I love neither DEA or PhARMA, but the business about Congress passing a last year to make it “harder for DEE to stop drug companies selling drugs to drug dealers” is a load of crap. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a brilliant example of how the DEA and other police organizations retaliate against lawmakers who curb their authority when they abuse it, and how an easily manipulatable press and easily manipulatable public eats it up with a spoon.
Here’s the infamous 2016 final statute. If you click through to the text, and then look at the statute amended (21 U.S.C. 824), you will observe that what the 2016 statute did was require that before DEA arbitrarily stripped companies of their license to ship controlled substances (like opioids), they had to (a) identify what law they thought was being broken, and (b) had to show that there was a real likelihood the drugs would be diverted for misuse, rather than just arbitrarily decide that hospital X or pharmacy Y had already received “too much” Oxycontin for the month.
As usual, explaining something like this is complicated. Short version, the bill curbed a bunch of nasty abuses by the DEA. Of course PhARMA spent millions to get it passed. DEA is obscenely powerful and their abuses in this regard are fairly disruptive and legendary in the pharmacy and hospital world. And the thorough nature of their revenge here shows how DEA gets away with it. By spinning a bill that curbed DEA’s extra-legal abuses as a corrupt bargain between the hated drug makers and corrupt members of Congress, DEA has made it very clear what happens when you cross them. If you wonder why so few lawmakers want to take on issues like police brutality, civil asset forfeiture, or even horrendously price gouging prison phone rates, this is why.
I explain in great detail below.