Death in Mud Lick Quotes

“For the first time, we could calculate the six-year total for the entire state. There were two ways to do it. Simply add up all the pills the pharmacies bought. Or add up each distributor’s deliveries to every county. Both methods produced the same number—780 million. That was just hydrocodone and oxycodone—in a state with fewer than 1.8 million people.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

“In the sixteenth century, Swiss chemist Paracelsus coined the adage “the dose makes the poison.” It’s a fundamental principle of toxicology: High concentrations of any substance can kill. In this case, prescription opioids were particularly deadly. The coal barons no longer ruled Appalachia. Now it was the painkiller profiteers.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

“When I told them the newspaper was here, everything rolled so quickly,' Tomahawk had told me at the firehouse earlier in the year.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A True Story of Corporate Pill Pushers in Small Town America

“I reached over the side of the bed, fumbled around for a pen, and scribbled on a scrap of paper: Follow the pills and you’ll find the overdose deaths. I never bothered to turn on the light.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A True Story of Corporate Pill Pushers in Small Town America

“Emch wrote, 'And if those agencies protect any of that information from the intrusive journalistic nose of the Gazette-Mail, then its confidential nature must be respected.' Intrusive journalistic nose wasn’t meant as a compliment, but our editors and reporters seized on the phrase in Twitter postings anyway.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A True Story of Corporate Pill Pushers in Small Town America

“The paper’s tenacious reporting extended to state government, schools, jails, local businesses, city hall, cops, and courts. It was an undeniable check on power.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A True Story of Corporate Pill Pushers in Small Town America

“For the first time, we could calculate the six-year total for the entire state. There were two ways to do it. Simply add up all the pills the pharmacies bought. Or add up each distributor’s deliveries to every county. Both methods produced the same number—780 million. That was just hydrocodone and oxycodone—in a state with fewer than 1.8 million people. During those same years, 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, according to data sent to me by epidemiologists at the state Health Statistics Center.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

“Within hours, however, the Post had a blockbuster up on its website: The drug distributors had saturated America with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills from 2006 to 2012. The records provided a road map to the painkiller epidemic nationwide, tracing the path of every prescription opioid manufactured and distributed.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

“The distributors were sending some of their largest shipments to some of the smallest towns in the state. I worried the editors would want the story for the Sunday edition. They agreed to give me time to do more reporting. I had three weeks to put together the story of a lifetime.”
― Eric Eyre, Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic