Actavis Pharma was acquired by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries in 2016, and a spokeswoman there said the company “cannot speak to any systems in place beforehand.”
They bought out the company! Of course they can speak to systems in place beforehand! They're just choosing not to. The reporting here should make this clearer. Otherwise it should indicate exactly why they can't.
That same year, the DEA brought a case against Cardinal Health, accusing the nation’s second-largest drug distributor of shipping millions of doses of painkillers to online and retail pharmacies without notifying the DEA of signs that the drugs were being diverted to the black market.
If the DEA has such a detailed database, how were they not directly aware themselves??
Cardinal Health said that it has learned from its experience, increasing training and doing a better job to “spot, stop and report suspicious orders,” company spokeswoman Brandi Martin wrote.
Because companies are incentivized to sell however, it will require governmental oversight and regulation to fix this problem.
On Monday evening, U.S. District Judge Dan Polster removed the protective order for part of the ARCOS database.
I'd like to see an overlay of this chart below with the number of deaths by city.
This could also have been used as a heat map based on population per use numbers to immediately pinpoint communities that were abusing much earlier based on countrywide averages. Data could have been a savior here.
The database reveals what each company knew about the number of pills it was shipping and dispensing and precisely when they were aware of those volumes, year by year, town by town. In case after case, the companies allowed the drugs to reach the streets of communities large and small, despite persistent red flags that those pills were being sold in apparent violation of federal law and diverted to the black market, according to the lawsuits.
Surely a master database could and should have been used to identify bad actors from the bottom up as they were abusing the system and making things worse. Cross correlating against cities with high rates of abuse and drug deaths would have allowed the system to continue leaking for as long as it has (and likely continues to do.)