Cardinal, others shipped millions of opioids to village
Two of the nation’s biggest drug distributors shipped 12.3 million doses of powerful opioids to a single pharmacy in a tiny West Virginia town over an eight-year period, a congressional committee revealed Thursday.
The Family Discount Pharmacy in Mount Gay-Shamrock received the drugs from Dublin-based Cardinal Health and a peer, McKesson Corp., between 2006 and 2014, according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The committee is investigating the sale of pills in West Virginia by wholesale drug distributors, which are required by law to monitor and report to the Drug Enforcement Administration suspicious purchase orders for opioids. When they do not, millions of pills can be diverted to users and dealers from a single pharmacy.
The new data is included in letters sent by the committee Thursday to the “Big Three” drug distributors — McKesson, Cardinal and AmerisourceBergen — demanding more information on the steps they took during those years to keep drugs off the black market.
The committee said it had analyzed data provided by the DEA to determine that Cardinal Health sent Family Discount more than 6.5 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills between 2008 and 2012. It said McKesson sent the pharmacy 5.8 million pills between 2006 and 2014. Smaller distributors also sold narcotics to the drugstore — in a rural town with 1,779 residents in 2010 — bringing the total to nearly 16.6 million by 2016.
McKesson is the fifthlargest company in the United States, with revenue of more than $192 billion, according to the Fortune 500 list. Cardinal ranked 15th on the list, with $121 billion in revenue.
West Virginia has by far the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States, at 52 people per 100,000 in 2016.
“We need detailed answers and documents from these national distributors as to why large volumes of opioids were distributed to certain areas of the state,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and ranking Democrat, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., said in a statement. “West Virginians and families devastated by the opioid crisis all over the country deserve answers.”
A spokesperson for Cardinal Health said in an email that “we can confirm that we received a letter from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and we look forward to cooperating with them in the future.”