PART 2
Chapter 27
Washington, D.C., 2017
On February 10, 2017, Paul T. Farrell Jr., a small-town lawyer from Huntington, West Virginia, climbed into his Chevy Silverado pickup shortly before dawn and drove six hours to Arlington. The forty-two-year-old pulled into a parking spot near DEA headquarters and walked to the marbled lobby of the towering black-and-tan glass and steel building across the Potomac River from Washington. Built like a linebacker and sporting a soldier’s buzz cut, Paul was an intimidating figure. He didn’t have an appointment. And he didn’t care. He was determined to speak with the DEA agent in charge of the D.C. field office, which happened to oversee his home state. Even if he couldn’t see the agent, Paul wanted to make sure the high-ranking law enforcement official was aware of his presence.
Ever since his younger brother had challenged him during Sunday breakfast two months earlier to do something about the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, Paul had been trying to determine if there was a civil case to be made against the drug industry. After reading an investigative report in his local newspaper, he had concluded that ARCOS, the agency’s pill-tracking database, held crucial information that could be the foundation of a potential case. If he got lucky and the DEA supervisor he had come to see, Karl Colder, was willing to talk to him, he might find out how he could get access to ARCOS. The database, he believed, would reveal the identities of the companies that had hollowed out his hometown and thousands of other communities across the country. It would show precisely how many pills each company had shipped, where they had shipped them, and which pharmacies had parceled them out.
Paul also planned to go to the Library of Congress during his Washington field trip, hoping to find a friendly researcher who would guide him through the archives. Paul had read that the drug companies had objected to some of the reporting requirements contained in the Controlled Substances Act prior to its passage in 1970. If he could find their statements in old copies of the Federal Register, he might be able to use them to reinforce his case. How could the companies say they didn’t know they were obliged to stop shipping enormous orders of pain pills when they had objected to those very same requirements five decades earlier?
But more than anything else that day, Paul wanted to find Joe Rannazzisi. He had read about the DEA agent turned whistleblower, and his fierce but futile battle against the drug companies, in an investigative series published by the Washington Post the previous fall. Paul imagined Joe as his star witness one day, telling rapt jurors about his decade-long fight to hold the drug industry accountable.
Two months before Paul’s trip to Washington, the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia had published a blockbuster investigation into the opioid industry. The paper’s star investigative reporter, Eric Eyre, obtained partial access to ARCOS and discovered that drug distributors had dumped 780 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone into the state between 2007 and 2012. McKesson, Cardinal, and AmerisourceBergen were responsible for shipping more than half of those pills. The DEA provided the ARCOS data to the attorney general of West Virginia, who had sued the drug distributors. (Eyre’s newspaper had won access to this data after filing suit.) Cardinal and AmerisourceBergen settled with the attorney general, paying a combined $36 million. Paul thought the amount was a pittance and none of the money would ever reach his hometown. He had a strategy for a bigger payday that would benefit all of the towns and counties in the state.
After Eyre’s story appeared, Paul filed fifteen Freedom of Information Act requests with the DEA seeking agency documents about the drug companies, as well as access to ARCOS. He received nothing but pro forma acknowledgments. He also left numerous messages for Colder, to no avail. He was tired of being stonewalled. Time to doorstep the DEA agent.
“Hi, I’m Paul Farrell and I’m here to see Karl Colder,” Paul told the receptionist in the lobby of DEA headquarters.
“I’m sorry. Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Paul Farrell. I’m a lawyer from West Virginia and I’m here to see Karl Colder.”
“Hold on,” she said.
Fifteen minutes later, the receptionist summoned Paul back to the front desk. “I’m sorry, Mr. Farrell,” she said. “He’s not available.”
“Can I speak to his assistant?” Paul asked.
“Can I take a message, Mr. Farrell?”
“The message is, I’d like to speak to Karl Colder.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Farrell. You’re going to have to make an appointment.”
Farrell knew he wasn’t going to have much success at DEA headquarters that morning. But that wasn’t the point. He wanted to fire a warning shot: The lawyer from West Virginia wasn’t going away. Paul had been raised to be relentless, told by his mother, Charlene, from an early age that God had a plan for him. As a good Catholic who went to Our Lady of Fatima most Sundays and said grace before dinner every night, Paul believed that his mother might be right. He doted on her and admired her commitment to their town, where she had founded a hospice care facility three decades earlier. She also volunteered for the Red Cross and raced to New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks and to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The need to do some good was a family trait.
Sometimes it seemed like there were as many Farrells as pickups in Huntington, a small city of forty-eight thousand people on the banks of the Ohio River that had boomed during the best coal mining years in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. The Farrells had arrived in the United States from Ireland. Paul’s great-grandfather settled in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and worked as a police officer before dying from pneumonia during the 1918 flu pandemic. Paul’s grandfather was a flight surgeon in World War II and went to work as a doctor at the VA hospital in Huntington after the war ended. The family found a region full of economic promise—and they thrived. One of the downtown buildings is named for the family. For decades, the building was occupied by the law firm of Farrell, Farrell & Farrell. It was run by his uncles and his father, Paul Sr., who started out as a prosecutor in Huntington. Paul Sr. went on to help coordinate federal drug task forces in the region and became a West Virginia circuit court judge. Paul followed his father in the field, graduating from the West Virginia University College of Law in Morgantown in 1997 after attending Notre Dame.
