The Washington Post says a report from the majority staff of the House Energy and Commerce Committee found that the “distributors of powerful prescription opioids and the Drug Enforcement Administration failed to stop the flow of millions of pills into rural West Virginia despite rampant warning signs that the pills were being diverted for abuse, inertia that contributed to the nation’s opioid epidemic.” According to the report, distributors “failed to conduct proper oversight of their customers by not questioning suspicious activity and not properly monitoring the quantity of painkillers that were being shipped to individual pharmacies.” In addition, the DEA “did not properly use a database that aims to monitor the flow of powerful prescription painkillers from manufacturers to sellers, something that could have allowed federal agents – in real time – to notice that millions of pills were being sent to pharmacies in West Virginia.”

From the news release of the American Association for Justice