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Opioid Daily Report (8/18)
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Should Johnson & Johnson Be Helping to Fund the World Conference of Science Journalists?
Aug 17, 2017 | UNDARK
By Michael Schulson
THIS OCTOBER, 1,200 science journalists will gather in San Francisco for the World Conference of Science Journalists. Their experience there will be underwritten by foundations, universities, media organizations — and pharmaceutical companies. -
Schuyler county attorney to crack down on manufacturers, distributors of opioids
Aug 17, 2017 | Star Gazette (NY)
By Jessica Hice
Schuyler County has become the latest New York State county to join forces against manufacturers and distributors of opioid painkillers. -
Columbus Appoints Opioid Czar To Oversee Local Fight Against Epidemic
Aug 17, 2017 | Ohio Public Radio (WOSU)
By Clare Roth
Franklin County has a new Opioid Czar: Amy O’Grady. O’Grady started last week as a senior policy analyst for the Columbus City Council, and will oversee the county’s efforts to combat the opiate epidemic. -
Opioid Litigation: What’s On The Horizon (OPINION)
Aug 17, 2017 | Law 360
By David Schwartz, George Talarico and Giovanni Ciavarra
In 1996, James Campbell, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical School, gave a keynote speech at the American Pain Society’s annual conference. -
Politics and Public Policy Today
Aug 18, 2017 | Politics and Public Policy Today
By CSPAN
Rough Transcript: We'll get one more call here with a note that we will open up our phone lines a bit later on here on c-span, so stay with the program here, and we go to tacoma, washington and sandra. caller: hello. my grandson is 23, and he's addicted to opiates. he's been shooting up, tried it a few times, a couple of times. the people have had so many addicts here that -- and so many people dealing that they don't even know where they're at and they don't have the time to bust them. there are so many people here. 1:28 AMmy grandson got addicted. he had friends in high school that were dealing it. he was also prescribed it too. but -- and my thing is we need the doctors to stop prescribing it so easily and for those drugs to stop coming into our country, i mean,, you know, it's just destroying our children and it's horrible. host: what's the answer for stopping the heroin coming into the u.s., do you think? caller: put more regulations and get on it. it's killing our kids. you know, it's insanity, that it's coming in, and it's coming in all the time and we don't -- we're not stopping it enough, you know, i mean, they need to bust those people and if they find people -- because it's not the little person that's doing -- it's the big people making money off of it that are doing it. host: we'll open up our phones just a bit later on so stay with us. talking there about the overprescription of pharmaceuticals in particular, opioids. and in ohio, in that state, they have filed a lawsuit in the state of ohio against drug companies saying they have misled doctors and patients about opioid painkillers. the state is suing purdue farm, the company behind oxycon tin, johnson&johnson, teva pharmaceutical, and endopharmaceuticals and allergan. they overstated the benefits of painkillers. they targeted vulnerable populations such as the elderly and veteran. they violated antifraud and consumer protection laws. the man behind the lawsuit testified in june in washington d.c. on capitol hill.
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Should Johnson & Johnson Be Helping to Fund the World Conference of Science Journalists?
Aug 17, 2017 | UNDARK
By Michael Schulson
THIS OCTOBER, 1,200 science journalists will gather in San Francisco for the World Conference of Science Journalists. Their experience there will be underwritten by foundations, universities, media organizations — and pharmaceutical companies.
The WCSJ’s lead sponsor this year is pharma giant Johnson & Johnson, which contributed at least $400,000 to the conference. AstraZeneca, Bayer, and Sanofi each gave another $50,000. Taken together, that equals more than 20 percent of the event’s projected $2.5 million budget. The consumer genomics and biotechnology company, 23andMe, chipped in $50,000.
As a general rule, journalists aren’t allowed to take money from the people, organizations, and companies that they cover. But as journalism organizations rely more and more on corporate sponsors to fill out their conference budgets, they are opening up new avenues for companies to potentially influence science journalists, however indirectly. And along the way, they’ve created new pitfalls for science writers trying to avoid conflicts of interest.
