Trump Threatens to Sue Pharma Companies Over Opioid Crisis
As part of the Trump Administration’s opioid crisis plan, the president 3/19 warned pharmaceutical companies marketing opioid and other addictive pain killers that the Department of Justice is “looking very seriously into bringing major litigation against some of these drug companies.” Speaking at an anti-opioid addiction event in New Hampshire (see transcript), Trump said drug “companies must also be held accountable. The Department of Justice recently created a task force to coordinate investigations and lawsuits against manufacturers and other bad actors that harm our citizens.”
During his remarks, Trump said his administration is taking action to prevent addiction by addressing the problem of overprescribing. “We’re going to cut nationwide opioid prescriptions by one-third over the next three years,” he said. “We’re also going to make sure that virtually all prescriptions reimbursed by the federal government follow best practices for prescribing. We’ll ensure that opioid addiction is not subsidized by the American taxpayer.”
Trump also pledged to curb opioid use and to prevent new addictions by spending “a lot of money on great commercials showing how bad it is, so that kids seeing those commercials during the right shows on television or wherever — the Internet — when they see these commercials they say — ‘I don’t want any part of it...’ And we’ll make them very, very bad commercials. We’ll make them pretty unsavory situations. And you’ve seen it before, and it’s had an impact on smoking and cigarettes. You see what happens to the body; you see what happens to the mind.”
Additionally, Trump repeated his earlier controversial desire to seek the death penalty against drug dealers and drug traffickers. “Drug traffickers kill so many thousands of our citizens every year,” he told the crowd. “And that’s why my Department of Justice will be seeking so many much tougher penalties than we’ve ever had, and we will be focusing on the penalty that I talked about previously for the big pushers, the ones that are really killing so many people. And that penalty is going to be the death penalty.” His remarks admired other countries where drug problems do not exist due to the harshness of having a death penalty for certain drug violations.