…So this (big, sprawling) story and others we’ll be sharing aren’t themselves the problem, rather tragic aspects of it. Still, understanding them (and there’s are many more aspects here than we can excerpt in a blurb, so we hope you dig into the story) will hopefully help point toward paths leading to effective responses.
Excerpts:
“In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the DEA’s ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed according to whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi…
Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread…
…aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.
…Joe Rannazzisi [has] a law degree, a pharmacy degree and a smoldering rage at the unrelenting death toll from opioids. His greatest ire is reserved for the distributors — some of them multibillion dollar, Fortune 500 companies.
They are the middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drug stores all over the country. Rannazzisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic by turning a blind eye to pain pills being diverted to illicit use.”
However, the distributors are only part of a larger web involving business, government and medicine…. …where many parties have either via oversight or corruption enabled the problem to grow until it’s careened out of control….
…so there’s much [much] more in the story. Highly (if sadly) recommended.
#MMJ #Opioids #USpol #DEA #Congress #Drugcos
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See full article – Ex-DEA agent: Opioid crisis fueled by drug industry and Congress