Those dilemmas are exemplified by this year’s WCSJ, which has relied on Johnson & Johnson funding almost from the start. The annual conference rotates from country to country, and when two American organizations, the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and the National Association of Science Writers, decided in 2014 that they wanted to make a bid to host the 2017 event, they knew they’d need to show that they could cover the sizeable price tag. So they approached Johnson & Johnson.
Rosalind Reid, the executive director of CASW, told Undark that the organization has had a “very long relationship” with the company. “For various reasons, they have developed similar relationships with lots of different science journalist organizations, and it was an obvious relationship to bring forward in support of the conference,” Reid said. “They’re very respectful of the guidelines of science writing organizations, so it’s not challenging to come up with a no strings, arms-length arrangement with them.”
Sponsors are listed clearly and prominently on the conference website. And Reid stressed that, with the exception of separate, sponsored side events, none of the WCSJ’s corporate underwriters have any say in the conference’s programming.
Seema Kumar, the Johnson & Johnson representative responsible for the company’s sponsorship of the WCSJ and other science journalism events, said that she had not offered any specific requests or opinions about the conference’s content. She also rejected any suggestion that Johnson & Johnson stood to gain, at least directly, from its involvement in the conference. “To be honest with you, there is no real quote-unquote benefit other than it being corporate social responsibility,” Kumar told Undark.
Deborah Blum, the publisher of Undark and the program chair for the skills and training section of the conference, said that after the Johnson & Johnson grant had been announced, she was asked by the company to join Kumar and other J&J representatives for a sit-down meeting where possible speakers and topics for the event — including the importance of pharmaceutical research — were suggested. “We didn’t use any of that in my part of the program,” Blum said, “and I was not approached or pressured on that topic again.”
The company is hosting a sponsored field trip on the last day of the conference to its own healthcare incubator known as JLABS, and Kumar and a consultant do stay in regular contact with other conference organizers. Kumar also said that Johnson & Johnson did respond to general calls made by the event’s organizers for San Francisco area resources and scientist speakers, though she added that none of the company’s suggestions ended up being selected.
Still, some journalists might have reason to be concerned about particular WCSJ sponsors, including Johnson & Johnson. The company is currently being sued by multiple states, which allege that Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary pursued marketing and sales strategies that drove the opioid epidemic. And 23andMe has sparked controversy for flouting FDA regulations and challenging consumer privacy standards.
The Association of Healthcare Journalists, which is overseeing a track at the conference, did all of its fundraising separately because it was not comfortable with the WCSJ’s sponsorship decisions.
MIT Technology Review senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado, who received a travel reimbursement to attend world conference, said that, after reflecting more on the sponsorship model, he’s now thinking of giving that money back. “Hard to work up a lather if JnJ is only paying 10 percent of conference cost,” he wrote in an email to Undark. (The actual percentage is higher.) “Still, on a typical plane fare/hotel/conference pass 10 percent might be worth $100 to $200, which is more than the value of a coffee mug or a cash gift you’d accept, right?”
(Full disclosure: some members of Undark’s staff will be among the conference attendees, although the magazine is paying for its own travel and accommodations.)
The WCSJ case is far from an isolated example. The European Conference of Science Journalists, held in Copenhagen in June, got funding from Johnson & Johnson, too, as well as a major gift from the philanthropic wing of the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. The National Press Foundation has also recently offered science journalism workshops underwritten by Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.
In July, HealthNewsReview reported that the prestigious Poynter Institute had hosted an all-expenses-paid workshop on science fact-checking that was underwritten by the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility, an alcohol industry nonprofit. And the investigative reporter Paul Thacker has recently reported on journalism workshops that were put together by Coca-Cola and by the agro-tech industry.
