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.

Purdue Pharma quickly figured out Appalachia was a ripe market for the drug. The region had a history of heavy painkiller use.

Cardinal faced allegations that it had failed to alert the DEA about massive orders of the painkiller hydrocodone by rogue Internet pharmacies.

I checked with local lawyers, with officials at the state bar, at least a dozen expert practitioners—none of whom had ever heard of an “oral” recusal.

Morrisey retaliated against the newspaper with a vengeance. He had a subpoena hand-delivered to the newsroom.

After returning to the capitol, I called the county commissioner who helped identify Morrisey’s connections to Cardinal back in 2013.

McGinley was citing the landmark Supreme Court decision on the First Amendment that made it possible for the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish classified documents without risk of government censorship or sanctions. President Richard Nixon had ordered the Times to suspend publication of the papers, which detailed top-secret US actions in the Vietnam War.

All of a sudden homeless people were stumbling around Madison like zombies.

The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) had pumped more than $6 million into the West Virginia contest, mostly on television advertising that linked Reynolds to Clinton and Obama.

In 2010, I reported that West Virginia officials had used $24 million in federal stimulus funds to buy giant-size Internet routers designed to serve entire colleges and instead installed them at small-town libraries.

Through their political action committees, AmerisourceBergen, McKesson, and Cardinal had contributed a combined $180,000 to the campaigns of House Energy and Commerce Committee members during the most recent election cycle.

the Energy and Commerce Committee released a 324-page report that excoriated the prescription drug distributors. McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, H. D. Smith, Miami-Luken—the

Judge Polster had just ordered the DEA to release painkiller sales data for all fifty states to lawyers representing state and local governments.

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