08-12-2019, 05:58 PM
Washington Post has been doing a great job covering the opioid crisis this summer. Up until now, and with their fight for information, we now have some publicly-available information on which pharmacies have either directly or potentially been responsible, from 2006-2012.
The DEA has privately kept information down to the pill regarding amounts dispensed for many years.
To highlight how well this information has been kept secret (sorry, private) for so long, they describe how a coroner first took note of how an increase in deaths were coming from patients of a certain doctor. The doc was investigated, found guilty of neglect and over-prescribing. Court documents never mentioned a specific pharmacy even though the records said there was one in particular ...
We now know the doctor was a business partner, and shared a building with, a pharmacy found to have dispensed more pills per capita than any other in the country. Apparently the owner was pushed out by his son, who has been trying hard to turn the business around.
As overdoses soared, nearly 35 billion opioids --- half of distributed pills --- handled by 15 percent of pharmacies
Note:
The newspaper is aware of, and highlights how some pharmacies are outliers based on lack of competition, proximities to hospice care centers and so on. But learning which ones might be bad eggs necessities finding out where the damn pills come from.
In other words you can have corrupt pharma companies and corrupt doctors (both of which seem to exist) but all that means is that there's a likelihood greed has overtaken a few pharmacies as well. Unfortunately(?) this is not a story about "big, bad" Walmart/CVS/Walgreens et al.
The DEA has privately kept information down to the pill regarding amounts dispensed for many years.
To highlight how well this information has been kept secret (sorry, private) for so long, they describe how a coroner first took note of how an increase in deaths were coming from patients of a certain doctor. The doc was investigated, found guilty of neglect and over-prescribing. Court documents never mentioned a specific pharmacy even though the records said there was one in particular ...
We now know the doctor was a business partner, and shared a building with, a pharmacy found to have dispensed more pills per capita than any other in the country. Apparently the owner was pushed out by his son, who has been trying hard to turn the business around.
As overdoses soared, nearly 35 billion opioids --- half of distributed pills --- handled by 15 percent of pharmacies
Note:
The newspaper is aware of, and highlights how some pharmacies are outliers based on lack of competition, proximities to hospice care centers and so on. But learning which ones might be bad eggs necessities finding out where the damn pills come from.
In other words you can have corrupt pharma companies and corrupt doctors (both of which seem to exist) but all that means is that there's a likelihood greed has overtaken a few pharmacies as well. Unfortunately(?) this is not a story about "big, bad" Walmart/CVS/Walgreens et al.