WASHINGTON DC - Today, U.S. Representatives Debbie Dingell (D- Mich.) and David B. McKinley P.E. (R-W.Va.) introduced the Block, Report and Suspend Suspicious Shipments Act, which will require drug manufacturers, distributors and other Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registrants to not only report but halt suspicious orders.
Currently, under the Controlled Substances Act, drug manufacturers and distributors are only required to report suspicious orders of opioids to the DEA. This legislation would require registrants to halt, investigate, and report suspicious orders of controlled substances. Click here to read the full text of the bill.
“Ending this opioid crisis requires additional action to strengthen oversight of the opioid supply chain,” said Dingell. “The Block, Report, and Suspend Suspicious Shipments Act will help address the opioid crisis by making distributors and manufacturers active partners in helping curb abuses. All of us have been impacted by this epidemic and that is why it’s so critical that we all do our part to defeat it.”
“While Congress has been rightly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid epidemic has not gone away. In fact, across the country overdose deaths have only increased,” said McKinley. “The Energy and Commerce Committee conducted an investigation which revealed that nearly 800 million opioid pills were shipped to West Virginia, amounting to 433 pills for every man, woman and child in the state. Our legislation will prevent this from ever happening again.”
This legislation came together due in part to an investigation and report released by the Energy and Commerce Committee in December 2018. The investigation looked into pill dumping in West Virginia and the role that drug distributors and others in the supply chain had in fueling the crisis. The report provided several recommendations include that “Congress should consider enacting additional suspicious order requirements to clarify registrant responsibilities and to supplement the suspicious order requirements recently codified in the SUPPORT Act.”
Original source can be found here.
