Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health revealed that the Food and Drug Administration failed to properly regulate prescriptions and curb improper prescriptions since 2011 as tens of thousands of people have died of overdoses, according to a New York Times published Tuesday.
Medical ethicist Arthur Caplan told Boston Public Radio on Thursday this revelation shines light on the government's own failures, while people tend to lay blame on private manufacturers like theSackler family of Purdue Pharma.
"We tend to look just to the manufacturers, they certainly should be looked at and get their legal due, but the middle men who made these pills and shipped them into little towns. ... Then the doctor prescription behavior," he said, "Where were the regulators?"
Caplan speculated the lack of oversight came from a combination of factors.
"One was, everybody had been sold the bill of goods, whether right or wrong, that pain was not getting adequately treated. I think the FDA heard that too and didn't want to get in the way of doing better on pain control," he said.
"I also think they weren't really paying attention to mis-prescribing because nobody knew what the heck proper prescription was for a while," he added. "So that got slow-going, and then I do think the administrations (regulators) worked for, in particularly back in the Bush era, they just weren't aggressive about regulating."
