OxyContin Nation: Meet The Billionaire Family Who Helped Spark America"s Opiod Crisis

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

Unbeknownst to many, the Sackler Family, with assets of $13 billion, the nation’s 19th wealthiest family is one the top players in philanthropy. You can find the Sackler Gallery in the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. or visit the Sackler wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Sackler’s even have a museum at Harvard, Guggenheim, and dozen of universities around the country. If it’s art— the Sackler family has it.

Participating in the art game takes money and a lot of it. So, where does the Sackler money come from?

According to Forbes, the “Sacklers continue to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the businesses in 2016– some $700 million last year, by Forbes’ calculations - from an estimated $3 billion in Purdue Pharma revenues plus at least $1.5 billion in sales from their foreign companies”.

Forbes outlines a brief history lesson of how the Sackler family got started in the world of medicine-

The family fortune began in 1952 when three doctors — Arthur (d. 1987), Mortimer (d. 2010) and Raymond Sackler — purchased Purdue, then a small and struggling New York drug manufacturer. The company spent decades selling products like earwax remover and laxatives before moving into pain medications by the late 1980s. To create OxyContin, Purdue married oxycodone, a generic painkiller, with a time-release mechanism to combat abuse by spreading the drug’s effects over a half-day.

 

The FDA approved the medication in 1995 and it soon took off. By 2003 OxyContin sales hit $1.6 billion as the drug helped drive a huge nationwide spike in opioid prescribing. At its peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers, including OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet  — nearly enough for every American to have a bottle.

 

Now opioid prescriptions are declining amid increased scrutiny over drug addiction, down 12% since 2012 according to data from healthcare information firm IMS Health. OxyContin (which is also beginning to face competition from authorized generics while fighting to protect its patents over tamper-proof, extended-release oxycodone) saw prescriptions fall 17%.  

It wasn’t until the 1980’s, as explained by Forbes, the Sackler family through their family-owned drug company called Purdue Pharma created OxyContin. Then in 1995, the FDA approved the medication and sales exploded. Sales hit $1.6 billion in 2003, as a nationwide spike in opioids was seen. By the peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescription for opioid painkillers, such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet. Good times for the Sacklers from 1996- 2012, as the family drug business exploded.

According to The New Yorker, Oxycontin ” has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue” since 1995. OxyContin’s sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin, which makes it highly addictive.

The New Yorker further says Purdue used marketing techniques to deceive the American public of the drug’s true addictive characteristics.

Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product “to start with and to stay with.” Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.

Oddly enough, around the time OxyContin was approved, prescription opioid deaths across the United States surged. Fast forward to more relevant times, where heroin and fentanyl deaths are exploding.

Diving into the opioid crisis onto the streets of Baltimore. It’s very common to see local citizens shooting up heroin on city streets. In this video, I asked a man how did this addiction start? Guess what he said?... It all started with legal painkillers, such as OxyContin. 

As a few parasitical elites make billions flooding America’s streets with opioids. We the every day American citizen have to deal with the consequences, as President Trump outlined in yesterday’s opioid crisis speech:

• In 2016, more than two million Americans had an addiction to prescription or illicit opioids.


• Since 2000, over 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids.


• Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury death in the United States, outnumbering both traffic crashes and gun-related deaths.


• In 2015, there were 52,404 drug overdose deaths — 33,091 of those deaths, almost two-thirds, involved the use of opioids.


• The situation has only gotten worse, with drug overdose deaths in 2016 expected to exceed 64,000.


• This represents a rate of 175 deaths a day.

Bottomline: It’s time for the American people to learn the truth about the opioid crisis and the very few elites who have profited. The question You should ask: why did our government allow this to happen?

New Harvard Study Confirms Big Pharma & Federal Govt Root Cause of Opioid Epidemic

A new study published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review painstakingly describes how Big Pharma deception and federal government patenting have brought about the current U.S. opioid epidemic. As lawsuits pile up against pharma companies, this study confirms that for 20 years, the American public has served as the victim in a gargantuan scheme of money and power.

