Drug industry had plan to defeat DEA
Newly unsealed documents in a landmark civil case in Cleveland provide clues to one of the most enduring mysteries of the opioid epidemic: How were drug companies able to weaken the federal government’s most powerful enforcement weapon at the height of the crisis?
The industry enlisted members of Congress to limit the powers of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It devised “tactics” to push back against the agency. And it commissioned a “Crisis Playbook” to burnish its image and blame the federal government for not doing enough to stop the epidemic.
The new information is emerging through the efforts of lawyers in the massive federal lawsuit against two dozen drug companies in Cleveland who have obtained depositions from high-ranking company officials, internal company emails and confidential memos. The documents were unsealed in July after a year-long legal fight by The Washington Post and the owner of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia.
In 2016, the drug companies convinced members of Congress and Obama administration officials to rein in the DEA and force the agency to treat them as “partners” in efforts to solve the crisis. The crowning achievement of the companies was a piece of legislation known as the “Marino bill,” named after its original sponsor, which curbed the DEA’s ability to immediately suspend the operations of drug companies that failed to follow the law.
The Washington Post has twice investigated the industry’s battles with the DEA, first in 2016 and again in 2017 with “60 Minutes.”
But the full story has never been told because so few of the people involved will talk about it.
The list of people who have declined to be interviewed includes former congressman Tom Marino, R-Pa., who first proposed the bill; former acting DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg, whose agency surrendered to the pressure; former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whose department did not stand in the way of the legislation; and, finally, then-President Barack Obama, who signed it into law.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of more than 2,000 cities, towns and counties in federal court in Cleveland, seeks to hold the industry accountable for the opioid epidemic.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers are pursuing their civil case under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a law crafted to attack criminal organizations.
“Defendants carried out their coordinated strategy to weaken the DEA’s enforcement capabilities in part through the Marino Bill,” states a filing by the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case.
Lawyers for the drug companies have ridiculed the RICO argument and asked U.S. District Judge Dan Polster to toss out the case before it heads to trial, scheduled for Oct. 21.
“Plaintiffs have no evidence that Distributors associated with Manufacturers or one another, as part of a continuing unit, for the ‘common purpose of engaging in a course of unlawful conduct,’ ” drug company lawyers wrote in their motion to dismiss, which was denied by Polster on Sept. 10.