I almost forgot. The Washington Post has a killer story today about a law passed in 2016 that helps drug distributors avoid penalties for selling opioids to doctors who are pretty clearly reselling them on the black market:
The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar. Marino spent years trying to move the law through Congress.
….The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article. That powerful tool had allowed the agency to immediately prevent drugs from reaching the street.
….Besides the sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill, few lawmakers knew the true impact the law would have. It sailed through Congress and was passed by unanimous consent, a parliamentary procedure reserved for bills considered to be noncontroversial. The White House was equally unaware of the bill’s import when President Barack Obama signed it into law, according to interviews with former senior administration officials.
Apparently the law was essentially written by a former DEA attorney who went to work for the drug industry in 2011. Read the whole thing for more, including the 18 months of stonewalling from DEA and the Justice Department when the Post requested records related to the law.