Over the past two months, HealthNewsReview has taken a leading role in covering this kind of funding, with a special series on conflicts of interest. “For God’s sake, with all of the conflict of interest questions swirling around the current administration in Washington, and then with the all of the cheap shots that the current administration takes at journalism, you would think that of all times journalism right now would do everything that it could to wear steel underwear and to ensure that they were pure,” said Gary Schwitzer, the founder and publisher of HNR, in an interview with Undark. “And we just seem to be going in a different direction.”
Event organizers respond that this funding frees them up to provide better programming. They also argue that money from foundations and other philanthropies — the other primary funding stream for such events — often comes with restrictions and expectations that the donor can help to plan the event. “If you want to do these events in the current environment, where funding is — where you know where the funding is — then you have to make these choices,” said Reid, who points out that the WCSJ is costly, in part, because of the financial support it offers to students and journalists from the developing world.
I ASKED Kelly McBride, a media ethicist and Poynter vice president, what the organization would look like if they stopped taking money from corporate sources. “Could we do it? Sure. Would we reach half the journalists that we reach now, or maybe even only a third of the journalists that we reach now? Yeah, that’s absolutely what would happen,” she said. Foundation funding comes with its own problems, she argued, because “you are subject to the whims of the foundations you work for.”
McBride defended the choice to take money from an alcohol industry organization for its fact-checking workshop. “An organization within the alcohol industry that has a really specific agenda — that’s different,” she said. “It’s not the alcohol industry writ large.”
“We think journalists are pretty damn smart,” she added, “which is why we are transparent as we can possibly be about the funding.”
When Undark contacted two journalists who had served on the faculty at the Poynter science fact-checking workshop, both admitted that they had not realized at first where the money was coming from, even though the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility (FAAR) was listed in the invitation email.
“I attended the conference assuming that because it was being held by Poynter — a journalism organization — it did not present any conflict of interest for me,” Usha Lee McFarling, the West Coast correspondent for STAT, wrote in an email to Undark, adding, “this is a good reminder for me to check the details closely before I agree to participate in events even when housed at journalism conferences or by journalism organizations.”
While maintaining that the HealthNewsReview critique of the FAAR event was “unfair,” McBride announced in a blog post published Thursday that Poynter had updated and clarified its ethics policy — including its handling of funding from outside sources.
In our interview, Reid, the WCSJ organizer, recalled days when publications had more money, and, she said, media organizations didn’t have to hunt so far afield for support. “I came up in those days,” she said. “I wish we still had them.”
But Schwitzer, for one, remained skeptical that there weren’t other sources of money available.
“They’re out there,” he said. “And until you show me that you’ve exhausted all those other options, I’m going to keep my knife sharpened in addressing you taking industry money.”
Michael Schulson is an American freelance writer covering science, religion, technology, and ethics. His work has been published by Pacific Standard magazine, Aeon, New York magazine, and The Washington Post, among other outlets, and he writes the Matters of Fact and Tracker columns for Undark.
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Schuyler county attorney to crack down on manufacturers, distributors of opioids
Aug 17, 2017 | Star Gazette (NY)
By Jessica Hice
Schuyler County has become the latest New York State county to join forces against manufacturers and distributors of opioid painkillers.
This comes just a week after President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national emergency.
The County Legislature voted Monday to retain the firm of Napoli Shkolnik, PLLC, which is based out of New York City and specializes in personal injury lawsuits, the office announced.
The legal team of Napoli Shkolnik will work as special counsel with Schuyler County Attorney Steven Getman, lead attorney.
Getman said he believes the opioid issue has immensely affected Schuyler County.
"Over the past few years, despite its small population, Schuyler County has seen an uptick in opioid and heroin use and overdose," Getman said in a statement Tuesday.
During an interview with the Star-Gazette on Thursday, he elaborated on why this issue is important to him.
"We have seen a large increase in emergency room visits and mental health diagnoses that appear to be tied to opioid abuse in Schuyler County," Getman said.