The study, titled The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market, gets right to the point in the introduction.

“In this article, we argue that non-rigorous patenting standards and ineffectual policing of both fraudulent marketing and anticompetitive actions played an important role in launching and prolonging the opioid epidemic. We further show that these regulatory issues are not unique to prescription opioids but rather are reflective of the wider pharmaceutical market.”

Researchers follow with a primer on the rise of opioid prescriptions and how pain became “the fifth vital sign.” By the 1990s, doctors realized that chronic pain was often ignored, and pain management became a hot topic. Physicians were urged to make greater use of opioids, with experts in the field downplaying the potential for misuse and addiction – a view largely based on experience with morphine.

But this was before OxyContin came along.

Purdue Pharma, recognizing that this newfound view of the medical establishment could be exploited, worked to develop an improved synthetic opioid. Their golden ticket was found with the extended-release oxycodone pill known as OxyContin, patented and approved by the FDA in 1995.

However, Purdue’s exclusive patent was based on corporate fraud and government ignorance.

Advertisment

“Purdue was able to patent extended-release oxycodone in the United States despite the fact that its constituent elements—the active ingredient oxycodone and the controlled-release system Contin—had been developed decades earlier…Oxycodone was used in clinical practice in Germany as early as 1917, and was first introduced in the United States in 1939.”

Purdue’s angle was to develop a controlled-release version of oxycodone, banking on its success with the patented MS Contin for morphine. Here’s where the feds stepped in to help.

READ MORE:  Former SpaceX Employee Faces Life In Prison For Operating Silk Road 2.0

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) initially rejected Purdue’s patent request for extended-release oxycodone, citing the combination as “obvious.” But Purdue responded with a statistical falsehood – which the company knew was false – and the patent office made an about-face, granting the 20 year patent for OxyContin.

Since then, the cozy relationship between Big Pharma and government has grown, with the pharma industry spending almost a billion dollars in ten years on lobbying federal and state governments and campaign contributions.

As the Harvard study notes, “low patenting standards” and “a history of tepid enforcement” provided incentive for Purdue to embark on a massive, fraudulent marketing campaign. With the guarantee of no competition provided by government, Purdue spent obscene amounts of money getting American hooked on their newly-patented product.

“Between 1996 and 2000, the company more than doubled its U.S. marketing team…In 2001, Purdue paid forty million dollars in bonuses tied to extended-release oxycodone…Purdue also invested heavily in analytics, developing a database to identify high-volume prescribers and pharmacies to help focus their marketing resources…Patients were offered starter coupons for a free initial supply of extended-release oxycodone, 34,000 of which were redeemed by 2001…Finally, Purdue hosted forty all-expenses-paid pain management and speaker training conferences at lavish resorts. Over five thousand clinicians attended, receiving toys, fishing hats, and compact discs while listening to sales representatives tout the alleged benefits of extended-release oxycodone…Purdue elevated the stakes, spending an estimated six to twelve times more promoting extended-release oxycodone than its competitor Janssen spent marketing a rival opioid…

Purdue’s efforts paid off. Between 1996 and 2001, extended-release oxycodone generated $2.8 billion in sales. From 2008 to 2014, annual sales exceeded $2 billion.”

It gets even worse.

READ MORE:  Big Pharma Exposed for Knowingly Causing Opioid Epidemic, Ushering in a Heroin Nightmare

As the patent expiration for OxyContin approached, Purdue developed an “abuse-deterrent formulation” of the drug, for which FDA granted a patent in 2010. Not satisfied with a simple new patent, Purdue filed a “citizen petition asking the FDA to refuse to accept generic versions of the original extended-release oxycodone formulation on safety grounds.” Incredibly, FDA also granted this to Purdue, “effectively preventing the marketing of low-cost, therapeutically equivalent products that might undercut Purdue’s incentive to continue to widely promote its new abuse-deterrent formulation.”

