This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 8th, 2019.

I'm Keeble Brown.

The legal wrangling between domestic opioid manufacturers and state attorneys general is in

short a shakedown.

That from Cato Senior fellow Jeff Singer, he argues that to fundamentally address the

opioid problem at the state level. The federal government

first needs to get out of the way. So far a number of settlements have taken place

between some of the pharmaceutical companies that have You have this case in Oklahoma where all of the other defendants had settled, but Johnson and Johnson decided to go to court and they felt justified for a number of reasons.

Number one, they were concerned about preserving their good reputation.

But number two, according to data provided by the DEA, first of all, they only made roughly

they were only responsible for roughly 1% of the prescription opioid market in Oklahoma.

Second, out of those prescription opioids that they were responsible for,

one was Dura jesic, which is a fentanyl skin patch,

which has been around for decades.

It's very, it's not abused, it's not the fentanyl we hear about about people dying from

fentanyl overdoses.

The DEA tells us that over 99% of that fentanyl is fentanyl powder smuggled in from Asia or through Mexico.

It's what they call illicit fentanyl.

Duregisic patches are very difficult to abuse because if you put it on your skin it takes about three days to

slowly get absorbed anyway and it's kind of inconvenient to scrape off the what's on that

patch to try to use it.

So they make that, and then they make new cinta,

...