WASHINGTON, April 25 (Xinhua) -- A majority of people in the United States, across partisan and ideological divides, now think drug companies should be held responsible for the spreading opioid crisis that kills more than 100 people across the country every day, according to a new poll released on Thursday.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans want drug firms to pay to help fight the crisis while about 70 percent said even after companies pay fines and penalties, they should be forced to publicly disclose details of the role they played fueling the epidemic, the NPR/Ipsos poll finds.
"It's something, no matter your age, your gender, no matter where you live, your party affiliation, that people believe in large numbers," said Mallory Newall, lead Ipsos researcher on the survey.
"One in three have been personally affected in some way, either by knowing someone who has overdosed or by knowing someone with an opioid addiction," said Newall.
"We are holding Big Pharma accountable; they should be accountable," President Donald Trump spoke to applause at an addiction conference in Atlanta on Tuesday.
Big pharmaceutical firms have already been flooded with more than 1,600 civil lawsuits stemming from the opioid crisis, according to an NPR report.
Earlier this week, the Justice Department arrested executives who worked for a major prescription drug distributor called Rochester Drug Cooperative, one of the companies that ship large quantities of opioid from manufacturers to local pharmacies.
Jeff Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said it's the first time executives of a pharmaceutical distributor and the distributor itself have been charged with drug trafficking.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that more than 200,000 people in the United States have died from prescription opioid overdoses since the addiction crisis began in the late 1990s, after drug companies began aggressively marketing highly addictive painkillers.
