Purdue Pharma. Johnson and Johnson. CVS. Walgreens. I could keep going. Drug manufacturers and distributors have rightly come under scrutiny in light of the opioid abatement settlements. As these companies start paying hundreds of millions of dollars out across the country, in an effort to try to make up for the damage they caused by ignoring the warning signs of opioid prescribing trends over the last twenty years, it is easy to sit back and blame the whole thing on corporate greed. And no doubt, corporate greed played a big role. But the pharmaceutical industry is a complex web that extends far out from just drug makers and pharmacies. It involves doctors and providers, pharmacists, governmental agencies, insurance companies, law enforcement, and of course, the patients themselves. What happened to cause such a huge and complex supply chain with built in checks and balances fail? Imagine a stack of Swiss cheese slices on top of each other. As long as the holes don’t line up, nothing can pass through. But something did happen that lined them up, making a hole big enough for the whole country to fall in.
My guest this month is professor Anne Smith from UT College of Business. She specializes in organization failure in the context of disasters and catastrophes. As professor Smith discusses in this episode, the opioid crisis unfolded not unlike the Challenger explosion, or the Black Hawk helicopter incident in northern Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. Poor company leadership and values, market manipulation, regulatory failure, and other factors all happened to line up perfectly to create this disaster. In this episode, we dive into all the different parts of the supply chain, as well as discussing how policymakers and the private sector can learn from this colossal mistake, and hopefully prevent another pharmaceutical catastrophe in the future.
Produced and hosted by Jeremy Kourvelas. Original music by Blind House.
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