Despicable Drug Dealers In West Virginia

Click here for an article at Esquire by Charlie Pierce, entitled "Drug Companies Have Been Pumping Opiates into West Virginia."

Kermit, West Virginia, has a population of 392. It's a typical small town in the poor, rural county of Mingo. According to its Wikipedia entry, per capita income for the town is $14,695. About 4.0% of families and 10.1% of the population were below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is 12.8%.

Over two years, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million hydrocodone (OxyContin) pills to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town. OxyContin and similar opioids are highly addictive and potentially deadly, and are prescribed for pain relief.

Click here for an article with this information in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, by Eric Eyre, entitled "Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses." The article says:

Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States.

The trail also weaves through Wyoming County, where shipments of OxyContin have doubled, and the county's overdose death rate leads the nation. One mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drugstore just eight blocks away.

In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, a Sunday Gazette-Mail investigation found.

The article presents figures saying that 780 million doses of oxycodone or hydrocodone -- opioids -- were shipped to West Virginia in the period from 2007 to 2012 -- "433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in West Virginia." Deaths from opioid overdoses over that period increased by 67%.



According to the article, "The wholesalers and their lawyers fought to keep the sales numbers secret in previous court actions brought by the newspaper."

The drug companies, of course, are making billions; their CEOs and other executives are making tens of millions in salaries and bonuses. The largest distributor, McKesson, "has grown into the fifth-largest corporation in America. The drug distributor's CEO was the nation's highest-paid executive in 2012, according to Forbes."

Under the heading "Drug wholesalers made billions," the article says:

In the drug distribution industry, they're called the “Big Three” — McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen — and they bear no resemblance to the mom-and-pop pharmacies that ordered massive quantities of the drugs the wholesalers delivered in West Virginia.

The Big Three wholesalers together are nearly as large as Wal-Mart, with total revenues of more than $400 billion. Their revenues account for about 85 percent of the drug distribution market in the U.S.

Between 2007 and 2012 — when McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen collectively shipped 423 million pain pills to West Virginia, according to DEA data analyzed by the Gazette-Mail — the companies earned a combined $17 billion in net income.

Over the past four years, the CEOs of McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen collectively received salaries and other compensation of more than $450 million.

In 2015, McKesson's CEO collected compensation worth $89 million — more money than what 2,000 West Virginia families combined earned on average.

There's much more in the article about the unholy alliance between the drug companies, the pharmacies, and the physicians. It's well worth the read -- click here. And the article is only the first of two parts; the second is called "'Suspicious' drug order rules never enforced by state."