In 2016, the Schuyler County Health Department reported almost 70 felony drug arrests, which is much higher than the usual annual average of, at most, 15 arrests, Getman said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, significant increases in drug overdoses in 2014 and 2015 occurred in many states, including New York. In the same time period, the overdose death rate for the state increased 20 percent.
Paul Napoli, of Napoli Shkolnik, said he believes opioids are toxic. "These drug companies have poisoned our communities and polluted our children," he said in a statement released by the law office.
Napoli Shkolnik announced in March they will be representing Nassau County in New York State. Other cities represented will be Datyon, Ohio, Manchester, New Hampshire, Parma, Ohio and Niagara County, New York.
Another New York State county took action in February.
Filed on behalf of Broome and Erie counties, the suit alleges multiple companies, including Purdue Pharma L.P. and Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., engaged in "deceptive acts and practices, false advertising, public nuisance, violation of New York Social Services laws, fraud and unjust enrichment," according to a statement released by the firm.
According to the Napoli Shkolnik, Schuyler County taxpayers will not have to pay for any costs accrued by the suit, even if there is a loss.
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Columbus Appoints Opioid Czar To Oversee Local Fight Against Epidemic
Aug 17, 2017 | Ohio Public Radio (WOSU)
By Clare Roth
Franklin County has a new Opioid Czar: Amy O’Grady. O’Grady started last week as a senior policy analyst for the Columbus City Council, and will oversee the county’s efforts to combat the opiate epidemic.
“Not only will we be working on specific action items to fight the drug epidemic, but it’s also really making sure that community agencies and the people in Franklin County are working together to combat this problem,” O’Grady says.
Columbus Council said O'Grady's hiring is another step in the county's Opiate Action Plan, which focuses on addiction prevention, reducing overdose deaths, and expanding treatment access.
"Amy O’Grady’s experience in the field of addiction and mental health is invaluable,” said council president Zach Klein in a statement.
O’Grady briefly served as a judge in the 10th District Court of Appeals, but most recently worked in Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office as the director of Criminal Justice Initiatives. After her state-level experience, focusing on Franklin County will be quite a change.
“I think if you talked with anybody in the state they would agree that a lot happens – most things happen at the local level,” O’Grady says. “At the end of the day, it wasn’t the Attorney General’s office or the Governor that would dig their heels in and roll their sleeves up and do the work.”
Earlier this year, Columbus saw in-fighting between the county coroner, the Board of Commissioners, and Mayor Andrew Ginther over the structure and leadership of the opiate task force. O’Grady seems to want to avoid that conflict entirely, saying it’s her job to have relationships with all local agencies.
Though many localities in Ohio made headlines with decisions to sue opioid distributers and manufacturers – including Cincinnati, Clermont County, Dayton, and even DeWine’s office – O’Grady says that decision is up to county leaders.
O’Grady says her office will also consider action on prevention efforts and other health issues that come with addiction.
“I’ve said this before: It’s a balancing act,” O’Grady says. “You certainly have to look at what we can do for people that are in the midst of this crisis, people that need treatment, family members that are at a loss about how to get their loved ones help, and are really struggling because their loved ones are in the depths of this disease.”
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Opioid Litigation: What’s On The Horizon (OPINION)
Aug 17, 2017 | Law 360
By David Schwartz, George Talarico and Giovanni Ciavarra
In 1996, James Campbell, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical School, gave a keynote speech at the American Pain Society’s annual conference.
Campbell argued that hospitals must change their views on pain management by treating it as “The Fifth Vital Sign,” elevating it to the importance of collecting standard signs and symptoms (e.g., blood pressure, temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate) as part of a standard medical exam.
Campbell’s idea spread rapidly, changing basic hospital protocol to including not only taking patients’ medical histories and vital signs, but also asking, “do you have any pain today?” Patients’ pain would be evaluated on a scale of 1 to 10 with increasing severity and even include charts or pictures of relevant pain scales in every case, even if pain was not at all what the patient was hospitalized for.
