TITLE: Records Show Publix Opioid Sales Grew Even as Addiction Crisis Prompted Other Chains’ Pullback
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/tampa-bay-publix-pharmacy-opioids-crisis/
EXCERPT: An executive at Teva Pharmaceuticals flagged Publix Super Markets in October 2015 after detecting what he called in an email “serious red flags” with the grocery chain’s orders of powerful opioids.
The share of high-strength oxycodone orders was well above normal for a chain of grocery store pharmacies, and the total number of pills sent to Publix stores was “significantly above their peers,” Teva’s head of federal compliance wrote in the email to his supervisors, according to court records in a federal lawsuit pending in Ohio against Publix and other companies.
“This is high-strength oxycodone ultimately going to Florida, a well-established hot spot for oxycodone abuse in the U.S.,” wrote the compliance officer, Joseph Tomkiewicz, in the email explaining why he halted Teva-manufactured prescription opioids to Florida’s Publix pharmacies.
The volume of prescription opioids dispensed in Florida fell 56% from 2011 to 2019 as the pharmaceutical industry was hit by lawsuits for its role in the national opioid crisis, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis of Drug Enforcement Administration data recently released by a federal court. But while national pharmacy chains like CVS and Walgreens were dispensing fewer of the highly addictive drugs, Publix’s sales were soaring.
The Lakeland-based grocer’s sales of oxycodone climbed from 26 million pills per year in 2011 to 43.5 million in 2019, the data shows. The increase in sales, which far outpaced the chain’s addition of stores in Florida, saw its market share rise to 14%, enough to overtake CVS to become Florida's second-largest dispenser of all opioid medications, behind only Walgreens, which dispensed 28% of opioids in the state in 2019. The analysis excludes drugs like methadone prescribed for addiction treatment. Opioid sales at Publix dipped slightly in 2018 and 2019, the last two years of available data.
Even as its market share grew, however, Publix was not among the 15 national manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies that Florida sued in 2018. That lawsuit claimed other pharmacies had flooded America with painkillers such as OxyContin, fueling debilitating addictions that strained communities’ first responders and medical providers.
The state’s lawsuit was a boon for Florida. While admitting to no wrongdoing, the companies agreed to settlement payments to the state, including $177 million from Teva, $440 million from CVS, and $620 million from Walgreens. The state didn’t sue Walmart but in 2022 negotiated a $215 million settlement from the retail giant, which also denied any wrongdoing.
However, there is no mention of Publix’s role on a state webpage touting the 10 opioid settlements reached during Ashley Moody’s tenure as attorney general.
That’s despite Publix being the third-biggest dispenser of opioids in the state, selling nearly twice the amount of the drugs as Walmart from 2006 to 2012, according to earlier DEA data made public in July 2019, more than two years before Florida prosecutors reached settlements with other pharmacy chains.
Moody, a Republican, took over as the state’s top legal official in January 2019. Her office declined to specifically address why Florida has not included Publix in any of its legal actions over opioids.
TITLE: Major Florida GOP Donors Stand To Make Windfall Profits If Recreational Cannabis Is Legalized
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/28/florida-gop-donors-legalize-cannabis-ron-desantis/
EXCERPT: The owners of several of the state’s biggest medical cannabis companies have contributed to myriad of Republican causes. They have given to DeSantis’s campaigns, including his state PAC, before his presidential campaign converted it to a federal committee. And they have spread their money around the party, giving to state Republicans, including the state Republican Party, state legislative campaigns, and related committees.
Among the companies whose top officials are major GOP donors is Trulieve. One of Florida’s biggest cannabis companies and one of the first to receive a coveted medical license, Trulieve is also bankrolling the ballot initiative to legalize recreational weed.
Trulieve company officials have given at least $41 million to Republicans and Democrats in Florida since 2017 and at least $25,000 to DeSantis’s state PAC in 2020. They also donated $450,000 to the state Republican Party since 2019, including $125,000 five months before DeSantis’s 2022 reelection and another $100,000 in November.
According to disclosures, Trulieve is responsible for 97 percent — $38 million — of the total funding to the political action committee sponsoring the recreational ballot initiative, Smart & Safe Florida. The PAC is run by David Bellamy, a musician and half of the country-pop duo the Bellamy Brothers.
Like all the 22 tightly regulated medical cannabis companies licensed by the state, Trulieve is already expanding production to prepare should voters approve the ballot measure.
