A drug database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States reveals an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic.
And while we’ve focused on Purdue Pharmaceuticals, it turns out that a company located where I live in Richmond, VA, Mckesson, was actually the number one distributor of opioids– selling and pushing over fourteen billion pills between 2006 -2012. Purdue was actually fourth.
Both the drug companies and the pharmacies fought the release of this drug database. And a West Virginia newspaper took them on and asked the Washington Post to partner with them to force the release these records starting in 2016.
How does anyone with a conscious ignore nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012? The answer is greed. As long as people were making money, it was easy to ignore lives lost. What kind of people do that?
I struggle to begin to understand how many fought the release of this information that tracks the transactional data of every pain pill sold in the United States.
Thank you Amy S for sharing the article and there is a link below.
- Five takeaways from the DEA’s pain pill database– shorter article
- 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic – longer article
The statistics in this article were staggering. And enlightening. So very sad. The dark backstory of the opioid crisis is coming out and greed is at the very root of it all, as you said.
I just can’t fathom why SO MANY just didn’t care.