The Drug Enforcement Agency was “slow to respond” to the opioid overdose crisis that took the lives of more than 300,000 Americans since 2000, the Justice Department watchdog found.
The investigative report released Tuesday by the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General, led by Michael Horowitz, identified a number of straightforward fixes the agency agreed to take related to its failures to balance preventing opioids getting into the black market with making sure doctors, hospitals, and scientists could still get them.
“We found that the rate of opioid overdose deaths in the United States grew, on average, by 8 percent per year from 1999 through 2013 and by 71 percent per year from 2013 through 2017,” the DOJ inspector general wrote. “Yet, from 2003 through 2013 DEA was authorizing manufacturers to produce substantially larger amounts of opioids.”
The agency didn’t properly track the drugs using its data systems, punish people or organizations who were mishandling them, or fully vet the exporters, manufacturers, distributors, dispensers, and healthcare practitioners who are required to register with the agency, according to the report.
The watchdog said while the agency has started to address the crisis, it should develop a national prescription opioid enforcement strategy, conduct criminal background investigations of all new registrant applicants, and require electronic prescribing for all controlled substance prescriptions.
President Trump declared the epidemic a national health emergency in 2017.
“The misuse of and addiction to opioids, including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, has led to a national crisis that affects not only public health, but also the social and economic welfare of the country,” the DOJ watchdog report said.
An agency representative told the Washington Examiner, “While only a minute fraction of the more than 1.8 million manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and prescribers registered with DEA are involved in unlawful activity, DEA continuously works to identify and root out the bad actors.”
The representative also said the agency has removed an estimated 900 registrations in each of the past eight years and that it fined people and organizations breaking the laws $194 million in civil penalties in 2017, more than the previous seven years combined. As of August, the agency has levied $51 million in civil penalties this year.
“There has also been a precipitous decline in the number of these opioid prescriptions since the beginning of [the Trump] administration, down more than 30% from January 2017 to August 2019,” the agency representative said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2017, there were 70,237 drug overdose deaths, including 47,600 — or nearly 68% — involving an opioid, meaning there was an average of 130 opioid overdose deaths each day. The CDC further reported that between 2000 and 2014, drug overdose deaths increased by 137%, and a 200% rise in opioid overdose deaths specifically, including a 45% rise in prescription opioid overdose deaths (excluding methadone) between 2016 and 2017 alone.
And the National Institute on Drug Abuse showed that nearly 80% of those who began abusing illicit opioids in the 2000s got their start by abusing prescription opioids first. Beyond the loss of life, the opioid epidemic is also estimated to cost the country $78.5 billion each year.