Though this attitude towards pain certainly raised awareness, in terms of management it simply resulted in increased rates of opioid prescriptions so that hospitals could demonstrate results. Further, patients developed the attitude that their pain should always be “at zero,” whether this was doable or not.
As Campbell’s ideas gained momentum in the practice of clinical medicine, another factor conspired to dramatically increase the use of opioid painkillers. In January 1980, Jane Porter and Hershel Jick, two young researchers at Boston University Medical Center, published a short letter to the editor (100 words total) in January 1980’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The short letter described the incidence of narcotic addiction in nearly 40,000 hospitalized medical patients who the authors claimed were closely monitored. They reported only four cases of “reasonably well documented addiction” in their patient population, with only one “major” addiction. They concluded that “despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.”
Since its publication this short paragraph was cited nearly a thousand times (as of July 2017) as a way to downplay the addictive potential of pain medication. Importantly, the scope of Porter and Jick’s study was extremely narrow and only evaluated pain medication administered in hospital settings — i.e., it did not evaluate pain medications that were being taken home by the patient. But this finding, combined with physicians’ aggressive approach to pain management as “the Fifth Vital Sign,” fostered a huge increase in the prescribing of pain medication.
Recently, this letter has come under attack in the medical community as partially responsible for the opioid epidemic. For example, a recent letter to the editor published in June 2017 concluded that the 1980 letter has been “heavily and uncritically cited as evidence that addiction was rare with long-term opioid therapy.”
The Opioid Epidemic
OxyContin, a slow-release form of the now-generic narcotic oxycodone, is seen by many as the biggest player in the current opioid epidemic. Developed in Germany in 1916 in response to the heroin ban, oxycodone was designed to be a better, less addictive pain management medication as compared to other available opioids (e.g., heroin, codeine and morphine). Ironically, it turns out that oxycodone has itself since been found to be highly addictive.
Oxycodone was first introduced to America in 1939, and though it was used in a variety of drugs throughout the following decades, such as Percodan and Percocet, the opioid did not become widely used until Purdue Pharma began manufacturing its brand of oxycodone (OxyContin) in 1996. OxyContin went on to become the bestselling narcotic pain reliever in the country in 2001, and its use remains widespread today.
Like all opioids, Oxycodone functions by binding to and activating opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord, which are responsible for both the drug’s pain control attributes and for its euphoric effects. It is, of course, the euphoric effects resulting from the stimulation of opioid receptors that are pursued by addicts, as these effects are highly addictive. And addiction can, in many cases, lead to overdose and death.
Usage of opioid drugs like OxyContin has increased drastically over the past few decades; the statistics are staggering. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration even decided in 2015 that OxyContin could be prescribed to children as young as 11 years old. However, with all of these prescriptions, addiction has often followed.
One study reports that over 2.4 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from opioid use disorders. Consistent with the fact that addiction can often lead to death, another study reported that “an average of 91 people in the United States die every day from an opioid-related overdose.” But even given both of these statistics, the number of prescriptions for pain drugs is still growing. Though this increase in prescriptions for opioids has put pain problems at an all-time low, it has also put opioid addition at an all-time high.
However, in addition to the rise in prescription volume, patients also turn to other opioid agents. One recently published study found that as legal opioids become unavailable to users, those users turn to heroin and other illicit opioids. Due to an increase in accessibility, heroin's use as a primary opioid has risen sharply. It was also noted in the same study that because of the lack of experience many users have with serious opioids, there has been an increase in the number of fatalities associated with heroin use.
With the growth of interest in, and prescriptions for, pain-suppressing opioids like OxyContin, some have speculated that litigation will follow. Some have even forecast that it could be a mass tort the size of Vioxx or other high-profile cases. Such litigation could potentially take a number of forms, including personal injury lawsuits making design defect and/or failure-to-warn claims. Alternatively, plaintiffs could cite consumer fraud statutes, arguing liability based on specific promotional language used for the products.
