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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has only managed to curb the supply of methamphetamines by less than 1% of annual consumption, proof that it has been a bloody failure, his main political rival, the vice president, said...Thousands of suspected drug traffickers and users have been killed in the campaign that Duterte launched soon after he won election in 2016...Vice President Leni Robredo, who was elected separately to the president, and recently served a brief stint as the president’s drug “tsar”, said vast quantities of the highly addictive drug were available because seizures had barely dented the supply...despite the number of Filipinos killed and the budget spent, the volume of shabu supply curbed didn’t exceed 1%,” Robredo told a news conference, referring to methamphetamines...READ MORE

CVS Health Corp and its Omnicare unit were sued...by the U.S. government, which accused them of fraudulently billing Medicare and other programs for drugs for older and disabled people without valid prescriptions...The Department of Justice joined whistleblower litigation accusing Omnicare of violating the federal False Claims Act for illegally dispensing drugs to tens of thousands of patients in assisted living facilities, group homes for people with special needs, and other long-term care facilities...According to a civil complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Omnicare would often assign new numbers to prescriptions after the original prescriptions expired or ran out of refills...The government said this enabled Omnicare to bill Medicare Medicaid, and Tricare...for hundreds of thousands of drugs, under what the company internally called “rollover” prescriptions, from 2010 to 2018...READ MORE

When Insys founder John Kapoor was found guilty on federal racketeering charges...it marked the stiffest conviction yet for an opioid executive at the center of the nation's addiction crisis. Now, a federal judge says prosecutors failed to present enough evidence to support some of those claims—likely lowering Kapoor's sentence...Prosecutors failed to present evidence showing...Subsys to be prescribed to patients for nonmedical purposes...The order did not affect the sales fraud charges on which those executives were convicted as part of a long-running scheme to drive up prescriptions of Subsys by underselling the drug's addictive properties and capitalizing on patient titration...READ MORE

Outcome Health, which streams pharmaceutical ads on televisions and computer tablets it installs in doctors’ offices, agreed to pay $70 million to end a U.S. criminal probe into whether it defrauded clients by selling ad inventory it did not have...Department of Justice said...Outcome entered a three-year non-prosecution agreement where it admitted that former executives and employees overbilled clients, which were mostly pharmaceutical companies, in a scheme that ran from 2012 to 2017...The Justice Department also said Outcome admitted to overstating revenue, enabling it to raise $972.5 million of equity and debt financing, including from affiliates of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Google parent Alphabet Inc and Pritzker Group, and obtain a $5 billion valuation by 2017...READ MORE

A Chinese court sentenced the scientist who created the world’s first “gene-edited” babies to three years in prison...for illegally practising medicine and violating research regulations...He Jiankui...said he had used gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to change the genes of twin girls to protect them from getting infected with the AIDS virus in the future...The backlash in China and globally about the ethics of his research and work was fast and widespread...“They have crossed the bottom line of ethics in scientific research and medical ethics.”...READ MORE

Home Depot Inc. executives said the nation’s opioid crisis could be contributing to an unexpected surge in thefts from its stores...The company said organized criminals are stealing millions of dollars’ worth of goods from it and other retailers and storing the merchandise in warehouses. The theft, which retailers call shrink, has gotten so bad that it will narrow Home Depot’s operating profit margins next year, executives said during a meeting with analysts and investors...“This is happening everywhere in retail,” Chief Executive Officer Craig Menear said. “We think this ties to the opioid crisis, but we’re not positive about that.”...READ MORE

Read any newspaper and you will be confronted with articles to related to the opioid crisis. Whether the news is highlighting death related to overdoses, over-prescriptions, a medication grey market or doctors sending patients to pill mills, the focus is one: too many opioids are being prescribed and it’s time for pharmacists to take on additional roles in the national fight against opioid addiction and death. Several states have implemented new rules related to a pharmacy’s reporting obligations while other states, such as New York, are taking distribution companies to court...Currently, lawsuits are focusing on drug distributors like RDC and McKesson, which distribute opioid drugs to pharmacies who in turn disseminate those drugs to patients. But from 2017 to the present, several pharmacy owners have been jailed and fined millions of dollars for filling fake prescriptions...READ MORE

They were good sons with promising futures who died of drug overdoses less than two months before they were set to graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno...UNR seniors Jordan Watts and Ben Taylor died just 15 days apart in March 2019 from drugs laced with a fatal dose of fentanyl...Their mothers...say their sons were recreational users who bought a couple of pills, unaware they were tainted with the deadly opioid...The dealers pleaded guilty to drug and firearm charges that carry as much as 20 years in prison and fines of $10,000: Alec Donovan...Tyler Winters...Lucas Cueller...at least eight UNR students have died of drug overdoses in Washoe County since 2017...READ MORE

The co-founders of Outcome Health and several former executives have been charged by the Department of Justice in a $1 billion fraud scheme targeting clients, lenders and investors...The DOJ...charging Rishi Shah and Shradha Agarwal, the co-founders...along with Brad Purdy, former chief operating officer and chief financial officer and Ashik Desai, former executive vice president of business operations...At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission...added the executives to its civil complaint, alleging they falsely portrayed the company’s success to investors and auditors to the tune of $487 million...The DOJ filing alleges that from 2011 to 2017, the executives bilked mostly pharma companies by selling them “tens of millions of dollars of advertising inventory that did not exist.” The indictment claims the faux sales resulted in inflated financial statements that were then used to raise financing in 2016 and 2017...READ MORE

A Florida-based charity will pay $4 million to resolve claims that it acted as a conduit for companies including Biogen Inc and Novartis AG to pay kickbacks to Medicare patients using their high-priced multiple sclerosis drugs, the U.S. Justice Department said...The settlement with the patient assistance charity The Assistance Fund marked the third so far with a foundation linked to an industry-wide probe that has resulted in $850 million in settlements with drugmakers and charities...READ MORE