By JAKE ZUCKERMAN
Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The U.S. attorney general cracked the whip on medical professionals contributing to a worsening opioid epidemic in a speech in Charleston on Thursday.
(Gazette-Mail photo by Craig Hudson)
Speaking at a forum hosted by the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Cardinal Institute, Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled new pieces of the Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit, designed to combat the over-prescribing of painkillers, a suspected culprit behind America’s drug scourge.
“I have assigned 12 experienced prosecutors to focus solely on investigating and prosecuting opioid-related health care in a dozen hot-spot locations around the country, places where they are especially needed,” he said. “And you will be pleased to know, I think, that southern West Virginia is one of those. You will have another prosecutor whose focus will totally be opioid related health care problems.”
Sessions said the prosecutors will be working with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services to target and prosecute doctors, pharmacies and medical providers who have profited off the epidemic.
One of those prosecutors will focus on the southern district of West Virginia.
He said the team will use data to track anomalies in the disbursement of the pills to find those fueling the problem.
“The data analytics team will help us to find the telltale signs of opioid related health care fraud by identifying statistical outliers,” he said. “They can tell us which physicians are writing opioid prescriptions at a rate that far exceeds their peers, how many of a doctor’s patients died within 60 days of an opioid prescription, the average age of the patients receiving these prescriptions that pharmacies are dispensing, and which pharmacies are dispensing a disproportionate amounts of opioids in regional hot-spots for opioid issues.”
Sessions first announced the unit in August.
“Fraudsters might lie but these numbers don’t,” he said. “They give a clear indication of who we need to examine.”
Supporting his point, Sessions said between 1991 and 2001, opioid prescriptions nearly tripled in the U.S.
The speech came in stark contrast with remarks Sessions made at the University of Charleston in May. There, he echoed Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign and said ratcheting up enforcement will be key to solving the problem.
“They would say, which is pretty much true, ‘We can’t arrest our way out of this problem,’ and that is true, we can’t,” he said in May. “But it is a big political part of it, and people should not diminish the power and effectiveness of good law enforcement. But prevention, I truly believe, is the greatest part of our challenge and, over time, prevention will be the most effective.”
That said, although it was a minor part of his speech Thursday, he did cite Reagan’s campaign directly before unpacking the Department of Justice’s new focus.
“The best long term solution is prevention,” he said. “The best action is not to start. Nancy Reagan said, ‘Just say no, don’t start.’ And prevention is what we at the Department do every day, because law enforcement is prevention. Enforcing our laws helps keep drugs out of our country, drives up the price, reduces their purity, their availability, and their addictiveness [sic].”
In a follow-up interview, Sessions acknowledged the limits of the prevention campaign, but said it will still be one of the most effective tools for reining in the problem.
“It has not been going very well, because too many people are saying yes,” he said. “We need to call on people to avoid getting started with drugs. I think that’s a fundamental message that did work over time, but we need to try to get people to not start. An addiction can happen quick, and it’s so hard to get out from an addiction.”
Throughout his speech, Sessions hammered on the devastation the epidemic has waged on the nation’s people and its economy. He said in 2016, 64,000 Americans died of a drug overdose, up from 52,000 in 2015. Additionally, he said 1.3 million people visited the hospital as the result of drug use.
“We have a culture to defend, an economy to defend, a nation to defend,” he said.
On the financial side, he said opioid addiction alone costs the economy $78 billion per year, with illicit drugs in general costing $193 billion. Those costs, he said, are due to myriad factors including drops in productivity and the work force, strain on health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, overworking emergency rooms, foster homes and cemeteries.
“Make no mistake, however, that combating this poison is a priority of President [Donald] Trump,” he said.
Reach Jake Zuckerman at [email protected], 304-348-4814 or follow @jake_zuckerman on Twitter.
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