- Over the past decade, opioid producers and suppliers have spent more than $880 million at the federal and state level lobbying lawmakers to stop new regulations on their drugs, while calling on policymakers to actually loosen access to painkillers. That’s eight times as much as the gun lobby spent on its causes, according to Mother Jones.
- ... it often worked: In Maine, for example, drugmakers successfully pushed for a bill that required insurers to cover opioid painkillers that are supposedly harder to abuse.
- In fact, the DEA admits that pharmaceutical companies played a key role in its decision making in its own statements. Here is the agency in 1999 after an unnamed company asked for a formal hearing about the quotas: “In addition, one company requested a hearing to address the aggregate production quota for oxycodone (for sale) or hydromorphone if the aggregate production quotas were not increased sufficiently. The DA [sic], based on the date [sic] provided, has increased the aggregate production quotas for both oxycodone (for sale) and hydromorphone and has determined that a hearing is not necessary.”
- The company didn’t even have hold a formal hearing to get what it wanted from the DEA.
- All of this should make it clear: Regulation failed.
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