Drug distributors accused of flooding millions of small communities with addictive painkillers denied that their companies contributed to the opioid epidemic.
Four of five executives at a Tuesday hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigations subcommittee denied they made the epidemic worse. The hearing comes after a yearlong committee investigation found a small West Virginia town received more than 20 million opioid pills from 2008 to 2014.
Lawmakers chided all of the distributors for not doing enough to quickly identify suspicious pharmacies that acted as “pill mills” to illegally sell opioids to addicts.
“There is no logical explanation for why a town of 400 people got 9 million opioids over two years,” said committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore.
Executives with distributors Cardinal Health, Amerisource Bergen, H.D. Smith, and McKesson denied that they contributed to the epidemic. Miami-Luken was the only one of the distributors to admit that it contributed to the epidemic that federal data shows killed more than 42,000 Americans in 2016.
Miami-Luken didn’t elaborate on how the company contributed to the epidemic. Chairman Joseph Mastandrea said the board didn’t know until 2013 that the Drug Enforcement Administration had subpoenaed the company several times and that the agency had concerns with compliance.
Other distributors said they believe they did the best they could but wish they would have moved faster to clamp down on suspicious pharmacies. They all said that they have taken new steps to stop diversion of products and shipments to illicit pharmacies.
“There were pharmacists that were bad actors that McKesson itself terminated,” said company President and CEO John Hammergren. “In hindsight I would have liked to have seen us move much more quickly to identify these pharmacies.”
McKesson, Amerisource Bergen, and Cardinal Health are the biggest distributors in the country.
Several of the distributors face lawsuits from communities hit hard by the opioid epidemic for their role in the crisis.
Lawmakers trained their fire especially on McKesson, which paid the DEA 2017 a record $150 million to settle allegations that it supplied far too many opioids to pharmacies.
Hammergren blamed the DEA in part for the shipments.
“In the past we had challenges understanding the expectations that our regulators have asked us to follow,” he said.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., pointed Hammergren to a 2008 agreement between McKesson and DEA in which the distributor swore to do better at identifying suspicious opioid orders.
He said that from 2008 to 2013, McKesson’s Colorado warehouse filled 1.6 million orders but only reported 16 suspicious ones, and its Orlando facility, which supplied West Virginia, “failed to report suspicious orders,” Griffith said.
“The serious lack of suspicious order reporting does not show a high level of engagement by McKesson, does it?” Griffith asked.
“We took our responsibilities very seriously,” Hammergren responded.
