Ex-pharma chief charged with flooding Appalachian towns with opioids [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Federal prosecutors have charged a former president of a major pharmaceutical distributor with flooding parts of Appalachia with millions of opioid pills while ignoring evidence they were driving addiction and death. The arrest of Anthony Rattini, the ex-head of Miami-Luken, on criminal charges marks a significant shift in legal action to hold the drug industry to account for the US opioid epidemic as hundreds of civil actions against manufacturers and distributors head to court.
Rattini is accused of distributing powerful narcotic painkillers for other than medical reasons to more than 200 pharmacies across West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee.
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The company has previously acknowledged delivering 5.7m opioid pills between 2005 and 2011 to the small town of Kermit, West Virginia, with a population of just 380 people. In 2008 alone, it shipped 5,264 pills for every man, woman and child in Kermit.
Miami-Luken went out of business in January as federal prosecutors closed in. Its former chair, Joseph Mastandrea, was alone among drug distributor executives who appeared before Congress in 2018 in conceding that his firm had played a role in the spread of an epidemic estimated to have claimed more than 400,000 lives over the past two decades.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/19/opioids-crisis-appalachia-painkillers-drugs
Although the wheels of justice turn slow, this is great news toward removing this evil plague from our society.
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