West Virginia has received 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills over a six-year period. The West Virginia Sunday Gazette-Mail has been investigating the rise in fatal overdoses from those two prescribed painkillers and the numbers are staggering.
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.
The Gazette-Mail was able to get its hands on confidential drug shipping sales records between 2007-2012 for all of West Virginia, by county. The southern West Virginia counties have been hit with higher fatal drug overdoses and they have also received considerably more of the pain pill deluge.
For more than a decade, the same distributors disregarded rules to report suspicious orders for controlled substances in West Virginia to the state Board of Pharmacy, the Gazette-Mail found. And the board failed to enforce the same regulations that were on the books since 2001, while giving spotless inspection reviews to small-town pharmacies in the southern counties that ordered more pills than could possibly be taken by people who really needed medicine for pain.
As the fatalities mounted — hydrocodone and oxycodone overdose deaths increased 67 percent in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012 — the drug shippers' CEOs collected salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. Their companies made billions. McKesson has grown into the fifth-largest corporation in America. The drug distributor's CEO was the nation's highest-paid executive in 2012, according to Forbes.
As with all drug dealers who aren’t black, the chain of command gives them a plausible deniability defense. It’s not us manufacturing drugs, it’s not the pharmacies, it’s doctors who write “illegal prescriptions.” As the Gazette-Mail points out—it’s all of them.
“It starts with the doctor writing, the pharmacist filling and the wholesaler distributing. They're all three in bed together,” said Sam Suppa, a retired Charleston pharmacist who spent 60 years working at retail pharmacies in West Virginia. “The distributors knew what was going on. They just didn't care.”
The investigative report goes into more and more detail showing the shear numbers. When you are being prescribed addictive drugs by the fistful, there are going to be serious casualties.