October 1st, 2019 by WCBC Radio

 West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey issued the following statement regarding the bombshell report released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General on the mismanagement of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s drug quota system.
 
“Every aspect of the pharmaceutical supply chain bears responsibility for the havoc and senseless death unleashed upon West Virginia – and the DEA is no exception.
 
“For years, the DEA was grossly negligent in its mismanagement of the national drug quota system. Unfortunately, this mismanagement contributed to the senseless death of many Americans. Fortunately, we are now working with the Trump Administration to reverse the awful trends we saw for many, many years.
 
“We first sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the DEA back in 2015, when we suspected that the DEA was ignoring its statutory mandate to allocate supply on the basis of medical need.  We then followed up with a lawsuit against the DEA in 2017 and worked closely with the Trump Administration to ensure that the national drug quota rules focused on medical need, not industry want.
 
“Now, the regulations and the national drug supply takes into account diversion and suspicious orders and increase the number of checks in the system to prevent past mistakes from occurring in the future. I applaud President Trump for his willingness to rein in an out-of-control bureaucracy that was one of the root causes of the opioid epidemic.”
 
Attorney General Morrisey’s lawsuit against the DEA is helping affect real change in the opioid epidemic by requiring closer collaboration between states and DEA, as the OIG report calls for, and as can be seen by significant cuts in the number of pills that DEA will allow to be manufactured next year.
 
The proposed limits for 2020 slash hydrocodone manufacturing by 19 percent and oxycodone by 8.8 percent in one year. Attorney General Morrisey resolved his litigation with DEA over the quota system last year.