Last week the FDA gave nine pharmaceutical manufacturers 60 days to stop making unapproved painkillers, which included high concentrate morphine sulfate oral solutions, and immediate release tablets and oral solutions containing morphine sulfate, hydromorphone and oxycodone.  My first thought when I read that was, “How could so many companies have gotten by with manufacturing unapproved drugs to begin with?”  So I did some digging.

It turns out that many of these drugs were developed long...