Bipartisan committee leaders sent letters last week to two regional drug distributors, Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith, expanding on its ongoing investigation into alleged pill dumping in the state of West Virginia. The letters were sent by full committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), full committee Ranking member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Gregg Harper (R-MS), Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Ranking Member Diana DeGette (D-CO), and Rep. David McKinley (R-WV).
The bipartisan committee leaders first requested information from Miami-Luken on Sept. 25, 2017. This is the first letter to H.D. Smith.
In the letter to Mr. J. Christopher Smith, President and CEO of H.D. Smith, the leaders wrote, “H.D. Smith also appears to have been a major supplier to Sav-Rite Pharmacy No. 1 in 2008. DEA data suggests that it provided the pharmacy with over 1.3 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, a 1,154 percent increase over the 104,380 pills H.D. Smith provided the pharmacy the year prior."
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports, “In its letters, the panel also raised questions about Miami-Luken’s shipments to Westside Pharmacy in Oceana, Wyoming County. The committee cited documents that show a Miami-Luken employee reported a Virginia doctor, who operated a pain clinic located two hours from Oceana, was sending his patients to Westside Pharmacy, which filled the prescriptions. In 2015, more than 40 percent of the oxycodone prescriptions filled by Westside Pharmacy in Oceana were coming from the Virginia doctor, according to the committee’s letter. The following year, the Virginia Board of Medicine suspended the doctor’s license, finding his practice posed a ‘substantial danger to public health and safety.’ The panel’s letter also mentions Miami-Luken’s suspicious shipments to Colony Drug in Beckley. In a five-day span in 2015, the drug wholesaler shipped 16,800 oxycodone pills to the pharmacy."
