The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) will begin to aggregate and analyze data to identify and target prescribers and pharmacies moving unusually large amounts of opioid drugs, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced.
Sessions said a “surge” of DEA agents would be directed to the data-targeting initiative, which will be based on approximately 80 million reports filed by drug makers and distributors each year. Data on distribution figures and inventories are disclosed in the reports.
“We are not going to stand back and let this crime and addiction continue to rise, plain and simple,” Sessions said during an address in Louisville on Jan. 30. “We will not allow the progress against crime made by our men and women in blue over the last decade slip through our fingers. We will not cede one block or street corner to drug dealers and criminals.”
The DEA’s new data-targeting efforts follow an inquiry from members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee about how the agency uses aggregated data. A letter sent by committee members in May questioned whether the DEA had “sufficient insight into the supply patterns” of opioid drugs to states that have been hardest hit by the epidemic.
“‘DEA collects some 80 million transaction reports every year from manufacturers and distributors of prescription drugs,” Sessions said. “These reports contain information like distribution figures and inventory. DEA will aggregate these numbers to find patterns, trends, statistical outliers—and put them into targeting packages.”