The Department of Justice will send federal prosecutors to 12 regions to investigate so-called “pill mills“—clinics and pharmacies that give out prescription painkillers unscrupulously. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the plan while speaking in Ohio on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports.
The 12 assistant United States attorneys—called the Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit—are funded to work for three years out of districts in western Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Nevada, and eastern California. The unit will use data on doctors’ prescribing patterns and pharmacies’ dispensing to detect hot spots, Sessions said.
