24 Apr Heather Yakin: Opioid epidemic has just begun – News – recordonline.com
The latest salvo in the ongoing battle against opioids: The Southern District of New York on Tuesday unsealed an indictment charging the CEO of a prescription drug distribution cooperative with narcotics conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
The indictment charges that Laurence Doud, who was CEO of Rochester Drug Cooperative, Inc. from 1991-2017, with ignoring red flags that a number of the company’s pharmacy customers were ordering unusually large numbers of opioids, including oxycodone and fentanyl, that the pharmacies had large numbers of cash or out-of-state customers, and that they filled prescriptions from doctors on a watch list for possible overprescribers.
The indictment also charges that Doud ordered workers to keep selling to these pharmacies despite warnings from compliance staff at RDC, and that RDC failed to file required reports about suspicious orders from customers.
RDC was, according to prosecutors, the fourth-largest wholesaler of pharmaceutical products in New York, and one of the 10 largest nationally, with about 1,300 pharmacy customers and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. And RDC, prosecutors say, distributed millions of doses of oxycodone, fentanyl and other opioids to customers its own compliance officers knew were dispensing to people with no legitimate need for the drugs.
For what, profit?
How many of those drugs were diverted to the streets? How many of them contributed to the 70,000-plus opioid-involved overdose deaths of 2017?
It’s not just addicts who get hurt in these cases. There are real pain patients out there, people who carefully portion out and ration their medications, who have to jump through more and more hoops to get their medications, and get treated like criminals for trying to preserve their quality of life.
Among the acts federal prosecutors say Doud engaged in was pushing to open new accounts without performing due diligence, with Doud remarking in an email that “even though he had ‘no idea if this (new pharmacy customer) is a good guy or a bad guy’ ” it was taking too long to open accounts.
The result, the indictment charges, was that, at least since 2012, pharmacy customers who had been cut off by other suppliers for their questionable practice began “scrambling to RDC.”
High-dosage prescriptions, high percentage of cash transactions. Orders for large amounts of opioids and no other drugs. All red flags for pill mills, and all ignored by Doud, prosecutors charge.
Doud sued RDC in 2018, saying that the co-op and others “have engaged in a calculated campaign against Mr. Doud to tarnish his professional reputation and ultimately shift onto him the blame for a mounting federal criminal investigation into RDC.”
Doud argued in his suit that RDC and others told customers, shareholders and employees that he had financial arrangements with certain customers and ignored regulatory requirements so he could boost sales with those customers and get illicit money from those companies.
“These statements are false and knowingly false when made,” Doud’s suit states.
The indictment tells us whose arguments and evidence federal prosecutors have chosen.
The filing says employees warned Doud about the red flags, about legal and policy violations, and were ignored. I wonder how many other distributors played the same games.
We’re not at the end of the opioid epidemic. We’ve only just begun.
hyakin@th-record.com
On Twitter @HeatherYakin845
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