Tag: Opioid

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Task Force Strikes Again at Prescription Drug Crime

CREDIT: DEA

DEA

A Memphis woman is facing federal charges for attempting to get prescription drugs with fraud and forgery, the U.S. Attorney Office of the Western District of Tennessee announced Tuesday.

The Appalachian Region Prescription Opioid (ARPO) strike force helped indict 35-year-old Erin Pealor, along with 12 others in the region, for charges related to prescription drugs.

Pealor is charged with nine counts of attempting to acquire Schedule II controlled substances, like Ritalin, Adderall, Methylin, and Methylphenidate by filling out prescriptions with false or fraudulent patient names and forging the signature of physicians.

Pealor

The case against Pealor is the result of a combined effort by the ARPO strike force, the State of Tennessee Office of Inspector General, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. Attorney D. Michael Dunavant of the Western District of Tennessee said opioid misuse and abuse is an “insidious epidemic” that causes individuals to engage in criminal behavior, which ultimately makes the epidemic worse.

“Just as this office will hold medical professionals accountable for over-prescribing opioids, we will also pursue federal charges against any person who exploits the medical profession for their own selfish desire to obtain highly addictive prescription drugs by dishonest methods,” Dunavant said.

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This is the second coordinated effort by the ARPO strike force to crack down on the distribution of opioids in the region. The first was in April when indictments were brought down on 60 medical professionals who allegedly distributed more than 23 million pills to patients.

That sweep resulted in indictments of 16 medical professionals in the Western District of Tennessee. Five of the defendants were from Memphis. Since that time, two of the five have pleaded guilty.

A day after being charged, Kathyrn Russel, a nurse practitioner from Memphis pleaded guilty to unlawfully distributing controlled substances. Officials Russel wrote prescriptions for opioids for non-legitimate medical purposes and outside the “usual course of professional practice.” In an eight-week period, Russel prescribed more than 7,800 oxycodone pills, more than 6,000 benzodiazepine pills, and more than carisoprodol pills, according to law enforcement.

Michael Hellman, a Memphis physician who was said to have prescribed Percocet and Promethazine with Codeine for non-legitimate medical purposes, pleaded guilty to one of distribution of a controlled substance and one count of conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance in July.

The ARPO task force, formed in October 2018, is a joint law-enforcement effort by the FBI, DEA, several U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, and others. The team’s mission is to identify and investigate health care fraud involving the illegal distribution of opioids. The strike force operates in 10 districts and has charged more than 70 defendants who together are responsible for distributing more than 40 million pills.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 115 Americans die every day from opioid overdose. The CDC also reports that the number of drug overdose deaths in Tennessee rose to a record high in 2018, as the numbers went down nationally.

There were 1,837 drug overdose deaths recorded in Tennessee last year, 3 percent more than in 2017. Such deaths were down 5.1 percent across the country, marking the first decline of overdoses in 25 years. Read more about that here.

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State Sues Opioid Maker on Marketing Claims

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Justin Fox Burks

The state of Tennessee sued an opioid manufacturing company recently on marketing claims that its products were less addictive and more effective than other products.

Attorney General Herbert Slatery said Tuesday the state sued Endo Pharmaceuticals and Endo Health Solutions Inc. for violating the state’s consumer protection laws and contributing to “a devastating public health crisis in Tennessee.”

“Our office has conducted an extensive investigation into Endo’s unlawful marketing practices, which included targeting vulnerable populations like the elderly,” Slatery said in a statement. “Endo has repeatedly refused to take responsibility for its unconscionable conduct, which is why we are taking this action.”

The state’s 180-page complaint is sealed as Endo said some of the information it contains is confidential. The seal expires in 10 days, unless Endo moves to extend it. Slatery said the complaint should be made available to the public in its entirety and “efforts to keep it confidential will only prolong and diminish Endo’s accountability for its conduct.” [pullquote-1]

Slatery

Endo deceptively marketed its opioid products as being less addictive and more effective than others on the market, Slatery said.

