Opioid law draws scrutiny as drug czar nominee withdraws

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s pick to be the nation’s drug czar, Rep. Tom Marino, withdrew from consideration Tuesday after news reports focused attention on his role in pushing legislation that weakened the Drug Enforcement Administration’s power to investigate bulk shipments of prescription opiods.

Some members of Congress now say they will try to reverse Marino’s bill, and the Department of Justice plans to assess whether the law restricts investigations.

“We’re going to review it,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Tuesday when asked if current laws give law enforcement the powers they need to combat the opioid epidemic. “If we conclude they don’t have the appropriate tools, we will seek more tools.”

A spokeswoman for Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican who serves on the commission Trump appointed to recommend policy on the opioid problem, said he would support an increase in DEA authority “to go after unscrupulous drug makers and distributors.”

For years, drug companies have sold far more opioid medications in the U.S. than are being legally consumed. The U.S. consumes more opioids than any other country, Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis concluded in a report in July. In 2015, enough opioids were prescribed to medicate every American citizen for three weeks, the report found.

The 2016 law made it significantly harder for the DEA to restrict shipments of opioids by pharmaceutical wholesalers that law enforcement officials consider suspect, such as shipments to pharmacies that vastly exceed what their local markets could consume.

The law came about after Marino, R-Pa., had spent several years pushing the DEA to be more accommodating toward the companies. At a congressional hearing in 2014, Marino encouraged the head of the DEA to negotiate more with large pharmaceutical companies, saying, “big fines make headlines, but that is all they do: Press releases do not save lives.”

Marino and other backers of the law, which passed Congress almost unanimously with little debate, said it was needed to ensure that patients could receive their medications without interruption.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, DMo., introduced legislation Monday to repeal the 2016 law.

“This law has significantly affected the government’s ability to crack down on opioid distributors that are failing to meet their obligations and endangering our communities,” McCaskill said.

It is unclear how much the White House knew about Marino’s support for the legislation before he was nominated to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The topic got renewed attention this week after a report in the Washington Post and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which detailed how major drug distribution companies had hired former DEA officials to help craft the legislation and then pushed it through Congress. Marino was a major recipient of campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, more than $100,000 since 2011, the Los Angeles Times reported last year.

Nearly nine months into his presidency, Trump has been criticized for not taking more substantial actions on his campaign pledge to tackle America’s opioid epidemic, which disproportionately affects many of the areas that were key to his victory. Trump so far has not acted on a list of recommendations that his commission put forward in July.