Cherokee Nation Tries To Stand Up To Opioid Dealing Monopolies

Since federal and state governments seem unwilling to impede that efforts of the pharmaceutical and drug distribution monopolies to get all of America addicted to opioids, it is left up to local governments and now the Native Americans to fight this battle.

The Cherokee Nation has sued the three largest drug distributors, McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, in Tribal Court, charging them with turning “a blind eye to the problem of opioid diversion and profited from the sale of prescription opioids to the citizens of the Cherokee Nation in quantities that far exceeded the number of prescriptions that could reasonably have been used for legitimate medical purposes.” Also named in the suit are the three largest prescription providers, Walgreen’s, CVS, and Walmart, yet another oligopoly. The suit alleges that these firms flooded the 14 counties that comprise the Cherokee Nation with enough hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to supply every man, woman and child in the Nation with at least one pill each in 2015 alone. It claims that these drug distributors knew, or should have known, that this represented a suspiciously large number of prescriptions for such a small area yet did nothing. By doing so, these companies were conspirators in creating a public health crisis in the Nation.

You may remember the oligopoly of McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen as being also identified as the key players in flooding West Virginia with over 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills over the span of six years, enough for around 430 pills for every man, woman, and child in that state. As in the Cherokee Nation, individual pharmacies as well as the Board of Pharmacy of the state of West Virginia were also complicit in this massive drug dealing and yet, as far as I know, the state itself has taken no action against the distributors or the pharmacies. Seven West Virginia counties have joined together to sue these companies on similar grounds to the charges of the Cherokee Nation.

The purpose of filing this case in Tribal Court is to not so much do anything to stop these monopolies from continuing their mass dealing of addictive drugs and rampant pursuit of profits. It is to more quickly gain evidentiary access to the companies’ internal records about what they knew about the mass distribution of these pain pills. That information could then be used to potentially stop these monopolies from their abusive practices and in further cases in the normal US legal system as well.

It is more than ironic that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and DHS head John Kelly are more than prepared to crack down on marijuana, which has been proven to be minimally addictive, but are quite prepared to ignore the “legal” effort to get millions of Americans addicted to opioids by a handful of companies that wield enormous political power. It is even more ironic that the fight against these efforts is now being led by Native Americans, a group that has been abused more than any. More distressingly, it is the very communities that largely supported Donald Trump that have been, and continue to be ravaged, by the rapacious efforts of these monopolies. And the Trump administration will do nothing to stop them.