FDA Didn’t Handle Opioid Crisis Properly: Gottlieb

FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on the NBC Today show that “a lot of people (at FDA) didn’t do what they needed to do in the past” to address the nation’s growing opioid crisis. He said he has taken steps to increase controls over the drugs that kill some 60,000 Americans a year, including putting tighter restrictions on opioids in cough medicines for children, requiring 74 major drug manufacturers to give their employees better training, and urging drug companies to package opioids in smaller quantities.

The commissioner said his team is trying to learn from the mistakes of earlier administrations. “I look to the past to try to understand what we did wrong, to try to inform what we can do right going forward,” he said. “I don’t think this is going to be a five-year effort. But it will take a year or two to get to the optimal place here…. I don’t want to be looking back five years from now and saying I wish I had done more.”