Column: Here’s the infuriating opiate news you didn’t hear about – Opinion – The Columbus Dispatch

We begin today with another dose of BREAKING NEWS that unfortunately will probably still be big news to you, even though it happened days ago.

And it’s going to make you mad as hell — because it’s deadly serious. Yet it went mostly uncovered (because, as we’ve complained before, it’s not about Donald Trump, or Stormy or Vladimir, or any politician’s sexual extracurriculars).

It’s about two related revelations of how and why our run-amok system of pharmaceutical and medical special interests has been allowed for years to addict, entrap, destroy and even kill members of our families, our loved ones, our friends, neighbors and workplace colleagues.

Yet no news organization played this news in a big-time place where you would see it. Until today.

NEWSBREAK ONE: A new academic study of five years of Food and Drug Administration data on patients has revealed that FDA regulators, pharmaceutical companies and doctors routinely disregarded their own carefully designed rules and warning data and gave the highly addictive painkiller fentanyl to patients whose chemical intolerance made them prone to becoming addicted.

According to the FDA’s protective protocols that are supposed to be followed by prescribing doctors, from 2012 through 2017, between one-third and one-half of all patients who were prescribed fentanyl should not have been given the drug at all.

The FDA data were obtained by a team of six medical academics through the Freedom of Information Act and published last Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open website.

You are reading about this story today because I found it in the Wednesday edition of my Washington Post, back on page A20, at the bottom of the last page of the great newspaper’s business section. I didn’t find the story in The New York Times, print or website, or other major newspapers.

FDA officials devised a “risk evaluation and mitigation strategy” to ensure that fentanyl and similar drugs wouldn’t be used by patients who couldn’t cope with their powerful addictive effects. “The whole purpose of this distribution system was to prevent exactly what we found,” said Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and one of the leaders of the study.

That’s infuriating. It gets worse.

NEWSBREAK TWO: That same JAMA Network Open website published another academic analysis revealing a direct correlation between increases in drug companies’ so-called marketing payments to doctors (for meals, travel, gifts and so-called consulting fees) and increases in fatalities from opioid overdoses.

The study showed that from 2013 through 2015, in the counties where the opioid manufacturers spent more money to promote opioid drugs to doctors, there was a significant increase in deaths caused by opioid overdoses. For every three additional promotional payments to doctors per 100,000 people in a county, there were 18 percent more overdoses due to prescribed opioids a year later. Opioid manufacturers spent about $40 million on meals, trips and consulting fees for almost 68,000 doctors from 2013 through 2015, according to the study’s authors, who are from Boston Medical Center and New York University School of Medicine.

In a Feb. 18 piece on The New York Times’ website, Abby Goodnough reported that the findings constituted “some of the strongest evidence yet of the connection between the marketing of opioids to doctors and the nation’s addiction epidemic.”

Goodnough’s article also was carried in some print editions, on page B3, but not in the Times’ Washington edition or The Washington Post, where Washington’s agenda-setters feed. So it wasn’t a topic for cable news talking heads.

No wonder those urgent academic findings are today breaking news to you — and Washington’s powerbrokers.

Here’s the solution: Next time highly credentialed academics hit a big-news motherlode: (1) Bypass the academic journals. (2) Call a press conference (preferably in front of some monument). (3) Let the academics show up wearing brown paper bags over their heads (eyeholes recommended) and leak their news using voice-disguising gizmos.

Then watch my news colleagues’ coverage gush all over the page-one, primetime news. And watch the pressure build to finally fix what has gone so horribly wrong.

Martin Schram writes for the Tribune News Service. Email him at martin.schram@gmail.com.