Opioid distributors to testify at House panel

WASHINGTON – Top executives from five major drug distributors will face questions Tuesday from lawmakers investigating how millions of prescription painkillers ended up flooding into small towns in West Virginia, feeding the opioid epidemic in a state with the nation’s highest drug overdose rate.

The hearing before a House subcommittee comes on the one-year anniversary of the panel opening a bipartisan investigation into possible pill dumping in the Mountain State.

“As we work to develop solutions to combat the opioid crisis, we must fully understand the root causes of it — and this investigation is an important part of that process,” said Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

The subcommittee will hear from the leaders of five drug distributors — the McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc., AmerisourceBergen Corp., Miami-Luken Inc., and H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Co. — that are at the heart of the investigation, Harper said.

“Through their testimony, we hope to gain a more complete picture of the crisis that unfolded in West Virginia and across our nation,” he said.

The executives’ testimony could become a pivotal moment in the investigation and evokes comparisons to a hearing more than two decades ago in which leaders of the nation’s seven largest tobacco companies appeared before a different House subcommittee and testified they did not believe that cigarettes were addictive.

That 1994 hearing is now viewed as a turning point in the anti-smoking debate and opened the door to a torrent of lawsuits and legislation that eventually led to the federal regulation of cigarettes.

In the opioids probe, lawmakers want to know about the companies’ practices in West Virginia in light of reports that distributors may have supplied the state with questionably high quantities of the drugs.

In the small community of Kermit, which sits across the border from Kentucky and has a population of just 406, a single pharmacy received nearly 9 million opioid pills over two years, according to the House subcommittee.

In nearby Williamson, population 3,191, drug distributors shipped nearly 21 million pain pills over a 10-year period to two pharmacies — Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug Co., the panel said, citing data from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The pharmacies are located just four blocks from each other.

“We must fully understand the root causes of (the opioid crisis) — and this investigation is an important part of that process.”

Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss. Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

“How could this happen?” Harper asked.

In a series of letters to distributors, congressional investigators requested that the companies provide a list of the 10 largest pharmacy customers in West Virginia, based on the shipped dosage units of hydrocodone and oxycodone.

They also asked for the results of any internal or external investigations related to suspicious order monitoring and for an accounting of West Virginia customer orders that exceeded limits set by the distributor, including any explanation of why the drugs were released for shipment.

The letters provide some details about shipments of hydrocodone and oxycodone into West Virginia.

Michael Collins

USA TODAY