With the numbers no longer blacked out, I could see that AmerisourceBergen alone had distributed 119 million doses of highly addictive drugs to West Virginia pharmacies between 2007 and 2012, or roughly eighty pills for every man, woman, and child in the state. About 90 million of those pills were prescription opioids such as Lortab, Vicodin, and OxyContin. The company shipped another 27.3 million tablets of alprazolam or Xanax, the antianxiety medication that addicts often took with painkillers. Even smaller wholesalers, such as H. D. Smith, had big numbers—12.4 million hydrocodone pills and
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