Last week marked yet another ill-conceived media attack on the drug distributors. In an attempt to paint the broader industry as a group of entirely bad actors, the press has yet again taken data out of context and pushed the false narrative that distributors knowingly fueled the opioid epidemic.

In this case, the public release of the Automated Reports and Consolidated Ordering System, or ARCOS, database spanning from 2006 to 2012 demonstrated that distributors document each order of prescription opioids and share that information exclusively with the Drug Enforcement Agency . However, what the majority of the reporting failed to point out is that DEA, which alone had access to that information, acted insufficiently, if it acted at all.