During election season, we talked a lot about the politics behind Proposition 205. Well, it seems a new chapter has opened as Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich threw the book at Insys Therapeutics, last week.
Over the past several months, Insys has been hit with lawsuit after lawsuit across the country. Last week, Arizona joined 21 other states in holding Insys accountable for illegally pushing their opioid drug, Subsys.
Insys, if you’ll remember, is the Chandler-based opioid manufacture that donated $500,000 to the Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy to fight Prop 205. Aside from medical marijuana being a substitute to some ailments treated with opioids, Insys also plans to release their own THC pill, Syndros. (You know, the one that sounds like a Transformer.)
Brnovich is accusing Insys of jeopardizing patient safety by lying to doctors, insurers and patients to inflate the company’s income.
“Insys lied to insurers, concealed key facts from doctors and patients, and paid doctors sham ‘speaker fees’ in exchange for writing prescriptions, all in order to increase the sales of Subsys, without regard for the health and safety of patients,” he said in a statement.
He also estimates the company “made hundreds of millions of dollars from its deceptive scheme.” That’s important because under the law which Brnovich is using to sue the company—Arizona’s Consumer Fraud Act—Insys could be on the hook for all that money they made in addition to reparations to patients and families.
Brnovich sent Insys a “civil investigative demand,” according to the Arizona Daily Sun. From the information he received, his office identified three doctors responsible for the majority of Subsys sales over a five-year period. The trio made up just less than two-thirds of $51.9 million in sales during that time period.
The lawsuit comes three weeks after J.P. Holyoak, the chairman of Prop 205’s “Yes” campaign, wrote an op-ed piece for AZCentral criticizing Governor Doug Ducey’s lethargy towards the opioid crisis. Ducey declared the crisis a public health emergency in July, and this lawsuit is the first major development in his campaign to curb opioid addiction.
Holyoak also called out Yavapai and Maricopa county attorneys Sheila Polk and Bill Montgomery. Polk was the board chair for ARDP while Montgomery was just awfully vocal about his confusion.
Hopefully, by now, the irony has sunk in for Polk in an organization for “responsible drug policy” accepting a $500,000-donation from a company that might be responsible for killing people with its drug. That’s just bad policy, Polk.
As vindicating as the lawsuit may be for the marijuana industry, the underlying reality is that Insys’s unethical practices may have actually resulted in deaths from opioid overdoses.
Last year, 790 Arizonans died from opioid overdoses. This summer, Ducey ordered the Arizona Department of Health Services to provide weekly updates on statistics and deaths. The reports typically find between 152 and 259 “possible opioid overdoses” per week. The latest report says 35 percent of those had an opioid prescription within the past two months.
Insys isn’t the entire picture, but at least it’s a start.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2017.
This is appropriate.
However, their involvement in the anti-prop 205 effort was not the only reason it failed. Many people, myself included, voted no for one reason, and one reason only.
The writers of Prop 205 got greedy, by giving the current medical dispensaries and growers a semi-monopoly until 2021, and the regulatory framework was also not to my liking.
If they come back to the ballot with something more reasonable, I will vote for it.
“Last year, 790 Arizonans died from opioid overdoses….The latest report says 35 percent of those had an opioid prescription within the past two months.” So…65% did *not* have a recent legitimate prescription? That tells me that illicit opioids such as heroin and homemade or imported fentanyl used recreationally (as opposed to therapeutically) are playing a bigger part in opioid addiction in Arizona than prescription drugs.
What Insys did was sleazy, nasty, and wrong, and I support giving them whatever punishment they deserve. But I don’t support creating a binary either/or choice between opioids and marijuana for pain patients. That’s why I became an MMJ supporter in the first place. Firsthand experience with chronic pain is a big part of my life. No one single medication can be a panacea for every patient. For some patients, marijuana is the best option; for others, it’s responsibly used opioids. I saw how major East Coast cities cracked down on prescription opioids and made it nearly impossible for pain patients to obtain a legitimate prescription, without any helpful effect in terms of lowering addiction rates–heroin users will just continue to use heroin. I don’t want to see that happen in Arizona. Let’s face it, the drug war just doesn’t work that well. We tried a similar tack with alcohol nearly 100 years ago, and that didn’t work either.
So treat Insys like any other scummy corporation with its hands in the pockets of local politics, by all means. But don’t assume that one medication, whether MMJ or opioids, is “better” or “worse” than another, generally speaking. Patients need tailored, individualized care with all the options on the table.
I have been banned for calling the ADA what it is. In this case money dominates.