DEA Allowed Opioid Production to Surge, Says Justice Department

Los Angeles, California -

The Justice Department’s inspector general said that the Drug Enforcement Administration allowed the production of opioids to surge even as the epidemic grew.

Michael E. Horowitz, inspector general of the US Department of Justice, said that the agency, which is also under the umbrella of the Justice Department, authorized large increases in the production of painkillers even as drug-related deaths soared.

“D.E.A. is responsible for regulating opioid production quotas and investigating its illegal diversion. We found that D.E.A. was slow to respond to this growing public health crisis and that its regulatory and enforcement efforts could have been more effective,” Horowitz said.

The inspector general added that more than 300,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses since 2000.

“We found that the rate of opioid overdose deaths in the United States grew, on average, by 8 percent per year from 1999 through 2013 and by 71 percent per year from 2013 through 2017,” Horowitz said in his review of the DEA. “Yet, from 2003 through 2013 D.E.A. was authorizing manufacturers to produce substantially larger amounts of opioids.”

The DEA is the federal agency that directly oversees access to opioids.

The inspector general cited the fact that the agency increased production quotas for oxycodone production by about 400 percent from 2002 to 2013. At this time, there was already evidence that opioids were being prescribed excessively and being misused.

His report further said that the DEA did not capture enough timely data on opioid abuse or other drug trends. He did acknowledge that the agency had “recently taken steps to address the opioid epidemic, but more work remains.”

A DEA spokeswoman said in a statement that the agency “appreciates the O.I.G.’s assessment of the programs involved in the report and the opportunity to discuss improvements made to increase the regulatory and enforcement efforts to control the diversion of opioids.”

The spokeswoman added: “The DEA uses a wide variety of tools—administrative, civil and criminal—to fight the diversion of controlled substances. While only a minute fraction of the more than 1.8 million manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and prescribers registered with D.E.A. are involved in unlawful activity, DEA continuously works to identify and root out the bad actors.”

Andrew Kolodny, a director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University said that the review did not address the problems at the root of the opioid crisis because it was narrowly focused on the DEA. Kolodny is currently testifying as an expert for government plaintiffs against pharmaceutical companies that allegedly helped spread the opioid epidemic.

“When you read the report, what you really don’t get out of it is that in almost every way in which the D.E.A. failed—except for the fact that they could have managed their data better—you have pharmaceutical industry and distributor industry influence,” he said.

The report noted that in 2013, there was a sharp decline in the DEA’s issuance of immediate suspension orders. The inspector general said the immediate suspension orders were the agency’s strongest enforcement tool because the orders can stop companies from distributing drugs.

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