At first, Paul joined the family firm, defending doctors and health care organizations in medical malpractice lawsuits, known as “med mal” cases, before striking out on his own. He signed on to a firm in Morgantown, where he switched and began to represent patients harmed or killed by defective medical devices. In 2011, he became one of the lead attorneys in national litigation against manufacturers of transvaginal mesh, a surgically implanted device that caused serious injuries to thousands of women. Two of Paul’s cases resulted in $20 million jury verdicts.
While he chased big paydays, Paul also had an idealistic streak. In 2016, he ran a quixotic campaign in his home state as a Democratic candidate for U.S. president. He was not a cautious person. He signed on to causes, always confident of his success. He was a pushy, fearless doer—arrogant and romantic in equal measure.
Paul came in third in the state, surprising everyone but himself. He hoped to bring national attention to the economic ruin in West Virginia following the collapse of the coal industry. He even beat Hillary Clinton in one of the hardest-hit counties in West Virginia, Mingo; the county is site of the legendary feuds between the Hatfields and McCoys, and the bloody labor clashes in the 1920s between coal miners and the Pinkerton cops their bosses had hired to crush the rebellion in the town of Matewan.
The day after his brother’s challenge to do something about the epidemic, Paul had an epiphany: What if the conduct of the drug distributors was treated as a public nuisance? He knew that West Virginia had created a law decades earlier to clean up illegal trash dumps, and later to demolish crack houses and shut down strip clubs. It had seldom been used, even though it conferred broad powers to counties in the state to eliminate hazards to the public health and fine those who created them. Paul began to envision using the same tool designed to address a municipal nuisance, like dumping trash, to prove that the drug distributors had created a public hazard by dumping enormous amounts of oxycodone and hydrocodone into his community. He unearthed an obscure passage deep in the West Virginia code, the sort of lines that most law students would have breezed past in search of more exciting material. He only needed to absorb the first section of Chapter 7 to know that he was on to something. It gave county commissioners the power to eliminate “hazards to the public health and safety and to abate or cause to be abated anything which the commission determines to be a public nuisance.”
Tie the wanton dumping of pills to the nuisance statute and liability could follow. It was a novel theory. Some lawyers had started to test it in other cases against the drug industry. How many other states or counties around the country had similar statutes on their books, he wondered?
Paul started poring over cases. Anything to do with pills. That’s when he spotted what he was looking for: Cardinal Health, Inc. v. Eric H. Holder Jr., the 2012 investigation that pitted Joe Rannazzisi against James Cole, the deputy attorney general of the Justice Department. He read and reread the thirty-four-page declaration Joe had filed in the case. It was a blow-by-blow account of how Cardinal had ignored its legal obligations to halt blatantly suspicious drug orders and report them to the DEA. It also detailed how the company had shipped vast amounts of oxycodone to a string of pharmacies in Florida, including the two CVS stores in Sanford, Florida. Paul also found the case the DEA had brought against Masters Pharmaceutical, the Ohio-based company that flooded Florida with 30mg oxycodone “blues” made by Mallinckrodt. Finally, he turned up the DEA cases against McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, two companies he had never heard of before. He downloaded every document he could find—every motion, affidavit, and hearing transcript in the cases against the companies. By accepting fines and promising to change their practices, it seemed to Paul that each of these companies had essentially pleaded guilty to unlawful conduct on a national scale.
Paul also discovered another organization he never knew existed, the Healthcare Distribution Alliance—a group that appeared to be at the center of the fight between the DEA and the drug industry. In both the Cardinal and the Masters cases, The Alliance had filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the companies. To Paul, the briefs read like industry claims of blanket immunity from DEA oversight.
His head was swimming with the minutiae of those cases on the day he made his unannounced visit to DEA headquarters. After he’d been rebuffed, he headed over to the Library of Congress, the grand building across the street from the U.S. Capitol. He stepped into the opulent reading room and was impressed by its majesty, the soaring domed ceiling with ten-foot-high statues representing religion, philosophy, art, poetry, commerce, science, history, and the law.
“Hi, I’m Paul Farrell and I’m looking for the legislative history of these documents,” he said to the librarian, handing her a copy of the Federal Register from 1970. During the public notice period a year before, he told her, there had been objections to drug distribution measures under consideration by Congress, and he would like to see them.
“Well, you’ll have to file a request for that,” she said.
“I already have,” Paul replied. “Where can I find these types of documents?”
“Well, they’re certainly not here,” she said.
“Do you know where they are?”
The librarian left her post and returned a few minutes later. “My understanding is, if these documents exist, they’ll be in a warehouse maintained by the DEA in Virginia. Have you tried the DEA?”
Paul had one final stop to make that February day. He drove across town to the W hotel near the White House where he was staying and walked a few blocks to meet with two reporters for the Washington Post who had written the investigative series about Joe. Paul said he had some documents he wanted to share; he was really hoping to obtain Joe’s unpublished phone number.
“Hey, do you guys have a phone number for Joe Rannazzisi?”
They did, but they told him they couldn’t give it out without Joe’s permission. They told Paul they would pass along his contact information.
If Joe wanted to talk, he’d give Paul a call.
Joe never did.