I’ve heard from families across Missouri who’ve lost loved ones to the opioid epidemic, and many others who’ve been forced to confront addiction head-on. And when I go to Washington, I always carry their stories with me.
So last year, when I became the top Democrat on the Senate’s main oversight committee, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work to tackle this issue. I wanted to see if I could get to the bottom of what was taking the lives of so many Missourians.
I decided to launch the largest ever congressional investigation into opioid manufacturers and distributors — to try to figure out what role those companies had in fueling the opioid epidemic.
What I found was shocking.
I discovered that some pharmaceutical executives created complicated strategies to push opioids onto people who had no business taking them.
My investigation featured a phone call where an employee of one company pretended to call from a woman’s doctor’s office to get a pharmacy to give the woman a powerful fentanyl medication. She later died from an overdose.
The same company aggressively used ‘speakers programs’ to pay physicians to discuss its fentanyl drug with colleagues — but in some cases these programs had no safety content and no true educational purpose.