Cardinal Health: A billion pills in 8 years, but no role in Ohio’s opioid crisis?

Cardinal Health maintains in a prepared statement that the American opioid crisis was caused by the doctors who over-prescribed the pills, the pharmacists who sold them and the regulators who failed to catch the addictive prescription drugs flooding American communities.

But federal enforcement actions and government lawsuits against the Dublin-based drug wholesaler allege a host of instances in which Cardinal ignored “blatantly suspicious orders” as it shipped billions of opioids into Ohio and other U.S. states. In fact, Cardinal has paid out almost $100 million in fines and settlements since 2008 in connection with the way it handled the dangerous drugs.