By the way, the “abuse-deterrent” OxyContin doesn’t really deter addicts, and it has fueled the explosive heroin epidemic as addicts seek out cheaper, black market alternatives. But Purdue is content making its billions off the patented drug.

While thousands of Americans die under a campaign of deception and greed, official Washington pretends to care with the occasional fine levied against pharma companies, including for false marketing by Purdue.

But no one ever goes to jail; no one in top management is ever held to account. The persons in “personhood” conveniently disappear when corporations get in trouble. And the fines? Mere pocket change compared to the revenues already made from the drugs involved.

“Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business.”

The Harvard study provides much more insight into the fraudulent marketing practices of Big Pharma, the patent schemes enabled by federal government, how generic drugs are routinely stifled, and possible ways to address the injustice.

Some of the more sinister effects of the system include “hard switches” which force patients to go from one costly patented drug to another instead of generics. The use of “citizen petitions” by pharma corporations to slow generic drugs and keep prices high is a particularly insidious scheme.

READ MORE:  Anti-Drug Senator"s Office Manager Arrested For Importing Meth And "Date Rape" Drug From China

The study notes that today, “Over four million Americans misuse opioids each month” at a societal cost of $80 billion annually. 300 million prescriptions were written in 2015 in the U.S., which has a population of 323 million. This is reflected in the fact that 80 percent of the world’s opioids are consumed in the U.S., which has 5 percent of the world’s population.

The misuse of opioids is a not a simple issue, and personal choice is of course involved. But the above numbers point to something much bigger going on.

As the Harvard study confirms, Big Pharma has exploited the enormous addiction potential of opioids to prey upon the American populace for decades — made possible by a federal government with blatant disregard for the well-being of citizens.

Tennessee Counties Sue Opioid Makers Using Local "Crack Tax" Law

The US opioid epidemic has continued to worsen in 2017 as super-powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil taint the nation’s heroin supply. While the FBI’s final tally has yet to arrive, preliminary data suggest that overdose deaths last year eclipsed the 50,000 recorded nationally in 2015 – the most ever. And the body count is expected to be even higher in 2017. As the death toll in some of the hardest-hit areas of the country skyrockets - in some cases forcing county coroners to build larger freezers to store the bodies – states have begun filing lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies responsible for making and marketing opioid painkillers, in hopes of offsetting the ballooning public-health costs that have been a byproduct of the crisis.

Three Tennessee district attorneys are the latest prosecutors to file suit against the drug makers, joining a group that includes the attorneys general of Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi, New York and Santa Clara and Orange County in California – not to mention the Cherokee Nation. But the Tennessee prosecutors" approach differs from their peers in one unique way:

They are suing under the state’s long-ridiculed and rarely used “crack tax” law, which would hold Big Pharma liable for damages as if they were street-level drug dealers, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported.

While the companies targeted by individual states differ, prosecutors are all alleging similar misconduct: That the pharmaceutical companies leaned on researchers to play down the drugs’ addictive qualities, while spending millions on marketing them to both patients and doctors.

Another lawsuit filed in Washington in January alleged that Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, was aware of the drug’s immense popularity on the streets, but did nothing to curb its distribution.

The suit also names a “Baby Doe” as a plaintiff. “Baby Doe,” the News Sentinel reports, is a boy born in March 2015 addicted to opiates because his mother, identified as “Mary Doe,” was an opiate addict and bought her drugs in Sullivan County, one of the three judicial districts represented in the legal action.

Filed on behalf of the three prosecutors and Baby Doe by Nashville law firm Branstetter, Stranch and Jennings, the lawsuit spends dozens of pages detailing publicly available accounts of alleged fraud and deceptive marketing practices by opiate manufacturers.

“It is now beyond reasonable question that the manufacturer defendants’ fraud caused Mary Doe and thousands of others in Tennessee to become addicted to opioids — an addiction that, thanks to their fraudulent conduct, was all but certain to occur,” the lawsuit stated.

Tennessee logs more opiate prescriptions per capita than every state in the nation except West Virginia, the News Sentinel reported. Sullivan County is considered an epicenter, so much so its law enforcement agencies snared their own reality television shows. Shelby County in West Tennessee is also considering joining the lawsuit.

