Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has introduced a bill that would require drug companies to pay the U.S. government at least $7.8 billion apiece for their role in the opioid crisis.
Sanders’ bill, the Opioid Crisis Accountability Act, points to government estimates that show the opioid crisis costs the U.S. more than $78 billion a year. The surge in overdose deaths related to opioids has been attributed in large part to the overprescribing of painkillers such as OxyContin.
The bill would also ban illegal marketing and distribution of opioids and penalize companies who ignore the law with 25 percent of the profits from their opioid products. Drug executives found responsible for the epidemic could spend at least a decade in jail. The bill would monitor whether prescription painkillers were flowing to states in massive numbers, defined in the text as “medically unreasonable,” and would require people to report such a pattern to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The legislation does not yet have any co-sponsors.
“We know that pharmaceutical companies lied about the addictive impacts of opioids they manufactured,” Sanders said in a statement. “They knew how dangerous these products were but refused to tell doctors and patients. Yet, while some of these companies have made billions each year in profits, not one of them has been held fully accountable for its role in an epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.”
The overprescribing of pain relievers started during the late 1990s, when the drugs were falsely marketed as nonaddictive. Hospitals also had incentives to provide the drug to patients because they were accredited in part on their ability to lessen pain.
When rates of addiction and death began to increase during the early 2000s, government regulators urged doctors to reduce opioid prescriptions. As a result, people who had developed a dependency on the drugs or who continued to face unbearable pain turned to more easily available heroin. The illegal drug affects the brain in the same way as the painkillers and led to a surge in deaths.
In 2007, OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to misleading doctors, patients, and regulators about the drug’s potential for abuse. The suit resulted in a $600 million settlement.
By 2010, heroin overdoses had quadrupled compared to a decade earlier, and the latest death estimates show that opioids were responsible for 42,249 deaths in 2016.
During the past year, several states have issued new opioid lawsuits against Purdue, Johnson & Johnson, and Teva Pharmaceuticals, as well as distributors such as McKesson and Cardinal Health. The lawsuits are backed by the Justice Department.
Sanders noted that the local, state, and federal governments had invested billions of dollars dealing with the crisis, adding, “We must hold the pharmaceutical companies and executives that created the crisis accountable.”
While some drug companies have made billions each year in profits, not one of them has been held fully accountable for its role in an epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. That has got to change.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 17, 2018
