AmerisourceBergen calls DOJ complaint ‘an attempt to shift blame’ from DEA

AmerisourceBergen issued a response to the Department of Justice complaint filed yesterday, stating in part: "The complaint filed by the Department of Justice attempts to shift the onus of interpreting and enforcing the law from the Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Administration to an industry they are tasked with regulating and policing. The simple fact is DEA controlled and operated systems like the ability to limit the amount of opioid medication available through manufacturing quotas; and maintenance of registration for pharmacies that dispense controlled substances like opioid medications were not used to stem the crisis of opioid misuse and abuse… In each of these examples – which were cherry picked by DOJ from the thousands of pharmacies AmerisourceBergen delivers medicines to be the most incriminating to the company – the DEA received information directly from AmerisourceBergen on the pharmacy and it’s ordering of controlled substances like opioids. And in each case AmerisourceBergen invested time and money to take action before the DEA did. Perhaps the most fundamental demonstration of this fact is that the Department of Justice complaint never accuses AmerisourceBergen of delivering opioid based medicines to a pharmacy that the Department of Justice’s own agency – the DEA – had not registered themselves. An objective review of the facts shows that the DOJ’s complaint about AmerisourceBergen is simply an attempt to shift blame from past administrations at the Department of Justice and specifically their agency, the DEA, to industries they were tasked with regulating. Congress investigated the DEA’s conduct and found that they did not use tools like registration and manufacturing quotas to address opioid abuse and misuse. And recently a Federal Judge in West Virginia noted in a decision for AmerisourceBergen and two of its competitors, that the companies had maintained diversion control systems in accordance with the law. This sweeping decision addressed many of the same accusations that are made in this DOJ complaint and concluded that AmerisourceBergen had complied with the law." Reference Link