too many political cheap shots. i m hoping that the two parties can work and understand that millions of people depend on this, and hopefully everybody will do the right thing. you were in the arena, and you know how difficult health care is to administer to huge numbers of people the first thing i think i would do is have a summit with the insurance company ceos that the president has been having with people from the auto industry and the drug firms and things of that sort. number two is that i would take a very good look at exactly how things have progressed so far. we ve had four years of progress so far. i think there s a fairly decent understanding of what needs to be tweaked and what s worked. it s so much easier and cheaper to build on what we have as
about $200 or so going into one of the clinics so they might be called pill mills. they were getting prescriptions but they weren t in many cases even seeing doctors. they were just basically cash for scrips is what was going on. what responsibility do, for example, doctors have with this and talk about, too, your reporting on the response from what you call the big three drug firms basically supplying more than half of the pain pills that went to west virginia. well, the doctors have a responsibility to know their patients and prescribe what s medically necessary. what was going on here is people would come in and in many cases wouldn t give a reason for, you know, or maybe they would say they had back pain or something like that or a tooth ache and getting pills.
by 67%. all the while heads of the drug firms collected salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. the new investigation and following the story. eric, walk us through what we should know about really thousands of pages of documents you guys pulled. we got all of the sales data for all of the pharmacies where the drug distributors shipped two particular pain pills. one was hydrocodone most people know as lortab or norco and oxycontin. what we found is there was a large number of over dose deaths caused by those two specific drugs. over the same period there were 780 million pills of both of those particular pain pills that were shipped to west virginia.
fda lax in key authority. it can t force a recall of pharmaceutical drugs. even if they catch tainted drugs at the border they can t seize, impound or destroy the drugs so ultimately it falls on the u.s. drug company to be the last resort. phrma, representing the large american drug firms say they follow good manufacturing practices. they are required to test the products from china or anywhere else, both before they put them in their product as well as during and after. reporter: that system relies on u.s. manufacturers to catch problems. most of the time they do. but heparin slipped through the cracks and the results were deadly. in this case, that s a case that has never been solved. u.s. investigators know someone deliberately tainted the. he. parin, who did it and how? we don t know. lisa sylvester. stand by for cool hot shots!
fda s lacking key authority. it can t force a recall of pharmaceutical drugs. even if they catch tainted drugs at the border, they can t seize or impound or destroy the drugs. so ultimately, it falls on the u.s. drug company to be the last resort. pharma, which represents big drug firms, says they follow manufacturing practices. they are required to test the drug be it from china or anywhere else. reporter: that system relies on u.s. manufacturers to catch problems. most of the time they do. but heprin slipped through the cracks and the results were deadly. in the case of heprin, that is a case that s never been solved. u.s. investigators know someone deliberately tainted the heprin, but who were the individuals responsible, how they did it, we still don t know. lisa sylvester, cnn, washington.