Surterra Wellness, another of the state’s biggest medical cannabis firms, has given at least $63,000 to DeSantis state PACs since his 2018 campaign. Surterra’s former chief executive officer, William Wrigley Jr. II, of the Wrigley candy empire, gave $100,000 to the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down in June, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. His firm, Palm Beach Enterprises, gave another $100,000 on the same day. (Surterra became part of Parallel, another cannabis firm, in 2019. Wrigley left Surterra in 2021.)
Hackney Nursery, another major cannabis company in the state, gave $10,000 to DeSantis’s state PAC in 2021. Other cannabis companies including Planet 13 Holdings, Curaleaf, Cresco Labs, and its subsidiary VidaCann have also given more than $112,000 to state Republicans and GOP committees since 2018.
TITLE: How Big Pharma Is Fueling a Radical MAGA Agenda
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/big-pharma-fueling-maga-agenda-1234953950/
EXCERPT: Big Pharma has invested big money in the organizations planning what a MAGA policy agenda will look like in a new Trump administration. Not surprisingly, that policy playbook contains a major gift for the drug industry: a swift end to the Biden administration’s landmark program to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.
For two decades, Congress barred Medicare from negotiating prescription drug prices, which is a major reason why Americans pay higher prices for drugs than anyone else in the world. In 2022, Democrats finally passed legislation creating a price negotiation pilot program.
The same year, Washington’s top drug lobby — Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA — donated $530,000 to groups involved with the far-right Project 2025 agenda. The agenda, which is meant to serve as a policy roadmap for the early days of a new Donald Trump presidency, includes a call to repeal the new provisions allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
The provisions are one of the most popular achievements of the Joe Biden presidency, with 76 percent of Americans supporting Medicare drug-price negotiations, including two thirds of Republicans. Only 6 percent of Americans outright oppose the policy, according to recent polling by the Associated Press.
So it’s not surprising that Big Pharma would fund front groups willing to wage an unpopular battle to boost drug manufacturers’ bottom lines — PhRMA has long done so with organizations on both sides of the aisle. However, the lobbying group’s donations to the organizations behind Project 2025 implicates the pharmaceutical industry in an extremist conservative plan that calls for eliminating access to the abortion pill, allowing states to ban hospitals from providing emergency abortion care, and ending protections for LGBTQ+ Americans.
“We engage with different groups who have a wide array of different policy opinions and priorities,” says Alex Schriver, a senior vice president of public affairs at PhRMA. “We may not agree on every issue, but we believe engagement and dialogue is important to promoting a health care policy environment that supports innovation, a highly-skilled workforce, and access to life-saving medicines.”
PhRMA’s 2022 tax return — the most recent available — reveals the group donated $125,000 directly to the Heritage Foundation, the heavyweight conservative group that is spearheading Project 2025 and its agenda. But that agenda was produced in collaboration with an advisory board of other right-wing political groups, many of which received PhRMA dollars as well in 2022, the year work on Project 2025 began.
These donations include:
· $125,000 to the Pacific Research Institute, which dedicates itself to “advancing free-market policy solutions” in the economic school of Milton Friedman, and believes the “starting point for any policy solution is a private, voluntary action, rather than unnecessary, and even harmful, government intervention.”
· $110,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which advances a national, far-right “free market” agenda, state-by-state, by introducing “model legislation” that GOP-led legislatures can copy and pass in their various statehouses.
· $75,000 to American Commitment, which bills itself as dedicated to waging “critical public policy fights over the size and intrusiveness of government.”
· $70,000 to FreedomWorks, infamous for its role in ginning up the Tea Party movement.
· $25,000 to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a far-right group that’s most infamous for its work undermining climate science and touts a track record of “40 years of eliminating excessive regulation.”
In total, PhRMA donated more than half a million dollars to Project 2025-linked groups. This behind-the-scenes giving aligns with PhRMA’s overt efforts to retain drug companies’ ability to maximally gouge Americans on prescription products.
Drug costs are so high in the U.S., first and foremost, because the government has not negotiated lower prices, as other countries do. Then there’s America’s rigged patent system, which allows companies to block competitors from selling lower-cost generic versions of their products for many years.
This status quo allows drugmakers to reap windfall profits off patients in the United States, even as drugmakers routinely discount their most expensive drugs for sales abroad — leading to the absurdity of American consumers road-tripping to Canada to fill their prescriptions.
Maybe the most galling part of the situation is that the U.S. government subsidizes research and development on virtually all new drugs that are approved for sale.