As director of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s Office of Diversion Control from 2005 to 2015, Joe Rannazzisi was charged with leading the effort to regulate opioids, but he continually increased opioid quotas for pharmaceutical companies.
The Drug Enforcement Agency wasn’t doing a good job of enforcement, and the Office of Diversion Control wasn’t controlling diversion.
During Rannazzisi’s tenure, the number of registrants allowed to prescribe and dispense opioids grew 45 percent, and the quota for hydrocodone increased from 37,604 to 99,625 kilograms while the quota for oxycodone went from 50,490 to 137,500 kgs. Meanwhile, Rannazzisi ignored inquiries from drug companies about suspiciously large orders.
That didn’t stop him from blaming those same companies for the opioid crisis that he himself had exacerbated with his lax control efforts. In fact, after leaving the DEA, he offered his well-remunerated services to plaintiffs lawyers suing those companies.
In 2017, two years after Rannazzisi’s departure from the DEA, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey successfully sued the agency to force it to reform its national drug quota system. Once proposed reforms were in place, such as accepting more input from state authorities and monitoring diversion more closely, opioid quotas began going down. Wanting to see quotas decline still further, Morrisey is leading a four-state coalition urging the DEA to track the illicit use of opioids even more scrupulously.
“Opioid abuse has cost far too many West Virginians their lives,” he laments. “This rampant drug abuse has been fueled by an agency that was asleep at the switch and allowed our state to be flooded with dangerous pills until President Trump and our office took action.
“We appreciate the efforts DEA is making to reduce supply, but there is still more that can be done to limit the availability of painkillers to those who would abuse them.”
By working more closely with the states, the DEA and its Office of Diversion Control can make its enforcement and diversion control efforts more effective. Like someone once said, we’re “stronger together.”