Trump pick for US drug czar has 'troubling' pharmaceutical ties

President Trump’s pick to be the nation’s next drug czar was the architect behind a bill making it harder for federal agents to go after drug companies flooding the market with addictive opioids.

Critics questioned Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) and his cozy ties to the pharmaceutical industry on Sunday — with some claiming he has no interest in alleviating the nation’s worsening opioid epidemic.

“This is a very serious question,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told the Daily News. “I’m going to meet with Mr. Marino. And I hope to ask him about this because it’s very troubling.”

Marino’s 2016 industry-friendly Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act disarmed the Drug Enforcement Administration in its fight against companies suspected of dispensing excessive amounts of powerful prescription medications, according to a joint report from the Washington Post and 60 Minutes.

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“The drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and chain drugstores, have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before,” former DEA official Joseph Rannazzisi told the Washington Post.

“I mean, to get Congress to pass a bill to protect their interests in the height of an opioid epidemic just shows me how much influence they have.”

Marino’s bill was initiated by an industry-funded group, the Healthcare Distribution Management Association, which claimed that the DEA was misusing its powers to go after pharmacists and drug distributors which made minor mistakes in their paperwork.

Drug and pharmacy companies, including CVS, Rite Aid and McKesson, spent more than $106 million in support of the bill, according to the report.

Marino said last year that the law, which passed both houses unanimously, was meant to protect the rights of patients in need of prescription painkillers while also acting to prevent abuse.

DEA chief administrative law judge John Mulrooney disagrees.

“At a time when, by all accounts, opioid abuse, addiction and deaths were increasing markedly” the new law “imposed a dramatic diminution of the agency’s authority,” he wrote in a draft article the Marquette Law Review editorial board provided to the Washington Post.

Marino’s own home state has been hit particularly hard by the worsening opioid epidemic, which many experts believe is directly linked to the overprescribing of addictive pain meds sold by large drug manufacturers.

Trump nominated Marino to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy last month.

Three weeks later, acting DEA chief Chuck Rosenberg stepped down, with a source telling the New York Times that he was “convinced that President Trump had little respect for the law.”

Marino, an early Trump supporter, has called for more criminalization of drug use, which could undermine efforts to treat addiction as a public health issue, critics claim.

He is also a staunch opponent of legalizing medical or recreational marijuana.

It’s unclear how much power Marino, a former prosecutor, will have should he be approved by the Senate, but his track record dovetails with Trump’s “tough on crime” rhetoric.

“It will affect votes,” Schumer said of Marino’s cozy relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. “It makes me dubious.”

More than two months have now passed since the President unceremoniously announced he would declare America’s opioid epidemic a national emergency.

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“We’re going to draw it up and we’re going to make it a national emergency,” Trump said from his golf resort in New Jersey.

Ordinarily, a formal declaration of a national emergency would follow, allowing federal funds and public health workers to be sent to struggling states.

Instead, the Trump administration has proposed cutting the budget of the Office of National Drug Control Policy by 95%.

Trump’s opioid epidemic commission, chaired by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has recommended a declaration of a state of emergency and has leaned towards treating addiction primarily as a public health problem, not a criminal justice issue.

The group headed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is due to deliver its final report on the crisis on Nov. 1.

More than 52,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2015 — with roughly two in three linked to opioids.