“Dang Good”

The CliffsNotes Version of How the DEA Failed to Stop a Problematic Drug Distributor

I was in the middle of reporting for Pharma in 2018 when the DEA charged that the nation’s fourth largest drug distributor, Morris & Dickson, had repeatedly failed to flag and report more than 12,000 suspicious orders for opioid painkillers to hospitals and pharmacies over a four-year period. Despite feeding millions of pills to small town pharmacies that sometimes supplied pill mills and churned out fraudulent prescriptions, the company had filed only three suspicious order reports, none of which led to any formal action.

What did the family-owned Morris & Dickson, with $4 billion in annual revenues, do to demonstrate that it was serious about fixing its mishandling of lethal opioid painkiller shipments? It hired Louis Milione, chief of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the unit responsible for regulating companies like Morris & Dickson when it comes to the sales of addictive prescription drugs. The firm’s president, Paul Dickson Sr., testified that its compliance program was “da…