"Congress is owned by pharma.”

  The biggest drug dealers in the U.S. operate legally.  Their names are emblazoned in ads and promotions everywhere.  Who hasn’t heard of Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis?  Big Pharma revenues and profits have skyrocketed.  In 2017 the U.S. consumers spent $333.4 billion on prescription drugs. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/07/message-congress-big-pharmas-trail-greed-power-and-cruelty-must-be-stopped

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Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) Charles Dharapak/AP   As reported by the health and medicine news agency STAT, Collins is hardly alone:  Congressional disclosure forms reveal that about 30 percent of senators and 20 percent of representatives “held assets in biomedical and health-care companies, or in specialty funds set up to invest in those industries, during 2014.”  The investments totaled upward of $68 million—more than lawmakers’ combined investments in the defense and construction industries—and were concentrated on such major multinationals as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck.  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/these-congressmen-have-big-financial-stakes-industry-they-are-helping/

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10-19-17   The 2016 law makes it much more difficult for the Drug Enforcement Agency to freeze suspicious drug shipments by making the criteria for such actions more stringent. The effect is immediately visible – the DEA has issued only six suspension orders this year, compared to 65 in 2011.

  The DEA’s troubles began far before 2016, however.  In 2013 Jim Geldhof, the Detroit DEA program manager, discovered that Miami-Luken, a medium-sized Ohio-based drug distributor, had shipped 11 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to Mingo County, West Virginia, which has a population of 25,000.  Of those, 258,000 were shipped to one pharmacy in Williamson, which has a population of 2,924. West Virginia has the highest opioid death rates in the nation.  However Geldhof’s attempts to suspend Miami-Luken’s shipments were unsuccessful as he was dismissed by the company and lawyers.

  The movement of previous DEA officers to the private sector, where they provided pharmaceutical and drug distribution companies with intimate knowledge of the DEA’s weaknesses, helped to begin weakening the DEA’s power to fight the opioid epidemic.  In 2014, the first iteration of the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act was proposed.  Pharmaceutical lobbyists supported the bill, and Congress framed it as an effort to improve the relationship and cooperation between the drug industry and the DEA.  In 2015 the bill passed the House with unanimous support.  Those who had long fought the bill slowly retired, paving the way for the bill to be passed by the Senate with little resistance.   https://www.askcarolyn.co/congress-big-pharma-and-the-opioid-crisis/

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5-19-14  Drug companies have armies of lobbyists, and the rest of us pay….It’s actually the pharmaceutical industry that spends the most each year to influence our lawmakers, forking over a total of $2.6 billion on lobbying activities from 1998 through 2012, according to OpenSecrets.org. https://publicintegrity.org/health/opinion-big-pharmas-stranglehold-on-washington/

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3-13-19   Dr. Raeford Brown, a pediatric anesthesia specialist at the UK Kentucky Children’s Hospital and chair of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Committee on Analgesics and Anesthetics, has been openly critical of big pharma and the lack of proper oversight from the FDA.  Despite many politicians, particularly declared presidential candidates, beginning to speak out against big pharma, Brown does not think that anything will come out of it “because Congress is owned by pharma.” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/congress-big-pharma-money-123757664.html

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  As usual, big pharma is giving campaign cash to key decision makers in Congress.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) received $205,100 from those affiliated with the industry this year, the most among his congressional colleagues.  The industry also gave $135,486 to McConnell’s campaign during the 2020 cycle thus far.  https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/09/big-pharma-invests-millions-drug-pricing-bills/

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8-27-19  In the first six months of this year alone, political action committees run by employees of drug companies and their trade groups have given the 30 senators expected to run for reelection nearly $845,000.   https://khn.org/news/pharma-cash-rolls-into-congress-to-defend-an-embattled-industry/