DeWine to drug industry: pay up

On ‘60 Minutes,’ he said companies knew pills ‘would kill people.’

COLUMBUS — Ohio Governor-elect Mike DeWine is sending a message to the drug companies: He’s gunning for them.

On the CBS News program “60 Minutes” on Sunday, DeWine said drugmakers and distributors of powerful prescription painkillers knew their business tactics were hurting Ohioans. Now, he says, they have to pay.

“If they didn’t know it the first couple years, they clearly would’ve seen it after that. You can’t miss it,” DeWine said of the companies’ culpability. “When one year we had close to a billion — a billion pain meds prescribed in the state of Ohio, you know, 69 per man, woman, and child in the state. And that lies at the feet of the drug companies. They’re the ones who did that.”

DeWine appeared in a segment about Mike Moore, the former attorney general of Mississippi who is now handling lawsuits filed by Ohio and other jurisdictions against the industry. Moore led the charge 25 years ago to win a $250 billion settlement against Big Tobacco and later pressured BP Oil to agree to a settlement over its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Moore and DeWine said on 60 Minutes that industry sales data, released in response to a federal court order, are crucial to the case.

“I’m not allowed to talk about the specifics. But I will simply tell you it’s shocking,” DeWine told 60 Minutes. “Anyone who was looking at those numbers, as those middlemen were, as these distributors were, clearly, clearly should’ve seen that something was dramatically wrong.”

Distribution network revealed

Burton LeBlanc, a Louisiana lawyer who works with Moore and represents hundreds of cit-

ies and counties in their opioid lawsuits, said the data tracks all transactions involving controlled substances, allowing the team to document where the pills came from and where they went.

“So, you can see that for every pharmacy in the — in the country?” the 60 Minutes reporter, Bill Whitaker, asked.

“I have it for every transaction in the United States,” LeBlanc responded.

In response to a question about what he’s learned from the data, LeBlanc said, “That the stories that you’ve heard from some of the DEA investigative agents concerning the large volumes of pills going into certain parts of our country are absolutely true.”

Moore added: “If you’ve got walking around sense and you care, you’re gonna check before you send nine million pills to a little, bitty county in West Virginia or Mississippi or Louisiana or Ohio. You’re gonna check if you care.”

‘Everybody’s got some fault’

In May 2017 Ohio filed suit against five drug makers: Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and its subsidiary Cephalon, Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Allergan. The suit, filed in Ross County Common Pleas Court, claims the companies violated Ohio’s Consumer Sales Practices Act, committed Medicaid fraud, created a public nuisance and violated the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act.

In the 60 Minutes report, Moore said Purdue Pharma created an environment “so that opioid use was OK. So if you prescribe your patients this drug, there’s less than 1 percent chance they’ll get addicted. That was a lie, a big lie.”

Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug oxycontin, declined an interview request from 60 Minutes. But in a statement the company said that when the FDA approved oxycontin in 1995 it authorized the company to state on the label that “addiction to opioids legitimately used is very rare.”

Drug distribution companies like McKesson, which had a reported $208 billion in revenue last year, also declined comment, according to CBS. But a statement from their trade association said: “It defies common sense to single out distributors for the opioid crisis ... distributors deliver medicines prescribed by a licensed physician and ordered by a licensed pharmacy.”

Moore acknowledged, “Everybody’s got some fault.” But, he said, “we have 72,000 people dying every year. Let’s figure out a way to resolve this thing. You guys made billions of dollars off of this. Take some of that money and apply it to the problem that you helped cause.”

DeWine’s challenge

The opiate crisis will be one of the biggest challenges facing the DeWine administration. Statewide about $1 billion is spent in tax dollars annually to address the opioid epidemic, including treatment, law enforcement and prevention.

As a candidate for governor, DeWine also pledged to create at least 60 more specialized drug courts, expand drug task force models, expand early intervention programs that target Ohio families and children in foster care, double substance abuse treatment capacity, and institute drug prevention education in all schools.

Along with Moore, he believes the pharmaceutical industry should help pay for the costs of these recovery initiatives.

“They flooded the State of Ohio with these opioid pills that they knew would kill people,” he said in the 60 Minutes interview.