Death In Mudlick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opiod Epidemic, Eyre - B

      This story is set in West Virginia, where some of America's major drug distributors pumped millions of Vicodin and OxyContin pills through small-town pharmacies with the help and support of local businessmen and without any government oversight. The state led the nation in deaths from opioids as a result. The author is the reporter who exposed the misdeeds of  AmerisourceBergen, McKesson, Cardinal Health and Sav-Rite. He won a Pulitzer for his reporting.

     The 2005 death by oxycodone intoxication of a forty-five-year- old former miner, Bull Preece, revealed that over 45 days, he had 630 pain pills in his possession. Bull's death was the beginning of the end for the secrecy under which the distributors operated. That year, the DEA and the WV Attorney-General had pursued and obtained awards against Purdue Pharma, the aggressive maker and seller of Oxy. McKesson had flagged the activities of a Sav-Rite pharmacist in Kermit, who managed the pharmacy that had supplied Preece. Preece's sister filed a wrongful death action against both the Ohio physician who prescribed drugs for her brother and the local Sav-Rite. The lawyer learned that people from all over the east coast daily filled prescriptions in Kermit, WV, that suppliers delivered massive amounts of meds and that in essence, the Sav-Rite was a 'pill mill'. The owner, Jim Wooley, had even opened a pain clinic where doctors could come and write scripts all day for compensation. The DEA also began to investigate and learned that Wooley's Sav-Rite was delivering 54,000 pills per day in a town with 209 people. In 2009, the government closed the Sav-Rite. Preece's sister, Debbie, settled the case and began assisting  others who worked with her attorney, Jim Cagle. Soon, Cagle had 29 lawsuits in Mingo County Court.  He eventually decided to up the ante and go after the pharmaceutical distributors. The WV Attorney General deputized Cagle, and an associate, to help on a case the state was oursuing. The election of a new republican AG with ties to the industry led to a stalling of the process and years of lies and subterfuge. The distributors took the position that they were not responsible if doctors prescribed drugs and pharmacists filled the orders. They eventually settled the state's suit for $36M. Then, the towns and villages pursued them and Congress aroused itself from its lethargy and began to investigate. The five CEO's of the largest distributors faced Congress in a hearing in May, 2018. The committee report eviscerated the conduct of the companies and the DEA. The litigation against the distributors became a national trend, with 1500 cases consolidated in a federal court in Cleveland. That court released information showing that between 2006 and 2012, 76 billion pain pills had been sold in America and that the states leading the way were West Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee. The story is ongoing, sad and shocking.