoidance of addiction, are more important than profits for large pharmaceutical corporations.
[1] Superville, D., & Daly, M., 10/18/17, “Marino pulls name from US drug czar consideration,” The Boston Globe from the Associated Press
[2] Higham, S., & Bernstein, L., 10/16/17, “Drug industry quashed effort by DEA to cut opioid supply,” The Boston Globe from The Washington Post
[3] Higham, S., & Bernstein, L., 10/16/17, see above
[4] Katz, J., 6/5/17, “Drug deaths in America are rising faster than ever,” The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/05/upshot/opioid-epidemic-drug-overdose-deaths-are-rising-faster-than-ever.html)
Lippitt's Policy and Politics Blog 
John, Thanks for writing about the Opiod situation. It boggles the mind that it began in the medical community and has been perpetuated to put a lot of $$$ into the pockets of big pharma and their lobbyists. Our weak and ineffective Republican party seems to think the problem will go away if they do nothing.
NH is fully embroiled in battling this crisis and starting to spend more state money to case manage addiction recovery in creative ways. Not sure how effective all of it will be but forward motion is a good thing. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and my Rep. Annie Kuster are engaged and proactively letting NH voters know what they are doing at the Federal level to get some money and resources flowing on a national basis back to local officials. We can only help it will help.
Elaine
Elaine, It is mind boggling. I just heard a piece on NPR last nite about how Rep. Marino got the DEA employee who was blowing the whistle on the illegal use of prescription narcotics investigated and marginalized. And I just learned that the issue of the New Yorker that will come out on Monday has a long article on the “ruthless marketing of painkillers [that] has generated billions of dollars – and millions of addicts.” I hope there’s a huge class action lawsuit in the future for the drug makers and distributers.
Thank you, John for encouraging us to contact our MOC’s about this. Carolyn
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Thanks, Carolyn. The more I learned about how the big drug corporations and distributors fed narcotic painkillers to the public and caused the current opioid epidemic that angrier I get. And how a few in congress aided and abetted this. Let’s watch carefully to see what Congress and the President do to address this epidemic and its root cause.