This 2 part series won the Pulitzer for Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette. A must read.

[Cattledog]

Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

Follow the pills and you'll find the overdose deaths.

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.

Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States.

The trail also weaves through Wyoming County, where shipments of OxyContin have doubled, and the county's overdose death rate leads the nation. One mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drugstore just eight blocks away.

In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, a Sunday Gazette-Mail investigation found.

- See more at: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161217/drug-firms-poured-780m-painkillers-into-wv-amid-rise-of-overdoses#sthash.DQmtC8I4.dpuf

[Hokie]

1. Really sad

WTF is the FDA doing?

[Maraya1969]

2. The CEO of one the pain pill manufacturers is #1 for CEO compensation

#1 John H Hammergren

Total Compensation
$131.19 mil
5-Year Compensation
$285.02 mil
Education:
College: University of Minnesota BS '81
Graduate School: Xavier University MBA '87


He might as well be a viscious dictator

[Staph]

3. There were two other stories on the subject by Eyre.

December 19, 2016 -- Pill rules not enforced

http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161218/suspicious-drug-order-rules-never-enforced-by-state


May 23, 2016 -- Drug firms fueled ‘pill mills’ in rural W.Va.

http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20160523/drug-firms-fueled-pill-mills-in-rural-wv


This whole subject breaks my heart. And our state's Republican attorney general Patrick Morrisey has some sort of connections to the issue. As stated in Morrisey's Wikipedia entry, "Recently questions have arisen about Morrisey's ties to Cardinal Health, his campaign funds and the lawsuit his predecessor filed against Cardinal Health. After his claim of recusing himself from the suit he met privately on several occasions with representatives of Cardinal Health." The news story that covered Morrisey's meeting with Cardinal Health (a major pharmaceutical distributor) -- written by Eric Eyre!

http://www.wvgazettemail.com/News/201310120085

[ThatOtherPerson]

4. +1

kick