DEA Knowingly Gave Addicts and Drug Dealers Licenses to Prescribe Opioids—Fueling the Epidemic

By Jack Burns

 As thousands of Americans die each year from opioid overdoses, an  independent investigation into the Drug Enforcement Agency’s conduct has  found that it has been issuing controlled substance licenses to drug  dealers, drug addicts, convicted felons and dead people, which is just  one of the many things that have fueled the current crisis. 

The investigation,  which was conducted by the Daily Caller, noted that in 2006, only  510,000 individuals and organizations held controlled substance  licenses. As of March 2018, that number had increased drastically to 1.7 million licenses. According to the report: 

One dentist, for example, admitted to helping “an outlaw  motorcycle gang” manufacture methamphetamine in the early 2000s, which  resulted in two years of jail time, a DEA document said. He’d previously  been caught with meth several times and admitted to “a history of  substance abuse with alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine.

That same dentist was given a license to prescribe controlled  substances in 2012. A doctor was also given a license, in 2009, even  though he had previously had a run-in with the DEA when he was caught  distributing cocaine. 

A doctor was caught distributing cocaine in 1981 but  wasn’t prosecuted because he cooperated with authorities, another DEA  document shows. He was arrested again in 2001 with cocaine and two  prescription drugs — an opioid and a minor tranquilizer — and pleaded  guilty to related charges in 2003.

While the total number of DEA licensed providers exceeds 1.4 million  people, it appears as though the agency is not doing its due diligence  when it comes to regulating how opiates are being diverted from  distributors directly to the street-corner drug dealers. 

The Office of  Diversion Control, as it’s known, is the DEA department that is tasked  with policing when opiates are being diverted from legitimate uses to  nefarious ones. The pipeline runs from the pharmaceutical company’s production line,  through distributors into pharmacies and further down to drug dealers.  But it seems as though they are not doing their job. The investigation  found that licenses are also held by both people who have died and  people who are in prison: 

More than 760 people of the then-1.4 million registered  with the DEA “were potentially ineligible” for licenses because the  Social Security Administration reported them as dead, they did not have  state-level permission to prescribe or distribute controlled substances  or “were incarcerated for felony offenses related to controlled  substances.”

Some of the DEA’s license holders did not even provide a  social security number making it impossible to conduct a background  check prior to the license being issued. 

…nearly 700 Social Security numbers in the DEA’s database  were registered to multiple names or variations of names, “which can be  a risk indicator of potential fraud,” the report showed.

Instead of supplying the required social security number, some applicants listed an employer identification number: 

Another nearly 42,000 entries in the DEA’s database  listed an employer identification number rather than a Social Security  number, the GAO found, which makes it more difficult to conduct  background checks and prevent fraudulent identities.

It is not as if the DEA is underfunded and cannot police the  pharmaceutical industry or even its own licensing loopholes. In 2013,  the agency took in $328 million in licensing fees.  

There is more than enough money to hire agents and investigators to  oversee the distribution and diversion crimes being committed. But according to last year’s former DEA Office of Diversion Control executives, who blew the whistle in an explosive report,  little to nothing is being done. As the whistleblowers allege, Big  Pharma is writing policy for the DEA to protect its distribution  network. 

Not only has Big Pharma placed its lawyers within the agency,  but former DEA agents now work for Big Pharma in an incestuous pool that  is controlling the opiate supply chain. Joe Rannazzisi, former head of the Office of Diversion Control for  the DEA, uncovered how one West Virginia town of 3,000 people had been  shipped 21 million opioid pills but was stymied into not being able to  do anything about it. 

“This is an industry that’s out of control. What they wanna do, is do what they wanna do, and not worry about what the law is,” Rannazzisi told 60 Minutes. “And  if they don’t follow the law in the drug supply, people die. That’s  just it. People die. This is an industry that allowed millions and  millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices that  distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those  drugs.” 

After Rannazzisi exposed the diversion pipeline in West Virginia, as  well as other diversion hot spots, the former DEA executive said  Congress passed a law making it nearly impossible for anyone to do  anything about it. 

It is called the “Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act,”  which was passed in 2016 and signed into law. He said top DEA  officials, along with Big Pharma lobbyists, helped draft the law—further  shielding their profits from DEA fines for diversion infractions. 

“The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies,” Rannazzisi said. Rannazzisi resigned shortly after the law’s passage but he did not  stay silent. Unfortunately, it is now up to the American people to take  on the opioid crisis head-on. The will of the people must be changed in  order for Big Pharma’s death grip over the population to be released.  

The only hope, it seems, for people to end their addiction to opiates  lies, ironically, in another substance the DEA has classified as more  harmful than opiates—Marijuana. As The Free Thought Project has reported, doctors in Boston have over an 80 percent success rate  ending opiate and heroin addiction using concentrated forms of  cannabis. Until cannabis is made legal nationwide, opiate-addicted  Americans will continue to seek out their drugs, which the DEA is all  too complicit in supplying. 

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