DEA wants to set national opioid quotas

DEA Wants to Target Drug Manufacturers in Opioid Supply – April 21, 2018 – By Ed Coghlan

The Drug Enforcement Administration wants to be able to give companies quotas for the controlled substances that they produce.

Wait a minute… I thought the DEA was supposed to go after the illicit fentanyl drugs that are killing so many Americans. They sure aren’t going to find illicit fentanyl in the medications these companies manufacture for medical use.

I can’t help but think that only cowardice can explain why the DEA isn’t going after the drug cartels selling those deadly street drugs: have you seen pictures of the insanely powerful weapons these drug lords have? 

The DEA has a published a proposed rule change to direct the Administrator to issue procurement quotas for manufacturers.

The public comment period opened on Friday (April 19) and will last until May 4.

Some pain advocacy groups are developing strategies to add the voice of the pain patients—many of whom depend on opioids to help manage their pain–to this discussion.

The new rule would, if approved, require applicants for procurement quotas to state

• what basic class of controlled substance is needed,
• the purpose or purposes for which the class is desired,
• the quantity desired for each purpose during the next calendar year, and
• the quantities used and estimated to be used for each purpose during the current and preceding two calendar years.

If the applicant’s purpose is to manufacture another basic class of controlled substance, the applicant also must state the quantity of the other basic class that the applicant has applied to manufacture, and the quantity of the first basic class necessary to manufacture a specified quantity of the second basic class.

I’ve read the above sentence three times now and I still can’t understand it. It sounds like they’re basically asking drug companies, who never deal directly with patients, to foretell the future, to predict how many patients will need how many pills for what purposes.

This sounds so contrived and unrealistic that it seems an obvious maneuver to stall legal opioid production, which only sends more people to buy illicit drugs from the cartels, whose business improves with each further clampdown by the DEA.

You’d think the DEA and the cartels were in cahoots if that weren’t so far-fetched… or is it?

For more on the rule change and the address to either mail comments or directions on how to submit them online, you can go here.

Earlier this month, the DEA announced it has reached an agreement with Attorneys General from 46 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia to share prescription drug information with one another in order to aid investigations. DEA’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS) system collects some 80 million transaction reports every year from manufacturers and distributors of prescription drugs

HIPPA anyone? This privacy relic from the 90’s seems to function mainly as a hassle for patients trying to access their own health records. It’s certainly doing nothing to stop our data from being searched without a warrant and used against us.

DEA Comment Period on Opioid Quotas Ends May

Richard “Red” Lawhern is the public face of the Alliance for the Treatment of Intractable Pain. He has submitted his organization’s comments to the DEA. He contacted the National Pain Report this weekend asking that we publish his letter for your review, which felt like a reasonable request.

Here’s what he submitted: [zyp’s excerpts – full text here]

Our unified message to DEA is
“cease, halt and desist”.

DEA has no reliable measures for diversion at the individual medical practice level, given a wide range of “normal” prescribing practices between individual doctors acting in good faith to serve different patient populations.  

Prescribing levels as such are not a viable basis for restricting medical supply, absent a detailed knowledge of the patients and conditions serviced by the medical practice. Likewise, restriction of medical opioid supply has already been tried and failed.  Prescriptions are now at a 10 year low, while overdose deaths continue to climb (see attachments).

CDC analysts have admitted publicly that CDC inflated prescription opioid deaths nearly 100% for years.  

The dominant causes of the current opioid crisis are illegally manufactured Fentanyl and Heroin – with prescription opioids a distant fifth in overdose statistics.