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III issued a statement Tuesday in which he said his office is investigating the state"s options in pursuing its own legal action.

"Our objective is to identify and hold accountable the parties responsible for this opioid epidemic," the statement read.

That “crack tax” – otherwise known as the drug dealer liability statute - was passed in 2005 to allow for civil action against street drug dealers, many of whom were peddling crack.

However, since police typically seize convicted drug dealers’ profits under criminal and civil forfeiture laws – and since most drug dealers go to prison after they’re arrested – there was rarely anything left to be claimed in civil court.

But unlike street dealers, pharma firms are flush with cash. Purdue has annual sales of nearly $3 billion, while Mallinckrodt and Endo also rack up billions each year from sales of opiate drugs.

Many legal experts have said that the current batch of lawsuits resembles the 1998 settlement between the four largest US tobacco companies – Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard – and 46 states attorneys general. In accordance with that judgment, the tobacco companies agreed to pay out more than $200 billion through 2025, with payments to be made in perpetuity.

While states are no doubt in need of financial resources to offset the public-health costs they’re forced to absorb because of the epidemic, pharmaceutical companies have at least one strategy to legally deflect blame: If the showdown ever makes it to trial, defense attorneys will try to slough off as much blame as possible on the overprescribing doctors, like one elderly physician who was arrested earlier this month in New York City and charged with needlessly prescribing millions of pills. 

City Suing OxyContin Co. for Causing Opioid Epidemic by Allowing Criminal Trafficking

A major pharmaceutical company that was exposed in 2016 for its complicity in wrecking countless lives is now facing a new kind of lawsuit. The city of Everett, Washington has filed suit against Purdue Pharma, claiming it ignored criminal trafficking of huge quantities of the drug OxyContin – in violation of federal law – and primarily caused an opioid epidemic.

According to the LA Times:

“In a complaint in state Superior Court, city lawyers accused Purdue of gross negligence, creating a public nuisance and other misconduct and said the company should pay costs of handling the opioid crisis — a figure that the mayor said could run to tens of millions of dollars — as well as punitive damages.”

OxyContin, a patented form of oxycodone which hit the market in 1995, ushered in the era of opioid addiction and brought billions in profits to Purdue Pharma. Owned by the Sackler family, Purdue came to control nearly a third of the U.S. pain pill market through massive marketing and a campaign of deception against doctors and patients.

Purdue identified doctors around the country who were prescribing the most pain medications – even doctors it knew were acting recklessly – and targeted them with a marketing onslaught. It worked, and “from 1997 to 2002 prescriptions of OxyContin for non-cancer pain increased almost tenfold.”

Purdue has been sued numerous times before concerning its marketing to doctors and OxyContin’s risk of addiction, but the Everett lawsuit is the first to focus on the company’s knowledge of criminal distribution after the Times investigation.

“The Times’ investigation, published in July, disclosed that for more than a decade, an internal security team at Purdue monitored doctors and pharmacies it suspected of colluding with dealers and addicts. In the case of the L.A. ring, criminals set up a phony clinic near MacArthur Park in 2008 and worked with corrupt physicians and pharmacies to obtain pills over 18 months.

A Purdue sales manager dispatched to investigate the high volume of prescriptions at the clinic found a rundown building thronged with rough men and urged supervisors to alert the Drug Enforcement Administration, saying she was “very certain this is an organized drug ring.”

Despite her pleas and additional evidence suggesting that pills were pouring into the hands of criminals, company officials did not go to authorities until years later when the drug ring was out of business and its leaders under indictment. By then, 1.1 million pills had spilled into the illicit pipeline.”

These disturbing revelations come on top of a prior investigation that found Purdue maintained a secret Purdue database of 1,800 suspect doctors, but only about 10 percent of them were reported to law enforcement.

READ MORE:  1 in 13 children taking psychiatric medication in US

As a result of this willful ignorance, OxyContin – a powerful formulation of oxycodone which was labeled a dangerous drug before being patented – flooded the streets across America and gave rise to the opioid epidemic.

