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“We haven’t learned from this situation,” former PEIA director says of oxycodone explosion in early 2000s

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — “We felt helpless,” a former director of the Public Employees Insurance Agency said about the time in early 2001 when warning signs about the dangers of oxycodone, the key ingredient in Oxycontin, began showing themselves in West Virginia.

“The FDA should have some kind of system to monitor (prescription drugs), especially narcotics and, at that point, it was just kind of the Wild West,” said Tom Susman during an appearance on Wednesday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”

Susman was quoted in an Oct. 26, 2016 investigative report from STAT, a national publication focused on health, medicine and scientific discovery stories.

READ THE FULL STAT STORY HERE.

In the early 2000s, Susman said PEIA took steps to attempt to limit abuse by requiring prior authorization for Oxycontin prescriptions after analysts identified possible correlations between rising deaths due to oxycodone and larger numbers of oxycodone prescriptions.

“All of the sudden, we saw this one drug starting to show large percentage growth, so we took a look at the drug, we looked at the clinical need or use of the drug and it really scared the hell out of us,” Susman said.

The STAT investigation, citing recently unsealed court documents from McDowell County, determined Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, blocked attempts to limit OxyContin prescriptions by paying off a pharmacy benefits manager, Merck Medco.

Similar steps were taken in other states, STAT reported.

The Mountain State now has the highest per capita drug overdose death rate, the result of an opioid epidemic that many health experts link back to the overprescribing of Oxycontin and other similar painkillers.

“We saw it coming,” Susman told STAT.

“It lays at the hands of Purdue Pharma,” he said on “Talkline.” “It lays at the hands of the fact that we don’t have an early warning system to look at these kinds of situations when it comes to narcotics. I truly believe that we haven’t learned from this situation.”





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