This is a story where media incompetence and corruption meet and the truth gets left by the wayside yet again. Professional standards are an alien concept to the modern American media.
Big (and Hurting) Media on Drugs
Did the Washington Post overplay its opioid story because it spent so much money on it?
PHOTO: ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Oct. 20, 2017 6:27 p.m. ET
182 COMMENTS
In 1997, The Wall Street Journal lent its editorial voice to those of cancer doctors and the Journal of the American Medical Association to warn that severe pain was badly under-treated by the U.S. medical profession.
The reason, of course, was customs and regulatory strictures meant to “prevent doctors’ offices from becoming a channel for the illegal marketing of drugs.”
Obviously opioid abuse is a challenge today, as is adequately treating patient pain, though, 20 years later, the problem is still sometimes misstated. But one thing is certain: Unless the Washington Post andCBS ’s “60 Minutes” have discovered a new, physics-defying form of quantum action at a distance, their splashy exposé last weekend identified neither the cause nor any solution.
I’ll admit I didn’t read the Post’s 7,800-word opus on first pass. To the credit of some merciful editor, the lead sentence told me I needn’t bother. The piece begins: “In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.”
In other words, whatever the sorry tale of the sausage factory to follow, the abuse epidemic was already in full swing when Congress acted barely a year ago, so the DEA’s “potent” weapon perhaps wasn’t so potent.
On second pass, though, the Post story seems almost purposely to mislead. At ominous points it provides an updated running total of opioid deaths since 2000—which naturally rises relentlessly because people don’t come back from the dead.
In fact, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pointed out, prescription opioid deaths remain roughly proportional to prescriptions written. The number of prescriptions, which tripled between 1999 and 2010, has been falling ever since. Today’s surging opioid death rate is due to black-market heroin and fentanyl.
Moreover, the Post hardly bothers to substantiate the central pinion of its story—its claim that the DEA has been deprived of a vital tool, known as “immediate suspension orders” against drug distributors. Such orders peaked at 65 in 2011 and have fallen to single digits. But is this a meaningful gauge?
A federal survey finds misuse of prescription opioids peaked in 2012 and has returned to 2002 levels. Suspension orders were already being dialed back—41 in 2012, 16 in 2013—before Congress intervened. Maybe the message got through to drug distributors via a tactic that didn’t lend itself to being repeated or accelerated.
In an accompanying editorial, the Post fulminates that “Congress alongside the pharmaceutical industry helped fuel the opioid crisis,” but fails to mention the bill in question was one of 18 that the Associated Press called a “mountain of bills addressing the nation’s opioid abuse crisis.”
The measure in question, which rewrote the legal standard for suspension orders, was approved by the Obama White House, DEA and Justice Department. It was unanimously supported by Congress. It reflected, as the New York Times noted, a Congress under pressure from drug lobbyists to show an interest in “ensuring access to narcotic painkillers” for patients even while “addressing the addiction epidemic linked to those drugs.”
Notice something else: As these bureaucratic adjustments, wise or unwise, were wending through Congress, the nation was acting on opioid deaths. Police were being equipped with the opioid-inhibitor naloxone. Crackdowns on “pain clinics” were dramatically reducing illicit supplies, etc.
What we have here is a typical story of bureaucratic angst, promoted by the Post’s lead source, Joseph Rannazzisi, a former DEA official who now works for trial lawyers suing the drug industry.
It partakes of a Washington-centric delusion that actions in Washington matter above all. And what to make of the Post’s willingness to let a source put undocumented words in the mouths of unnamed “drug company representatives” who naturally confirm, in conversations the Post can’t claim to know took place, everything the Post’s source says?
Which brings us to the unfathomable part. Why does the paper so grossly overplay its story? In a time of digital penury, nobody wants to discourage journalistic enterprise, but a new risk reveals itself: Look at how the Post festoons its report with what can only be called marketing—graphics, video and charts out the wazoo. This also costs money. How can any editor, especially late in the process, have the courage to say, “Aren’t we trying to make mountains out of a molehill here?”
I got around to reading the rest of the Post piece after it prompted one of the law’s many authors, Rep. Tom Marino (R., Pa.), to drop out of consideration for Trump drug czar. Don’t worry. I am not about to overplay the significance of this consequence. The drug czar is a largely powerless office whose value is symbolic at best.
