The seven-month investigation focused on efforts by the Pain Care Forum, a coalition that has fought against laws restricting opioid prescription across the country, said Kytja Weir, project manager for the Center for Public Integrity.
In North Carolina, the group donated $500,000 to elected officials and political parties, a relatively small slice of the $63 million in campaign contributions the group has made, considering the size of the state, according to the investigation.
In North Carolina, there are no legal limits on how many prescription opioids can be prescribed by a physician. But Jean Brinkley, spokesperson for the North Carolina Medical Board, which licenses physicians and physicians’ assistants, said appropriate prescribing is one of the board’s biggest priorities.
“The bottom line is that if you prescribe these drugs, you need to do so in a manner that is appropriate concerning current standards of care,” Brinkley said.
Brinkley said the two main ways of doing this are by providing resources about prescribing opioids for physicians to reference and monitoring efforts to make sure appropriate care is being administered. The board regularly investigates physicians to determine whether they are meeting the prescribing criteria.
“This is us being proactive,” Brinkley said. “Being investigated doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong in and of itself.”
From 1999 to 2014, more than 165,000 people in the United States died from prescription opioid overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During that same period, the number of drug poisoning deaths in North Carolina increased by 260 percent, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
