This Is Insane

How is this “Justified”?

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.

780 million pills…to a state with a population of 1.85 million.

Good lord.

4 Responses to “This Is Insane”

  1. Kathy Kinsley says:

    1) what dosage?
    2) they are supposed to be taken every 4-6 hours – so divide that by at least 4 -assuming that’s a yearly amount of pills.
    3) Also – 780 million pills in 6 years? that’s 130 mil per year – which still sounds like a lot. But.

    Don’t fall for scaremongering, mkay?

  2. Syd B. says:

    Just add milk.

  3. Dr Alice says:

    A single county in an area without high population density… this isn’t scaremongering. This is BAD.

    And these drugs in most cases should be used short term only, not long term. Yes, some people do need narcotics on a regular basis but MDs are trying to minimize this type of use. I can tell you I am under a lot of pressure not to prescribe long term narcotics these days (not that I never do it, but I certainly am taking a second look in some cases).

  4. Mr. Bingley says:

    I don’t think I’m falling for scaremongering; it just seems like insanity,

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