The U.S. Justice Department signaled support for legislation to extend by seven months a ban on illegal copycat versions of fentanyl, the powerful synthetic painkiller that has helped fuel the nation’s opioid epidemic.
New York state filed civil charges accusing Johnson & Johnson of insurance fraud for downplaying the risks of opioid painkillers, including to doctors and elderly patients.
The Trump administration has resolved an internal dispute over how to handle new variants of fentanyl that it believes can beef up the fight against the deadly synthetic painkiller without hindering research to ease the opioid crisis, according to a draft agreement seen by Reuters.
Lawmakers on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee urged the Trump administration to conduct a scientific review of a Justice Department-backed bill to classify all illicit chemical knockoffs of the potent painkiller fentanyl in the same legal category as heroin.
China will expand the range of fentanyl-related substances the country defines as controlled narcotics, a Chinese security official said, blaming U.S. culture for abuse of the drug.
The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to stop a nonprofit in Philadelphia from opening what could become the nation’s first supervised drug-injection site in an effort aimed at addressing opioid abuse.
The former chief executive of Insys Therapeutics Inc. agreed to plead guilty to participating in a scheme to bribe doctors.
A former Insys Therapeutics Inc. sales representative now married to the drugmaker’s ex-CEO said she arranged to have a physician assistant in New Hampshire receive kickbacks to prescribe patients its addictive fentanyl spray.
Medical treatment would be more widely available to opioid abusers under a rare bipartisan measure aimed at tackling the U.S. addiction crisis expected to be signed into law by President Trump.
Maryland charged Insys Therapeutics Inc. with deceptively marketing a powerful opioid pain killer so that it was prescribed inappropriately beyond its intended use with cancer patients.