As understanding of the opioid epidemic increases, more attention is being directed toward not only the drugmakers and distributors, but the pharmacies.
On the one hand, legal sellers of drugs were merely filling doctors’ prescriptions. But do these sellers have a responsibility to monitor and publicly speak out about increasing use of addictive and potentially fatal medications?
Watch “The Pharmacist” on Netflix and you’re likely to conclude that the answer is yes. The protagonist of this docuseries is a pharmacist who, after his son died in a drug deal gone bad, began to notice the many prescriptions for opioids he was asked to fill.
After staking out the offices of a local doctor who was running a “pill mill,” he notified law enforcement and gave a deposition against the doctor.
So why write about this on a blog about Wegmans? Because Wegmans has been a major purveyor of painkillers.
A database kept by the Drug Enforcement Administration, tracking pills from manufacture to purchase, has been published by the Washington Post and is searchable by state and county.
According to the data, in its home county of Monroe, NY, Wegmans was the top seller of opioids from 2006 to 2014.
Monroe County is not one of the worst locations in the nationwide opioid epidemic. As the Post reports, the highest death rates nationwide were in rural West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia.
Yet during the years 2006 to 2014 – the same time span presented in the Washington Post data – 231 people in Monroe County died from opioid use.
The opioid crisis began in the 1990s because of “legitimate” organizations pushing the pills. From OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma (now in bankruptcy) to distributors to pharmacies.
Nationally, 17,029 people died in 2017 from commonly prescribed opioids. (Many of those who become addicted begin with painkiller prescriptions, then move on to heroin and fentanyl. If you include deaths for these drugs, the total deaths exceeded 47,000.)
Clearly, every sector observed the increase and the mounting number of deaths reported by health officials. The alarm should have sounded much earlier. From all corners.