Ensuring Compliance Against Drug Diversion Act of 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRIFFITH. Madam Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 4812, the Ensuring Compliance Against Drug Diversion Act.

This is a small but very important step that could play a key role in helping contain the opioid epidemic.

License to distribute opioids is not a commodity to be freely bought and sold. Those who wish to distribute opioids must earn the ability to do so.

An investigation performed by the Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee found that the current process of transferring controlled substance dispensation licenses does not create sufficient accountability.

In the one instance you heard about before, a distributor and its pharmacy customer did not go through the appropriate process of transferring registration to a new pharmacy owner, but the mistake wasn't caught until long afterward. As a result, there was a period of time during which the DEA was unaware that particular pharmacy was distributing controlled substances.

Now, in this case, as best I understand it, there was not a rogue individual, it was just a matter of an oversight. But what we are trying to do with this bill today is to make sure that in the future we don't have some rogue individual that comes in and buys somebody else's business or their license or their registration and doesn't go back to the DEA to get proper registration.

Failing to appropriately contact the DEA and verify whether the agency approved a transfer creates a serious risk of drug diversion, and this bill amends the Controlled Substances Act to prohibit that transfer of any DEA registration without written consent from the agency.

By requiring written approval from the DEA before the transfer of registration occurs, we decrease the risk of drug diversion by keeping controlled substances out of the hands of people that have not been vetted by the appropriate regulatory authorities.

Madam Speaker, that is the purpose of the bill. I appreciate everyone's support on it.

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