The article makes the assumption that the likes of Walmart, Walgreens and CVS should be responsible for "monitoring" what doctors legitimate prescriptions are being asked to fill, as if they were doing anything illegal by doing this. If a licensed MD writes a prescription for a medication, their responsibility begins and ends with fulfilling that legally authorized prescription. It is bizarre to think that these companies should have some system in place to refuse to fill these legally authorized prescriptions. If the DEA wants these drugs off the street, they should work with congress to have these drugs added to the Schedule I list. Speaking of the Schedule I list, which includes Heroin (an opiod), I've never understood the rationale that could conclude that Heroin (an opiod) would be listed as a Schedule I (no medical benefit), yet all the other opiod analogs are not listed there as well. As a matter of fact, there is an Analogs Act [0] that has been in place to specifically deal with analogs of Schedule I substances. These drugs, like Oxycontin, Oxycodone, Hydrocodone, other opiod analogs, you would think would fall under the Analogs Act, but for some reason they were lobbied to not be part of that -- therefore allowing a few large players to make billions of dollars a year because of it and allow millions of people to overdose.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act

How curious, when companies look to optimize for profits, and when their profits are pegged to consumption of pharmaceuticals, they look to get people hooked on them so they can sell in quantity

I didn't see this coming at all

/s

Also notice the similarities with the food/big-sugar industry

Having a legal requirement for companies to report “suspicious” orders seems destined to fail. You receive an order for $XM in a product you sell. It looks suspicious.

You can fulfil the order and make $XM, or you can report it and get... nothing.

Now as the employee of course you want to do the right thing, so you run it up the chain. And someone says to the board “we should invest millions in better systems and people to detect suspicious orders, so that we can make less money but do the right thing”. Any wonder this didn’t happen?

The blame here seems to be with the design of the regulation/oversight. Where was the FDA/other agency reviewing a random sample of those orders and then smashing the companies for missing the suspicious ones?

No one is going to go to jail. Nothing at these companies or others that will take their place will change. None of this will help people who are addicted especially since the only thing that can help them now is to not get cut off from their supply and have access to treatment and opiates like methadone, suboxin, or even good old heroin in pure form. Our governments are so fucking incompetent in dealing with this crisis, even a multi-billion dollar settlement won't do shit. I wonder if they even really care or is this just another show they're putting on to pretend like they care when they don't? You don't need storage space to store thousands of bottles of opiates because they go very quickly. It's not a wonder, it's called tolerance. Even such basic concepts are not understood by the idiots running these governments. Nothing will change. People will continue to die. Because nothing mentioned here is an actual solution. Probably because the problem isn't opiates. The problem is people living shit lives in a shitty society. Poverty. Loneliness. Alienation. Lack of support. Lack of culture. Lack of community. Anyone who thinks our government is qualified or even cares about fixing these fundamental issues with American society is delusional. At the very least we could legalize drugs, stop the crime around them as they would be incredibly cheap, and stop the overdosing from unknown combinations that often include fentanyl or carfentanyl drugs that are tens to hundreds or thousands of times more potent than morphine. But of course, the idiots in charge won't even do that, because then how are you going to lock up all the black and brown people? What a farce.

Court filings are just statements made by random people. The simple act of a court filing saying something neither proves nor disproves the argument being made

This chart shows that the acceleration of deaths from the synthetics starting in 2014. By 2015 it was unmistakable: After being more or less stable over the prior decade, overdoses of Fentanyl, Tramadol, etc. tripled over 2 years and then tripled again. [1]

This is 2019, 4 years later, and only now are we seeing the results of action. How does this horror persist, growing so fast, killing so many and the US government under both Obama and Trump not declare war on the drug companies?

[1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-de...

It's incredibly weird that there's a war on drugs at exactly the same times as the corporations legally feed and profit from an opioid drug epidemic.

Only in America could such a contradiction be possible.

Hey, just like the government and the crack epidemic!