DEA backed rise in opioid output

The US Drug Enforcement Administration had permitted drugmakers to boost production of opioids even as overdose deaths were skyrocketing, the Justice Department's inspector general said on Tuesday.

Deaths from opioid overdoses in the United States increased 71 percent a year between 2013 and 2017, but the DEA was slow to combat the opioid epidemic, the report said.

The agency, which sets annual quotas for narcotic painkillers produced in the US, authorized a 400 percent increase in oxycodone output from 2002 to 2013, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said, and it didn't sharply reduce the number of pills drug companies were permitted to make until 2017, the report said.