A congressional investigation has determined why West Virginia is “the epicenter of the nation’s opioid epidemic and the state with the highest drug overdose death rate in the country,” said U.S. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), chairman of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“The Energy and Commerce Committee spent more than 18 months investigating allegations of pill dumping in West Virginia,” Rep. Walden said on Dec. 19 in a joint statement released with U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), the committee’s ranking member. “Our bipartisan investigation revealed systemic failures by both distributors and the DEA that contributed to – and failed to abate – the opioid crisis in West Virginia.”
Their comments are based on a newly released Energy and Commerce Committee report from its investigation into allegations of opioid-dumping in rural West Virginia towns.
The Majority Staff report, Red Flags and Warning Signs Ignored: Opioid Distribution and Enforcement Concerns in West Virginia, identified the limited effectiveness of wholesale drug distributors’ compliance programs, as well as failure by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to do its job enforcing compliance, according to the lawmakers’ statement.
Their lack of action “contributed to the worsening of the opioid epidemic in West Virginia,” the congressmen’s statement says.
The Energy and Commerce Committee staff recommended several legislative solutions in their report, including that Congress consider enacting additional suspicious order requirements to clarify registrant responsibilities and to supplement the suspicious order requirements recently codified in the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, H.R. 6.
The sweeping bill, introduced by Rep. Walden in June, became law on Oct. 24 and represents the nation’s largest legislative effort focused on fighting a single drug crisis in American history, according to his staff.
Among other recommendations from the report, the DEA should work with contracted experts to create a data platform that provides real-time data to registrants; distributors should require that pharmacies dispense data in a way that would enable distributors to identify each pharmacy’s prescribing physicians; and if red flags are raised about a pharmacy, that pharmacy should be subject to heightened monitoring, according to a summary provided by Rep. Walden’s office.
“Blame for the opioid epidemic is widespread and goes far beyond the bounds of this investigation,” concluded the report. “Pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmacists, physicians, drug traffickers, and others have contributed to this problem as well.
“This investigation has revealed that neither the DEA nor the distributors rose to the occasion to help mitigate the opioid epidemic,” according to the report. “The committee will continue its bipartisan work to examine the causes and effects of the opioid epidemic.”