Not surprisingly, plaintiffs have argued that states’ consumer fraud laws are applicable to the sale of prescription drugs.[1] For example, parents of a five-year-old child who began to experience seizures allegedly resulting from an improperly high dose of neurotoxin (Botox) prescribed off-label for complications from cerebral palsy brought an action against Allergan, alleging violations of the Vermont Consumer Fraud Act. Drake v. Allergan Inc., 63 F. Supp. 3d 382 (D. Vt. 2014). In this case, the court denied Allergan’s motion for summary judgment on the Vermont Consumer Fraud Act. Id.
In New Jersey, the trial-level Superior Court recognized the validity of bringing suit under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act for deceptive labeling in a putative class action concerning Vioxx where the plaintiff sought “economic damages resulting from the purchase and not personal injury damages.” See Kleinman v. Merck & Co., 417 N.J. Super. 166, 188, 8 A.3d 851, 865 (Law Div. 2009) (devoting extensive analysis to the N.J. Consumer Fraud Act claim but denying class certification because “the court cannot find that a class action is a superior mechanism for adjudication of these claims”).
Similarly, it has been held that New York’s Consumer Protection from Deceptive Acts and Practices, Gen. Bus. § 349–350-f, extends to prescription drugs.[2] Plaintiffs have even sued under consumer fraud statutes where the injury is transient or perceived merely because they could have been injured, although many of those suits have failed. See, e.g., Williams v. Purdue Pharma Co., 297 F. Supp. 2d 171, 172 (D.D.C. 2003) (dismissing class action suit and finding plaintiffs could not sue for money damages under D.C. law as consumers injured by the drug manufacturers' allegedly-fraudulent advertising claims; patients were prescribed a drug for pain that lacked efficacy, but they suffered no ill effects); Rivera v. Wyeth-Ayerst Labs., 283 F.3d 315 (5th Cir. 2002) (finding insufficient injury where purchasers of prescription drugs sought recovery of economic damages after learning the drug had been withdrawn from the market because it caused liver damage in other patients).
Liability of Manufacturers and Retailers
The manufacturers of these drugs are not the only defendants; retailers have become targets as well. In fact, in addition to the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured these drugs, there have already been lawsuits filed that name big retailers as defendants. In one such case, the Cherokee Nation in West Virginia is suing 3 major distribution companies as well as 2 retailers for profiting from “sale of prescription opioids to the citizens of the Cherokee Nation in quantities that far exceeded the number of prescriptions that could reasonably have been used for legitimate medical purposes.”
Other lawsuits have also been filed. For example, another lawsuit, filed by the DEA’s Detroit Field Division, alleged that Mallinckrodt LLC failed to design and implement an effective system to detect and report “suspicious orders” for controlled substances. These suspicious orders are those that are unusual in frequency, size or other patterns. The charges allege that Mallinckrodt supplied distributors who in term supplied various pharmacies and pain clinics without notifying DEA of these suspicious orders. Mallinckrodt has agreed to pay $35 million to settle these allegations.
In late June 2017, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter filed a state court lawsuit against four corporate defendants that manufactured opioid pain medication, Purdue Pharma, Allergan, Cephalon and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, alleging that defendants’ deceptive marketing caused the state's opioid epidemic. The lawsuit alleges that defendant manufacturers "executed massive and unprecedented marketing campaigns ... misrepresent[ing] ... risks of addiction from their opioids” and also “touted unsubstantiated benefits." As to relief, the Oklahoma Attorney General seeks injunctive relief and money damages and penalties, including punitives, legal fees, Medicaid reimbursement and consumer reimbursement.[3]
Several counties in New York state have sued opioid manufacturers after hiring a private law firm to prosecute the matter, with Suffolk County filing last August (2016). The suit alleges that the manufacturers utilized deceptive practices in their promotion and in advertising of the drug’s effectiveness and safety in pain management. In April 2017, plaintiffs counsel for three New York counties (Suffolk, Erie and Broome counties) remarked that his law firm has been contacted by Schenectady County and 9 other counties in New York state. Meanwhile, other jurisdictions, from Washington and California to Illinois and West Virginia, have likewise sued corporate defendants concerning opioids.