By the year 2000, Purdue was producing 160mg tablets which became wildly popular as users could crush, sniff or inject the pill for a powerful, long-lasting high. In 2010, Purdue reformulated OxyContin to make it harder to abuse, but this simply drove addicts to heroin.

Purdue claimed the potential for addiction was very small or “less than 1 percent.” In 2007, “Purdue and its top executives pleaded guilty to charges that it misled doctors and patients about the addictive properties of OxyContin and misbranded the product as “abuse resistant.””

Now, the city of Everett is seeking to hold Purdue accountable for allowing its most profitable drug to flood the streets, by failing to report known criminal trafficking of the drug, which has resulted in countless wrecked lives and millions of dollars in costs to the city.

Heroin is now an enormous problem, thanks to OxyContin. Fatal overdoses are common and government budgets are overwhelmed. Jails are full of addicts in need of detox, city blocks have become open-air drug markets, and homelessness has exploded. At one point, OxyContin was a factor in more than half the crimes in Snohomish County.

“Purdue’s improper actions of placing profits over the welfare of the citizens of Everett have caused and will continue to cause substantial damages to Everett,” lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Purdue is liable for its intentional, reckless, and/or negligent misconduct and should not be allowed to evade responsibility for its callous and unconscionable practices.”

Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis

Congress would rather protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies than the health of those addicted to dangerous opioid drugs, says a former head of the DEA responsible for preventing abuse of medications.

Joseph Rannazzisi, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, asserts Big Pharma and its lobbyists have a “stranglehold” on legislators in Congress and have engineered the protection of a $9 billion per year industry over the health of American citizens, according to a report from the Guardian.

“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive,” he said, according to the outlet. “As long as the industry has this stranglehold through lobbyists, nothing’s going to change.”

Rannazzisi explained lobbyists have spent millions thwarting legislative and policy efforts to provide guidelines for reducing the prescribing of opioid medications closely related to heroin — and helped limit the DEA’s powers to discipline those who dispense unusually high dosages of the same.

A pharmacist himself, Rannazzisi severely criticized lawmakers he claims hold a double standard — publicly vowing to combat the opioid epidemic, while essentially working on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to ensure the industry’s profits.

“These congressmen and senators who are using this because they are up for re-election, it’s a sham,” he told the Guardian. “The congressmen and senators who are championing this fight, the ones who really believe in what they’re doing, their voices are drowned out because the industry has too much influence.”

With the unique insight of having been an insider, Rannazzisi excoriated the duplicity evidenced between legislators’ public lamentation of addiction and deaths from the opioid crisis during election years, and private efforts to protect drugmakers from liability.

And he would know. According to Rannazzisi’s LinkedIn profile, as Chief of Diversion, he had been tasked with “oversight and control of all regulatory compliance inspections and civil and criminal investigations of approximately 1.6 million DEA registrants” — but if the standards are lowered by Congress to allow greater leeway in prescribing opioids, the threshold of criminality is raised.

As the Guardian points out, legislation to fight the opioid epidemic, Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, did, in fact, pass in July — but partisan controversy erupted when Republicans failed to provide funding to give the law sharp teeth. Democrats then issued a report titled “Dying Waiting for Treatment” in response, which “likened the Republican response to the opioid crisis to ‘using a piece of chewing gum to patch a cracked dam.’”

Indeed the report sharply criticized the bill, equating its policies to ‘empty promises’ for the lack of financial follow-through.

As the Washington Post detailed in a report earlier this month, the DEA launched an aggressive campaign to rein in distribution of opioids by pharmaceutical manufacturers to illegal ‘pill mills’ and corrupt pharmacies, who cared little whether the drugs wound up on the streets.

Headed by Rannazzisi, the Office of Diversion Control sent investigators into the field, and began issuing hefty fines and filing lawsuits against the distributors responsible for the proliferation of opioids on the streets.

