To combat an escalating opioid epidemic, the Drug Enforcement Administration trained its sights in 2011 on Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of the highly addictive generic painkiller oxycodone.
It was the first time the DEA had targeted a manufacturer of opioids for alleged violations of laws designed to prevent diversion of legal narcotics to the black market. And it would become the largest prescription-drug case the agency has pursued.
Ultimately, the DEA and federal prosecutors would contend that the company ignored its responsibility to report suspicious orders as 500 million of its pills ended up in Florida between 2008 and 2012 — 66 percent of all oxycodone sold in the state. Government investigators alleged in internal documents that the company’s lack of due diligence could have resulted in nearly 44,000 federal violations and exposed it to $2.3 billion in fines, according to confidential government records and emails obtained by The Washington Post.
But six years later, after four investigations that spanned five states, the government has taken no legal action against Mallinckrodt. Instead, the company has reached a tentative settlement with federal prosecutors, according to sources familiar with the discussions. Under […]
I am in the field of “health” care. We do not prescribe drugs, and attempt to treat as many conditions as possible either through body work, exercise, nutrition, and nutraceuticals. Our patients are very satisfied with their care. In the US, as Stephan has previously described, we have a “for profit disease care” system not a health care system. It is a trillion dollar a year enterprise. In Tennessee it accounts for 52% of our state budget. Rarely a week goes by these days when we are not confronted by a patient who has been prescribed an opiate (in most cases erroneously) and have either become addicted or has had some extremely challenging process to detox themselves from their prescription. Never are they given instructions about how to detox properly from these drugs. 33,000 people in the US are dying from complications related to opiate addiction. This is insane. Big Pharma is in control of allopathic medicine. You only have to look at Mallinckrodt to know this is the tip of the iceberg. What has happened to the hippocratic oath? This is not health care–it is criminal.