Five years ago in his State of the State address then-Gov. Peter Shumlin turned the spotlight on the state’s opiate crisis. Avoiding the laundry list approach that characterizes these speeches, Shumlin spent the entire speech on opiates. He documented the impacts, listed solutions and thanked some of the survivors and health professionals in the audience.

But mostly in that speech, Shumlin did exactly what he called on the rest of us to do – bring the disease to public attention. Addicts are not criminals — they have an illness – an illness that we can treat, Shumlin said. But we need to see it as a public health crisis not a criminal justice issue.

Legislators rallied in bipartisan fashion and Vermont has made solid progress, developing a hub and spoke system, increasing access to treatment, reducing the number of prescription pills that doctors prescribe and making clean needles and the life saving drug Narcan, more available.

All of these policies have had an impact. Yet the number of Vermonters dying each year remains about the same and nationally, opiate-related deaths have doubled in 10 years to more than 70,000.

And this is because there is a second part of what Shumlin said that day — which we have not addressed – holding the drug industry accountable and reducing the distribution of prescription drugs. The criminals are not the addicts, it’s the drug companies that peddled their products, Shumlin said. President Trump in his recent “border wall” speech blamed drug pushers for more than 300 deaths a week from heroin. Trump cited the lack of security on the southern border as the cause – instead he might take a cue from Peter Shumlin and look to the drug dealers at home.

Most of those addicted to opiates, started with a legal prescription from their neighborhood doctor. In the late 1990s and 2000s prescriptions increased dramatically as drug companies marketed the drugs aggressively, manipulated the health care system, looked the other way as the drugs were abused, and lied about the addictive qualities of the drugs.

Take OxyContin for example, under the drug company Purdue’s aggressive marketing prescriptions increased sharply. Today the company has made a reported $32 billion selling OxyContin – a drug that is highly addictive.

Yet OxyContin is approved for widespread use by the FDA. To really address this crisis, Shumlin argued then, and does today — that we have to take back that approval, clamp down on drug sales and put the company’s executives into prison. Nationally, opioid prescriptions increased from 76 million to 207 million between 1991 and 2013.

More than 70,000 people a year now die because of what they started.

Here are a few of the drug pushers behind this crisis that should be locked up for a long time.

Richard Sackler, part of the family that owns Purdue and a champion of the drug OxyContin. Under Sackler’s aggressive marketing, prescriptions increased dramatically. By 2002, the company was spending more than $200 million a year to market the drug and sales were in the billions. The company recently paid a $600 million fine for lying about the addictive qualities of the drug.

Or how about Miles D. White, the CEO of Abbot — the largest manufacturer of Vicodin. In 2006, doctors issued 130 million prescriptions for Vicodin, a synthetic painkiller that is highly addictive. No longer able to obtain the drug, addicts turn to heroin and other cheaper alternatives, leading to death and disease.

And over at Johnson & Johnson, America’s sweetheart drug company, William Weldon oversaw a growth in the sales of Tylenol codeine, which has a massive abuse potential. J&J is frequently named in the opioid lawsuits that states are filing. More about Weldon, who made $22 million in 2008, will be known soon, as these lawsuits wend their way through the courts.

Or Zogenix CEO Stephen J. Farr who brought Zohydro, a hydrocodone drug to the market despite it being lambasted by an FDA panel and banned in several states.

And let’s add our new drug czar, as a congressman he championed a law that has severely reduced the ability of the government to freeze drug shipments from pharmaceutical companies — companies that were operating pill mills where OxyContin is given out like candy.

The list can go on and on. But the point is obvious, let’s have harsh penalties for the people who are actually behind the opiate crisis. And lets demand that the FDA to take back their approval of these drugs.

Shumlin was right about that, just as he was right to bring attention to this issue five years ago.

This commentary is by Richard Watts, who is the director of the Center for Research on Vermont, with research contribution from Anthony DiMario, now a PHD student at UCLA.