From staff reports

WASHINGTON – More federal resources to fight opioid addiction need to be shifted into the state of West Virginia, a congressman said.

Rep. David McKinley, during a hearing this week of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee investigating opioid pill dumping, questioned Robert Patterson, the acting director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, about the responsibility of the agency to limit production quotas on pills and a lack of resources put into West Virginia.

“Back in the ’70s when America was facing a major problem with amphetamines, the DEA stepped up and instituted quotas, cutting production by 90 percent, and the problem went away,” McKinley, a Republican from the 1st District, said. “In the ’80s, they did the same thing when quaaludes became a problem. Fast forward to today, and we have continuously allowed the production of dangerous opioid pills to increase.

“Didn’t the DEA learn anything from our successes in the past?” McKinley said. “The data should have raised red flags, yet they kept increasing quotas. Enough is enough.”

Patterson, acting director of the agency since October, was questioned by the committee for about two hours.

Patterson in his statement to the committee said the DEA’s Diversion Control Division has modernized the Automated Reporting and Consolidated Orders System to which manufacturers and distributors report sales and distributions, including to pharmacies. The system has been enhanced to require manufacturers and distributors of controlled drugs to fix errors, he said.

“This will help the ARCOS system to capture more accurate data and provide a more ‘real time’ snapshot of the flow of controlled substances within the drug supply chain,” he said.

The agency also is working with attorneys general in 41 states and a second coalition of seven states to provide confidential data to help in investigations and has launched a new tool in the automated reporting system to help manufacturers and distributors determine if an order is suspicious, Patterson said. The system will report the number of sales of the substance to a prospective buyer within the last six months, he said.

The opioid epidemic has hit West Virginia the hardest with 52 deaths per 100,000 people, McKinley said.

“The DEA needs to shift resources back into the state to help us combat this crisis on the front lines,” he said. “Recently, they placed a tactical diversion squad in Clarksburg, but that is only the second DEA unit in the state. More resources and officers must be placed in West Virginia if we’re going to turn the tide and win the fight.”

The committee also met on Wednesday on the opioid problem with public health officials. Among the witnesses were Dr. Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Dr. Anne Schuchat, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Michael Kilkenny, physician director at Cabell-Huntington Health Department in West Virginia.

“A sometimes overlooked aspect of the epidemic is the rise in blood-borne infections associated with injection drug use,” Kilkenny said. “Historically, substantial progress has been made in reducing HIV infections among injection drug users, but increases in injection drug use stemming from the opioid epidemic present a new set of challenges, particularly in rural and suburban communities.”