“It did this despite evidence to the contrary, including the (U.S. Food & Drug Adminstration’s) explicit rejection of Endo’s claim that Opana (extended release – ER) was resistant to abuse as well as overwhelming evidence that Opana ER was being abused throughout Tennessee,” reads the statement.

Tennessee argues the company knew the dangers of its opioid products, including increased risks of respiratory depression and death in elderly patients. Also, the company did not clearly disclose those risks while it specifically targeted patients in that age group, says Slatery’s office.

In June 2017, the FDA asked Endo to remove Opana ER from the market. It was the first time the agency acted to remove an on-the-market opioid pain medication from sale “due to the public health consequences of abuse.”

“The abuse and manipulation of reformulated Opana ER by injection has resulted in a serious disease outbreak,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said at the time. “When we determined that the product had dangerous unintended consequences, we made a decision to request its withdrawal from the market. This action will protect the public from further potential for misuse and abuse of this product.”

The company’s stock slid from $94.46 per share in April 2015 to to $6.69 in Tuesday afternoon trading, according to Google Finance.

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Shelby County Fills Fewer Opioid Prescriptions, Sees More Overdose Deaths

CREDIT: DEA


DEA

The opioid fentanyl can be 100 times more potent than morphine.

Though the number of opioid prescriptions filled each year in Tennessee and Shelby County has been decreasing since 2013, the number of opioid overdose deaths have not. 

The latest available data from the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) shows that of the 1,776 drug overdose deaths that occurred in the state in 2017, 1,268 of them were opioid related.

Nationwide, 30 Americans die every day from opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

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Opioids include prescription opioids such as hydrocodone, oxycodone, morphine, and fentanyl, which can be 100 times more potent than morphine, as well as heroin and opium.

Shelby County saw a total of 207 drug overdose deaths in 2017. Of those, 159 were caused by an opioid. Nine more opioid-related deaths occurred that year than in 2016 and 66 more than in 2013. 


Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid often mixed with other illegal drugs and sold on the street, was by far the deadliest opioid in Shelby County in 2017. It led to 106 overdose deaths, while heroin led to 59 and opioid pain relievers led to 52.

Tennessee Department of Health

Fatal overdose data for Shelby County

Shelby County had the state’s third-highest number of opioid overdose deaths in 2017 behind Knox County, which had 196, and Davidson County, which had 184.

The TDH report also shows that in 2017, 66 percent of Tennesseans who died from an opioid overdose, filled a prescription included in the Tennessee Controlled Substance Monitoring Database within a year of their death.

Thirty-seven percent of Tennessee residents who died from an overdose that year filled a prescription for an opioid within two months of their death. This is a 20 percent decrease from the number who did so in 2013.

Just under 6.9 million opioid prescriptions were filled across the state in 2017. That’s a little over a million less than were filled in 2013. 

In Shelby County, which has a population of about 939,000 people, 607,512 opioid prescriptions were filled for pain in 2017. This number has steadily declined from 2013 when 718,103 opioid prescriptions were filled.

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D. Michael Dunavant, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, said last week that many times those who end up addicted to heroin start with a dependence to prescription painkillers.

“Opioid misuse and abuse is an insidious epidemic, created in large part by the over-prescribing of potent opioids nationwide, and unfortunately, Tennessee and West Tennessee is at the center of that epidemic,” Dunavant said at a press conference last week as he detailed the indictment of sixteen medical professionals from Tennessee, including five from Memphis who allegedly illegally distributed of opioid prescriptions.

The five Memphis medical professionals — three doctors and two nurses — who were indicted along with 11 others from Jackson, Tennessee, were arrested in a sweep last week coordinated by U.S. Attorneys and the Department of Justice’s Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioid Strike Force (ARPO).

Together the medical professionals allegedly distributed more than 350,000 prescriptions for controlled substances, equaling about 32 million pills.