In an ironic twist during a trial in Florida to determine if Walgreens Pharmacy recklessly prescribed opioids creating an epidemic, a 2013 email between company officials accused the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of bullying them.
The email said then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi “Now agrees (with Walgreens), that the pendulum (bullying) has swung too far.”
Bondi filed the lawsuit now being heard against Walgreens in 2018.
The current Attorney General Ashley Moody inherited the ongoing case against Walgreens.
The company email also expressed a desire to set up a meeting with Bondi.
“Walgreens was flagrantly violating the law during a time (2013) when the epidemic was at its height and a loss of life,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny told Kaspar Stoffelmayr, the attorney defending Walgreens. “The DEA was just doing its job. This was described as bullying.”
The trial in Pasco County in Port Richey is being streamed live courtesy of Courtroom View Network.
In 2013, Walgreens agreed to pay $80 million for violating the Controlled Substances Act and negligently allowing drugs to be diverted for abuse and black market sales. The DEA served Walgreens with suspension orders because of drugs being diverted. Walgreens at the time was the largest provider of the drug OxyContin in the state.
Florida, along with West Virginia and Alabama, has had one of the highest rates of opioid addiction in the country.
Plaintiff attorneys said the epidemic started in the 1990s when the medical community, misled in the beginning by a few “opioid revisionist doctors” and later by drug manufacturers and distributors, eased what had been a tight policy of prescribing opioids mostly for end-of-life and cancer treatments. Instead, they argued, doctors began recklessly prescribing opioid drugs for less serious non-cancerous conditions. In addition, anti-drug diversion in-house programs required of the companies by the DEA were ineffective, too many suspicious orders and too few checkers, plaintiff attorneys contended.
Defense attorneys blamed the DEA for setting a maximum quota system that allowed too many drugs to be manufactured. They also argued that others caused the epidemic - pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma, distributors like McKesson Corp. and AmerisourceBergen, internet pharmacies and irresponsible clinics known as “pill mills.”
Officials of Purdue reached an $8.3 billion settlement agreement with the government in 2020 after admitting the company had knowingly conspired to aid doctors who were dispensing the drugs without a legitimate medical purpose.
The original Florida lawsuit included as defendants CVS Pharmacy, Teva Pharmaceutical, Allergan and Endo International. Those companies settled with the state for more than $878 million in March.
Kolodny, medical director of opioid policy research at the Heller School (Brandeis University), appeared as an expert witness for the state on April 28 and 29.
During the April 29 session, defense attorneys again focused on the drugs “when properly used” theme, attempting to portray opioids as safe and rarely addicting, when used as they were intended to be used. Defense attorneys contend the epidemic was a result of societal problems, the illegal abuse of heroin and fentanyl, and not from manufacturers legally supplying pain pills to the doctors who prescribed them.
Kolodny testified that profit drove Walgreens and that addicts got their start using prescription opioids and then moved to heroin (when the opioids became too expensive or hard to get).
Stoffelmayr displayed a document that read, “Heroin use is rare in prescription drug users and only a small fraction who abuse pain relievers started to use heroin.”
Another graphic said there were three main paths to heroin addiction, prescription opioid use (first), cocaine to heroin and “poly-drug” use, the abuse of multiple substances.
“Poly-drug is the most common path,” Stoffelmayr said.
“That’s what it (graphic) says,” Kolodny answered.
Kolodny disputed information that included statistics based on addiction in the Chicago metro area saying that Florida’s problem was much different.
“Chicago was hit hard (in the 1970s) by heroin,” Kolodny said. “Florida took a very different pathway.”
Kolodny indicated that prescription opioids were a threat to teenagers because they are considered “soft drugs," something available in bathroom medicine cabinets, unlike heroin.
“These are young people who would never mess with heroin,” Kolodny said. “Teens can have a more risk-taking personality. Adolescents are not good at taking risks it’s not uncommon to experiment.”
Regarding the (2013) letter where Walgreens official Sally West said they were being bullied by the DEA, Kolodny said he had no reason to doubt its intent.
“How many times did she (West) use that term bullying (publicly)?” Stoffelmayr asked.
“I highly doubt bullying was said publicly,” Kolodny responded.
“You didn’t review West’s testimony, what she meant by bullying?”
“I think the term…”
“I’m not asking what you think,” Stoffelmayr said cutting Kolodny off. “I’m asking, you did not review (West’s testimony)?”
“I may have reviewed it,” Kolodny said. “I don’t think bullying (the word) requires much research. It’s plain English.”
The passage in the email where it said, “Bondi now agrees the pendulum has swung too far.” Stoffelmayr asked Kolodny if he thought this statement was true.
“I think it’s true,” Kolodny said. “There was effective lobbying (by Walgreens) of Bondi’s office. I don’t think anybody’s lying in that email.”
Under redirect examination, Kolodny told state’s attorney Ariella Migdal that Walgreens at the time wanted to be seen publicly as cooperating with the DEA.
“They (Walgreens) did not like it that the DEA was taking action against them,” Kolodny said. “They were using lobbyists in Washington D.C., all the muscle they had.”
Kolodny said Walgreens and other pro-opioid groups lobbied for the passage of a bill in Congress authored by Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Tom Marino in 2016, that passed Congress unanimously. Critics said the law weakened the DEA’s efforts to go after opioid drug distributors by freezing their ability to hold suspicious narcotic shipments.
Investigations by the Washington Post and the television show 60 Minutes led to Marino withdrawing his name from a possible appointment by Donald Trump in 2017 to become the nation’s head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Kolodny, describing them as “front groups and associations,” testified that organizations such as the National Association of Chain Drug Stores worked for the bill’s passage, which made it harder for the DEA to go after Walgreens.
“Walgreens lobbied for the bill,” Kolodny said. “Walgreens was using Purdue Pharma’s playbook to make drug sales go up. It was more effective hiding behind an association. These groups were receiving money from Purdue.”
Later in the day Patricia Conners, a former chief associate deputy of Bondi with the AG's Office for 36 years, recounted how Bondi expressed alarm at the growing drug crisis.
"She (Bondi) looked up from the (statistic) figures and said, 'This is a recipe for murder,'" Conners recalled.