Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
After Years Of Silence On Opioid Crisis, US And China To Hold Talks This Week
The Washington Post: U.S., China Officials To Meet On Curbing Fentanyl Supply
United States and Chinese officials will meet in Beijing on Tuesday, convening a working group designed to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs targeting U.S. users. It is the first such high-level meeting of U.S. and Chinese officials since a breakthrough agreement between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco in November when the two leaders pledged to restart counternarcotics cooperation. (Cadell, 1/28)
More on the opioid crisis —
AP: Bill Decriminalizing Drug Test Strips In Opioid-Devastated West Virginia Heads To Governor
A bill that would decriminalize all strips used to test drugs for deadly substances in West Virginia, the state with the nation’s highest overdose rate, is headed to the desk of Republican Gov. Jim Justice. Justice hasn’t said publicly whether he supports the bill, which has received bipartisan support. The proposal follows a law signed by Justice in 2022 that decriminalized fentanyl testing strips. (Willingham, 1/26)
KFF Health News and Tampa Bay Times: Records Show Publix Opioid Sales Grew Even As Addiction Crisis Prompted Other Chains’ Pullback
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. (Hodgson and O'Donnell, 1/29)
The Guardian: ‘I Don’t See How It Ends’: Expert Sounds Alarm On New Wave Of US Opioids Crisis
When Dr. Art Van Zee finally understood the scale of the disaster looming over his corner of rural Virginia, he naively imagined the drug industry would be just as alarmed. So the longest serving doctor in the struggling former mining town of St Charles set out in the early 2000s to tell pharmaceutical executives, federal regulators, Congress and anyone else who would listen that the arrival of a powerful new opioid painkiller was destroying lives and families. ... The drug industry was alarmed by Van Zee’s warnings, but not in the way he expected. It saw the doctor as a threat to profits and so from the very beginning, big pharma responded by working to discredit Van Zee and others like him who rang the alarm on high strength opioids creating mass addiction. (McGreal, 1/28)