The onslaught of suits against retailers (among others) is not likely to abate. Sophisticated plaintiffs firms have ramped up plaintiff recruitment to municipalities, counties and states, as evidenced by websites such as Baron & Budd’s, which likens the effort to tobacco litigation. That website advertises that the firm’s “lawyers ... want to help communities hold negligent opiate distributors and pharmaceutical companies accountable for the opioid epidemic in the United States” and specifically mentions targeting retailers and the prime corporate opioid defendants that can be named.[4]
Taken together, the vigorous plaintiff recruitment and the host of new lawsuits likely presage others to follow, and should they succeed, could open a Pandora’s box for many household-name retailers.
Steps Retailers Can Take
If these forecasts prove to be accurate, manufacturers and marketers will certainly find themselves in the crosshairs of future litigation. These lawsuits are being brought by state attorneys general, with New Hampshire having filed suit most recently.[5] Additional suits may well be forthcoming from individual plaintiffs recruited by the plaintiffs bar (alleging consumer fraud actions), as well as health and welfare funds and insurers seeking recovery for having reimbursed injured persons. These actions, in turn, could provide opportunities for retailers to be proactive and take specific actions to minimize risk.
For example, one recent study found that when ward pharmacists reviewed doctor-prepared prescriptions of oxycodone, both pre- and post-intervention, the proportion of patients who were supplied oxycodone was reduced, but the amount supplied per patient was not. Thus, intervention by a retailer can have a great deal of impact on prescribing practices — in this case, reducing the total amount of oxycodone supplied.
Should retailers decide to intervene, there are many steps they could take. One such step would be to work with organizations like The Center for Retail Compliance (CRC), an initiative of the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) created to help retailers with compliance and regulatory needs.
The CRC believes that there is not enough regulation in place to help the retailers do what they need to, and thus their vision is to “develop a resource that will help retailers develop, enhance, and evaluate their compliance programs”. They aim to provide both resources and a community throughout the industry. Organizations like the CRC could be great resources for retailers, especially those with high potential for liability.
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Politics and Public Policy Today
Aug 18, 2017 | Politics and Public Policy Today
By CSPAN
Rough Transcript: "We'll get one more call here with a note that we will open up our phone lines a bit later on here on c-span, so stay with the program here, and we go to tacoma, washington and sandra. caller: hello. my grandson is 23, and he's addicted to opiates. he's been shooting up, tried it a few times, a couple of times. the people have had so many addicts here that -- and so many people dealing that they don't even know where they're at and they don't have the time to bust them. there are so many people here. 1:28 AMmy grandson got addicted. he had friends in high school that were dealing it. he was also prescribed it too. but -- and my thing is we need the doctors to stop prescribing it so easily and for those drugs to stop coming into our country, i mean,, you know, it's just destroying our children and it's horrible. host: what's the answer for stopping the heroin coming into the u.s., do you think? caller: put more regulations and get on it. it's killing our kids. you know, it's insanity, that it's coming in, and it's coming in all the time and we don't -- we're not stopping it enough, you know, i mean, they need to bust those people and if they find people -- because it's not the little person that's doing -- it's the big people making money off of it that are doing it. host: we'll open up our phones just a bit later on so stay with us. talking there about the overprescription of pharmaceuticals in particular, opioids. and in ohio, in that state, they have filed a lawsuit in the state of ohio against drug companies saying they have misled doctors and patients about opioid painkillers. the state is suing purdue farm, the company behind oxycon tin, johnson&johnson, teva pharmaceutical, and endopharmaceuticals and allergan. they overstated the benefits of painkillers. they targeted vulnerable populations such as the elderly and veteran. they violated antifraud and consumer protection laws. the man behind the lawsuit testified in june in washington d.c. on capitol hill."
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