Attorney General Jeff Sessions took the podium at an American Conservation Union Foundation and Cardinal Institute event in West Virginia to speak on the Justice Department’s fight against the nation’s impending opioid epidemic. Sessions told the crowd that the nation is fighting the worst epidemic it has seen in its history, but he believes that the Department of Justice is taking necessary steps to tackle the core problems of the issue.
“I believe the department’s new resources will reduce prescription abuse and save lives,” Sessions said. “I believe this is a war we can win.” According to ABC 33/40, he announced that his department has created an opioid fraud and abuse detection unit tasked with examining data and investigating for signs of healthcare fraud. He said that the unit will be able to determine the physicians who are writing excessive prescriptions, how many patients have died within 60 days of receiving the prescription, the average age of those receiving prescriptions, and the pharmacies writing the prescriptions.
“Fraudsters lie, but these numbers don’t,” the attorney general said.
Sessions has assigned 12 experienced prosecutors to investigate opioid abuse hotspots around the country. He mentioned the recent prosecution of a West Virginia doctor who wrote 400 prescriptions in a day without seeing the 270 patients he wrote the prescriptions for.
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The opioid epidemic has been devastating across the nation, including in Alabama. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 33,091 opioid related deaths in the United States in 2015, including 736 in Alabama. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. Many Alabama lawmakers have taken up the fight against this epidemic alongside Sessions, including Alabama’s own Attorney General Steve Marshall.
Sessions hopes that a crackdown on opioid abuse will not only benefit the nation socially, but economically as well. “Our country is advanced by having more Americans drug free and ready to work,” he said.
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