But the disproportionately powerful pharmaceutical industry — fearing a potential significant loss in profits — fought back. Hard.

According to the Post, the deputy attorney general summoned Rannazzisi to a meeting in 2012, concerning the cases of two unnamed major drug companies.

“That meeting was to chastise me for going after industry, and that’s all that meeting was about,” the now-retired DEA official told the Post.

Then, in 2014, came what constituted a hand out to the pharmaceutical industry by the Department of Justice and congressional legislators: the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act — legislation initiated by the Healthcare Distribution Management Association — the industry group representing distributors at the heart of the controversy.

An analysis of lobbying records by the Post found “the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, spent $13 million lobbying House and Senate members and their staffs on the legislation and other issues between 2014 and 2016.”

Rannazzisi argued his case to congressional staffers in a phone conference in July 2014, and recalled telling them, “This bill passes the way it’s written we won’t be able to get immediate suspension orders, we won’t be able to stop the hemorrhaging of these drugs out of these bad pharmacies and these bad corporations.”

Stunned at the massive — and ultimately successful — effort to take the bite out of DEA attempts to hold distributors and drugmakers responsible for their role in an epidemic estimated to take 19,000 lives every year, Rannazzisi likened the legislation to a “free pass” for legal drug pushers.

“This doesn’t ensure patient access and it doesn’t help drug enforcement at all,” he told the Guardian. “What this bill does has nothing to do with the medical process. What this bill does is take away DEA’s ability to go after a pharmacist, a wholesaler, manufacturer or distributor.”

“This was a gift. A gift to the industry,” he added.

After heading the diversion office for a decade, Rannazzisi retired in 2015 — likely disgusted over legislators’ dedication to the legal drug industry, rather than the people whose interests they’re ostensibly obligated to protect.

“The bill passed because ‘Big Pharma’ wanted it to pass,” he told the Guardian in no uncertain terms. “The DEA is both an enforcement agency and a regulatory agency. When I was in charge what I tried to do was explain to my investigators and my agents that our job was to regulate the industry and they’re not going to like being regulated.”

Big Pharma relies overwhelmingly on lobbyists filling the coffers of politicians to ensure they ignore the crisis gripping the nation. As the Center for Public Integrity found, the Guardian noted, Purdue Pharma — at the heart of the epidemic for its highly-addictive drug introduced in the late 1990s, OxyContin — spent a breathtaking $740 million in the last ten years on congressional lobbying efforts.

However, Big Pharma’s power to influence policy and legislation extends far beyond simple but effective lobbying — the government-run Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC) has been accused by Sen. Ron Wyden of being a tool to “weaken” CDC guidelines for limiting overprescribing of opioids.

Wyden wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell of his concerns the IPRCC had been staffed with ‘experts’ with conflicts of interest for their close ties to Big Pharma, including a scientist with a $1.5 million endowment from Purdue, reported the Guardian.

“You’ve got a panel that’s certainly got a fair number of people that have a vested interest in this problem of overprescribing. That’s something you’ve got to root out,” Wyden asserted. “The role of the pharmaceutical companies on these advisory panels troubles me greatly. Science is getting short shrift compared to the political clout of these influential interests.”

Families of countless addicts and victims of the opioid industry would undoubtedly find the direct influence of Big Pharma’s pro-opioid cash appalling — yet it continues to this day. Policies and legislation have not yet been given the appropriate funding needed to effectively combat the problem, which swirls out of control while politicians and drugmakers reap blood-tainted profits.

“Corporations have no conscience,” Rannazzisi flatly told the Guardian. “Unfortunately, with my job, I was the guy who had to go out and talk to families that lost kids. If one of those CEOs went out there and talked to anybody, or if one of those CEOs happened to lose a kid to this horrible, horrible domestic tragedy we have, I’d bet you they’d change their mind.

“When you sit with a parent who can’t understand why there’s so many pharmaceuticals out in the illicit marketplace, and why isn’t the government doing anything, well the DEA was doing something. Unfortunately what we’re trying to do is thwarted by people who are writing laws.”