20 Dec 2016 7:37 pm
People are making money, and that's all that really matters.Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses.
Follow the pills and you'll find the overdose deaths.
The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392.
There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.
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 unfettered shipments amount to 433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in West Virginia.
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As the fatalities mounted — hydrocodone and oxycodone overdose deaths increased 67 percent in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012 — the drug shippers' CEOs collected salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars.
Their companies made billions.
Read more at link in title.