Author: William K. Rashbaum / Source: New York Times

Mustafa Hussain for The New York Times
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For the first time, a major pharmaceutical distributor is facing federal criminal charges over its role in the opioid crisis that has ravaged the United States.
The company, Rochester Drug Cooperative, which is the nation’s sixth-largest distributor, was charged on Tuesday with conspiring to distribute drugs and defrauding the federal government. Two former company officials were also charged in the case, which was brought by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.
The criminal charges leveled at the drug distributor and its former executives marked a new tactic for the government in tackling the nation’s epidemic of addiction to prescription painkillers, like oxycodone.
Prosecutors applied the same criminal statutes to charge the distributor and its former executives as have been used against illicit street dealers and cartel chiefs who traffic in fentanyl and oxycodone.
The charges stem from a two-year investigation by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration that began after the company violated the terms of a civil settlement.
The company had admitted in the civil case that it had for years failed to report thousands of suspicious opioid orders from pharmacies, many of which flouted order limits and catered to doctors who ran pill mills.
In the last two decades, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses…
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