While President Trump has suggested the death penalty for dealers as a way to battle opioids, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has instead wielded the lawsuit.
Specifically, he sued the Drug Enforcement Agency last December on the grounds the agency was allowing too much opioid production, valuing the drug industry’s demands over public health.
Morrisey argued that the DEA’s “quota system is fundamentally broken,” as he put it in a statement this week. And the Justice Department seemed to agree. In response, Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week directed the DEA to review and reconsider the opioid production quota.
This is a huge win for all of West Virginia and for Morrisey specifically. “For far too long,” Morrissey said this week, the DEA “served the industry’s wants, instead of the patients’ needs, inexcusably neglecting evidence of diversion to rely on a formula that continues to kill hundreds each day.”
Because of their ability to do as much harm as good, opioid production is heavily regulated by the federal government. Overprescription has fueled the epidemic of abuse. Critics like Morrisey argue that the pharmaceutical industry has confused demand with legitimate demand, flooding the market and costing lives across the country.
“Federal data estimates that in 2016 more than 64,000 people died from opioid overdoses,” the Washington Examiner’s Robert King explained when the news broke. “West Virginia is one of several states that was hit hard by the epidemic, with 884 people dying due to drug overdoses in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
The new quota changes are meant to curb the opioid supply making it more difficult for those addicts to get their hands-on drugs in the first place. And there is another side-effect: a big political boost for Morrisey who hopes to defeat Republican Rep. Evan Jenkins for a chance to challenge incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V.
While Manchin and Jenkins have advocated on this issue in Washington, for now Morrisey looks like the one actually getting something done. Come election day, he can remind voters that when he was attorney general, West Virginia went it alone, sued the federal government over opioids, and won.
