Wall Street’s pushers

Big Pharma needs to answer for the opioid epidemic and all the harm it has caused.

The harrowing truth is that major pharmaceutical companies have marketed highly addictive painkillers to doctors for more than a decade, downplaying the danger and triggering a national epidemic.

Open your medicine cabinet and take a look at the pill bottles inside. If you’re like millions of other Americans, you might find some leftover opioids.

Don’t be surprised. Physicians in our country write an estimated 200 million opioid prescriptions each year. As many as 92 percent of their patients don’t use all the pills they’re given, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Surgery. Even well-intentioned doctors prescribe too many opioids, their patients take too many pills and average Americans become addicts.

Now, it’s about time some of the parties responsible for this national health crisis are held accountable. Harris County has filed suit against a host of drug manufacturers, distributors, doctors and even a pharmacist to hold them civilly liable for their roles in the opioid epidemic. County Attorney Vince Ryan argues that pharmaceutical makers knew from the outset the drugs they were selling were addictive. The lawsuit pointedly describes what happened next.

“Driven by profit, defendants engaged in a campaign of lies, half-truths and deceptions to create a market that encouraged the over-prescribing and long-term use of opioids even though there was no scientific basis to support such use,” the suit says.

The harrowing truth is that major pharmaceutical companies have marketed highly-addictive painkillers to doctors for more than a decade, downplaying the danger and triggering a national epidemic. Meanwhile, drug makers, trade associations and other groups bankrolled by the pharmaceutical industry have paid politicians more than $140 million to block efforts to restrict access to opioids like Vicodin and Oxycontin.

A startling investigative report conducted by The Washington Post and CBS’ “60 Minutes” recently revealed that several members of Congress, in a lobbying drive fueled by a number of large drug distributors, undermined the Drug Enforcement Agency’s dogged efforts to stem the illegal flow of opioids onto America’s streets. For example, one drug distributor shipped 11 million doses to a county with a population of 25,000 people. But under pressure from members of Congress taking campaign cash from drug interests, the DEA changed some of its rules and deprived its agents of the ability to crack down on such suspicious sales.

Now drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, killing 52,404 people in 2015. Most of those deaths involved an opioid, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Every day, roughly 91 Americans die from opioid overdose. But the damage doesn’t stop with prescription drugs. Patients who take opioids recommended by their doctors discover they’re addicted only after they exhaust their supply of legal pills. If they can’t obtain opioids, all too many of them turn to street dealers who supply them with heroin. A Houston physician specializing in addiction recently told the Chronicle’s editorial board about an average-looking man in a business suit who broke down in tears as he confessed he never imagined himself becoming “a man who’d stick a needle in his arm.” He had become hooked on a legally prescribed opioid, then progressed to heroin.

Harris County joins a long list of governments suing major pharmaceutical manufacturers over the opioid epidemic. At the same time, Texas has joined a bipartisan coalition of 40 state attorneys general that have launched investigations into various opioid makers.

If the deadly narcotics these manufacturers have been selling came from poppy fields or coca plants in South America, our government would fight it with everything the failed war on drugs could muster. Instead, the pushers peddle their products in our neighborhood pharmacies and sell shares of their companies on Wall Street. Now they need to answer for the epidemic from which they’ve richly profited. Lawsuits like the case filed by Harris County are a good start.