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The FDA failed to verify whether a program designed to help control the opioid crisis actually worked because of poor oversight, according to a study published...in JAMA Internal Medicine...The findings indicate that the FDA could not determine if the program to train more than 160,000 doctors on cutting back their prescribing of opioids did any good..."What's surprising here is the design of the program was deficient from the start," the study's senior author Caleb Alexander said...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

Multibillion-dollar settlements in pharma are a rare occurrence, but things are changing rapidly. Only weeks ago, two drugmaker deals were floated that would rank among the biggest ever if they are eventually approved...The first—a whopping $23 billion deal from Teva to end thousands of state and local opioid lawsuits...The largest deal ever approved was Merck’s $4.85 billion agreement in 2007 to settle thousands of suits against its arthritis drug Vioxx...The second deal reportedly on the table—a $4 billion opioid offer from Johnson & Johnson—would rank as the second largest settlement ever reached. That’s not even mentioning the deal Purdue Pharma is reportedly working on for up to $12 billion to end its own opioid suits...READ MORE

1. Reckitt Benckiser—$1.4B
2. Johnson & Johnson, Bayer—$775M
3. Allergan—$750M
4. Actelion—$360M
5. Teva, Endo, Teikoku Seiyaku—$270M combined
6. Purdue—$270M
7. Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, others—$248M combined
8. Insys—$225M
9. Teva—$135M
10. Astellas, Amgen—$125M combined

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

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law HB 2088, which requires that all pharmacists who dispense Schedule II controlled substances provide written notice on the safe disposal of controlled substances unless the dispensing pharmacy is authorized to take back those drugs for disposal, regularly accepts those drugs for safe disposal or provides the patient—at no cost—"chemicals to render the unused drugs unusable" or a mail-in pouch. This law goes into effect on January 1, 2020...DisposeRx, which has a network of more than 2,000 pharmacies in Texas, is working to help pharmacists and pharmacies comply with HB 2088 via safe, at-home disposal packets and patient education...READ MORE

The U.S. government is barring federal dollars meant for opioid addiction treatment to be used on medical marijuana...The move is aimed at states that allow marijuana for medical uses, particularly those letting patients with opioid addiction use pot as a treatment, said Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, whose federal agency doles out money to states for treatment programs...“There’s zero evidence for that,” McCance-Katz said. “We felt that it was time to make it clear we did not want individuals receiving funds for treatment services to be exposed to marijuana and somehow given the impression that it’s a treatment.”...READ MORE

The gleaming white booth towered over the medical conference...advertising a new brand of antidote for opioid overdoses. “Be prepared. Get naloxone. Save a life,” the slogan on its walls said...Some conference attendees were stunned when they saw the company logo: Mundipharma, the international affiliate of Purdue Pharma — the maker of the blockbuster opioid, OxyContin, widely blamed for unleashing the American overdose epidemic...Here they were cashing in on a cure...“You’re in the business of selling medicine that causes addiction and overdoses, and now you’re in the business of selling medicine that treats addiction and overdoses?”...“That’s pretty clever, isn’t it?”...“end-to-end provider” — opioids on the front end, and addiction treatment on the back end...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

OxyContin is a dying business in the United States. Purdue Pharma, owned by the billionaire Sackler family, is collapsing under an avalanche of lawsuits that accuse the company of using false claims to push its blockbuster painkiller in the U.S., profiting as an unsuspecting nation slipped into a devastating drug crisis...Meanwhile, another company owned by the family in China has been promoting OxyContin with the same tactics Purdue was forced to abandon...the Sacklers’ Chinese affiliate, Mundipharma, tell doctors that time-release painkillers like OxyContin are less addictive than other opioids...Mundipharma has pushed ever larger doses of opioids…In China, Mundipharma managers tried to boost profits by requiring sales representatives to copy patients’ private medical records without consent, in apparent violation of Chinese law...As in the U.S., marketing materials in China made claims about OxyContin’s safety and effectiveness based on company-funded studies and outdated data that has been debunked...READ MORE