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The governor’s task force on the opioid crisis met for the second time...to receive a progress report on its efforts to rein in abuse and death resulting from prescription painkillers...Representatives of health care organizations and Nevada officials told members of the Governor’s Opioid State Action Accountability Task Force that progress was being made on four priorities identified by the panel at its first meeting...: prescriber education, treatment options, data collection and criminal justice interventions...Specifics included obtaining federal funding for three new treatment centers; development of informational presentations for schools and law enforcement; distribution of the opioid reversal drug naloxone to law enforcement; and creation of the Opioid Dashboard, a publicly available collection of state data related to the epidemic...At the task force’s third meeting in July, presenters promised to present updates on other task force goals, including identifying ways to compile real-time overdose data...

A federal appeals court...declared unconstitutional a 2017 Maryland law that lets the state attorney general sue generic drugmakers who sharply raise prices on medications...The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the main trade group for generic pharmaceutical companies in holding that the law violated the U.S. Constitution by regulating the price of transactions that occur outside of Maryland...the law violated the Constitution’s bar against states interfering with interstate commerce, by targeting wholesale rather than retail pricing in transactions that occur largely outside of Maryland...

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has laid out a bevy of initiatives that officials said would reduce drug prices for patients covered by the Medicare Part D prescription drug program—but they have made no decisions yet...That issue is whether the discounts that pharmacy benefit managers negotiate for drugs—the “rebates” that lawmakers have been raising questions about in recent months—as well as other fees, should go toward lowering the price that a patient pays at the pharmacy...“While we are not finalizing any policy in this area at this time, we appreciate the detailed submissions from stakeholders, and we are evaluating these comments as we consider future proposals,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma...It’s unclear whether lowering the amount of money that the patient pays at the pharmacy would actually lower the total amount of health care spending. According to an analysis by CMS that was part of the proposed rule in November, patients would indeed pay less, but the government would pay more...

A European decision to exclude Britain from the EU’s drug approval system from March 30 2019 - the day after Brexit - has raised alarm among drugmakers, who fear the abrupt change could disrupt medicine supplies to patients...The move confounds hopes for continued joint cooperation via the European Medicines Agency, at least during a transition or implementation period until the end of 2020 when the UK will remain closely tied to the European Union...the EMA has appointed experts from other European countries to take over work currently undertaken by Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority from next March...Since the MHRA assesses around a fifth of EU medicines, drug industry leaders fear this sudden handover will cause disruption...The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry said it was clearly in the EMA’s interest to continue to draw on the expertise of the MHRA and it urged London and Brussels to come to an early agreement...

An online pharmacy that bills itself as Canada's largest was fined $34 million...for importing counterfeit cancer drugs and other unapproved pharmaceuticals into the United States...U.S. prosecutors say Canada Drugs' business model is based entirely on illegally importing unapproved and misbranded drugs not just from Canada, but from all over the world. The company has made at least $78 million through illegal imports, including two that were counterfeit versions of the cancer drugs Avastin and Altuzan that had no active ingredient, prosecutors said...judge...approved federal prosecutors' recommended sentences that include $29 million forfeited, $5 million in fines and five years' probation for Canada Drugs...also sentenced Thorkelson (founder, Kris Thorkelson) to six months' house arrest, five years' probation and a $250,000 fine...

A federal judge...ordered "pharma bro" scammer Martin Shkreli to immediately pay a defrauded hedge fund investor about $388,000 in restitution, roughly half of what the investor asked for… The order comes a month after Judge Kiyo Matsumoto sentenced Shkreli to seven years in prison for defrauding that investor, Richard Kocher, and a number other people, as well as for conspiring to manipulate stock shares...In addition to his prison sentence, Matsumoto also imposed a fine of $75,000 on the 35-year-old Shkreli and ordered him to forfeit almost $7.4 million in assets to the federal government...

The Drug Enforcement Agency has reached an agreement with 50 attorneys general to share prescription drug data with one another to support ongoing investigations...from its Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System, which collects 80 million prescription drug transactions from manufacturers and distributors each year...Attorney General Jeff Sessions...said the data-sharing pact will “make both the DEA and our state partners more effective at finding evidence of crime.”...Exactly how that data sharing agreement would operate remains fuzzy...

Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Nevada’s amphetamine death rate is highest in the nation and will soon eclipse the state’s prescription opioid death rate if current trends continue, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...The death rate in Nevada attributed to “psychostimulants” — a class of drugs that includes methamphetamine, ecstasy and ADHD prescription drugs like Adderall and Ritalin — hit 7.5 per 100,00 in 2016, up nearly 32 percent from 2015. Prescription opioid deaths fell about 9 percent in the same time period, from 9.8 per 100,000 to 8.9 per 100,000...unlike opioids, there’s no overdose antidote...if prevention resources were devoted equally to opioid and amphetamine overdose, that could cut down on abuse and, ultimately, death...What’s needed...is public education that stresses that using amphetamines can be lethal, not just from overdose but because they can impact organ function and can be laced with opioids like synthetic fentanyl, a deadly substance...