Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

by Eric Eyre

In two years, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million opioid pain pills to Kermit, West Virginia, a town with 382 people.

McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen. The three companies controlled 85 percent of drug shipments.

Americans were consuming more than 80 percent of the world’s supply of oxycodone, and 99 percent of its hydrocodone.

Purdue Pharma quickly figured out Appalachia was a ripe market for the drug. The region had a history of heavy painkiller use. Its workers mined coal, operated heavy machinery, putting them more at risk for accidents and injury. There was also isolation, poverty, despair. The little round pill could fix just about anything.

here was Greear’s email, unveiled, for all to see: Morrisey had given “specific instructions” for the lawsuits against Cardinal and the other drug distributors. The message referenced Cardinal by name, but no other drug company. Greear told Cagle that he had spoken to Charleston lawyer Mark Carter, who represented Cardinal and had also headed Morrisey’s campaign transition team. Morrisey had

Lefton had discovered that dozens of pleadings in the consolidated cases had been filed under seal. And the judge was going along with it. This wasn’t a private dispute being litigated in public. It was a public dispute being

wrongly argued in private. Didn’t the families of the seventy thousand Americans dying each year of drug overdoses deserve to know what started the public health crisis?

The drug distributors had saturated America with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills from 2006 to 2012.