Opioid distributors face tough questions
Top executives face questions from lawmakers
House subcommittee investigating possible pill dumping in West Virginia
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., MiamiLuken Inc. and H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Co. — that are at the heart of the investigation, Harper said.
The executives’ testimony could become a pivotal moment in the investigation and evokes comparisons to a hearing more than two decades ago when leaders of the nation’s seven largest tobacco companies appeared before a different House subcommittee and testified that they did not believe that cigarettes were addictive.
That 1994 hearing is now considered a turning point in the national antismoking debate and opened the door to a torrent of lawsuits and legislation that eventually led to the federal regulation of cigarettes.
In the opioids inquiry, lawmakers want to know about the companies’ practices in West Virginia in light of reports that distributors may have sup- plied the state with questionably high quantities of the drugs.
In the 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 10 years to two pharmacies — Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug Co., the panel said, citing data from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The pharmacies are just four blocks from each other.
“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, citing government data and news reports about the extent of opioid addiction, provide some details about shipments of hydrocodone and oxycodone into West Virginia.
Two Family Discount Pharmacy locations in Mount Gay-Shamrock, population 1,779, and Stollings, population 316, received shipments of more than 20 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone from 2006 to 2016, according to the committee data. The two pharma- cies are just 3 miles apart.
McKesson supplied nearly 6 million of the pills to the Mount Gay-Shamrock location from 2006 to 2014. Cardinal Health supplied more than 6 million pills to the pharmacy between 2008 and
2012. That means Cardinal Health shipped an average of 3,561 pills every day to this single pharmacy, the House panel said.
AmerisourceBergen distributed nearly 70 million doses of hydrocodone and 29 million doses of oxycodone into the state over a five-year period.
Miami-Luken shipped more than
24 million doses of the two drugs to five West Virginia pharmacies between
2005 and 2015.
Both the House and the Senate are considering a package of bills to tackle the opioid epidemic. Action is expected this summer.