Appeared in the October 21, 2017, print edition.
Big (and Hurting) Media on Drugs
Did the Washington Post overplay its opioid story because it spent so much money on it?
PHOTO: ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Oct. 20, 2017 6:27 p.m. ET
182 COMMENTS
In 1997, The Wall Street Journal lent its editorial voice to those of cancer doctors and the Journal of the American Medical Association to warn that severe pain was badly under-treated by the U.S. medical profession.
The reason, of course, was customs and regulatory strictures meant to “prevent doctors’ offices from becoming a channel for the illegal marketing of drugs.”
Obviously opioid abuse is a challenge today, as is adequately treating patient pain, though, 20 years later, the problem is still sometimes misstated. But one thing is certain: Unless the Washington Post andCBS ’s “60 Minutes” have discovered a new, physics-defying form of quantum action at a distance, their splashy exposé last weekend identified neither the cause nor any solution.
I’ll admit I didn’t read the Post’s 7,800-word opus on first pass. To the credit of some merciful editor, the lead sentence told me I needn’t bother. The piece begins: “In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.”
In other words, whatever the sorry tale of the sausage factory to follow, the abuse epidemic was already in full swing when Congress acted barely a year ago, so the DEA’s “potent” weapon perhaps wasn’t so potent.
On second pass, though, the Post story seems almost purposely to mislead. At ominous points it provides an updated running total of opioid deaths since 2000—which naturally rises relentlessly because people don’t come back from the dead.
In fact, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pointed out, prescription opioid deaths remain roughly proportional to prescriptions written. The number of prescriptions, which tripled between 1999 and 2010, has been falling ever since. Today’s surging opioid death rate is due to black-market heroin and fentanyl.
Moreover, the Post hardly bothers to substantiate the central pinion of its story—its claim that the DEA has been deprived of a vital tool, known as “immediate suspension orders” against drug distributors. Such orders peaked at 65 in 2011 and have fallen to single digits. But is this a meaningful gauge?
A federal survey finds misuse of prescription opioids peaked in 2012 and has returned to 2002 levels. Suspension orders were already being dialed back—41 in 2012, 16 in 2013—before Congress intervened. Maybe the message got through to drug distributors via a tactic that didn’t lend itself to being repeated or accelerated.
In an accompanying editorial, the Post fulminates that “Congress alongside the pharmaceutical industry helped fuel the opioid crisis,” but fails to mention the bill in question was one of 18 that the Associated Press called a “mountain of bills addressing the nation’s opioid abuse crisis.”
The measure in question, which rewrote the legal standard for suspension orders, was approved by the Obama White House, DEA and Justice Department. It was unanimously supported by Congress. It reflected, as the New York Times noted, a Congress under pressure from drug lobbyists to show an interest in “ensuring access to narcotic painkillers” for patients even while “addressing the addiction epidemic linked to those drugs.”
Notice something else: As these bureaucratic adjustments, wise or unwise, were wending through Congress, the nation was acting on opioid deaths. Police were being equipped with the opioid-inhibitor naloxone. Crackdowns on “pain clinics” were dramatically reducing illicit supplies, etc.
What we have here is a typical story of bureaucratic angst, promoted by the Post’s lead source, Joseph Rannazzisi, a former DEA official who now works for trial lawyers suing the drug industry.
It partakes of a Washington-centric delusion that actions in Washington matter above all. And what to make of the Post’s willingness to let a source put undocumented words in the mouths of unnamed “drug company representatives” who naturally confirm, in conversations the Post can’t claim to know took place, everything the Post’s source says?
Which brings us to the unfathomable part. Why does the paper so grossly overplay its story? In a time of digital penury, nobody wants to discourage journalistic enterprise, but a new risk reveals itself: Look at how the Post festoons its report with what can only be called marketing—graphics, video and charts out the wazoo. This also costs money. How can any editor, especially late in the process, have the courage to say, “Aren’t we trying to make mountains out of a molehill here?”
I got around to reading the rest of the Post piece after it prompted one of the law’s many authors, Rep. Tom Marino (R., Pa.), to drop out of consideration for Trump drug czar. Don’t worry. I am not about to overplay the significance of this consequence. The drug czar is a largely powerless office whose value is symbolic at best.
Appeared in the October 21, 2017, print edition.
