Cardinal was the top seller of prescription painkillers in West Virginia. It had saturated the state with hydrocodone and oxycodone—a combined 240 million pills between 2007 and 2012. That amounted to 130 pain pills for every resident. The lawsuit cited huge shipments to the counties most affected by the drug problem: Logan, McDowell, Boone, and Mingo. These counties were in the heart of the state’s southern coalfields. The region was shedding population, towns were dying, people were overdosing in record numbers. Hope was hard to find.
