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Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills To West Virginia Town of 2,900 (foxnews.com)
A congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis has discovered out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers over a decade to two pharmacies in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people. From a report: Between 2006 and 2016, two drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported. "These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia," the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J. said in a joint statement.
Most of this came abut due to the Congress neutering the Law enforcement (DEA) on behest of the Drug Companies that product the opioids.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/e...
Look up Joe Rannazzisi. Former DEA chief prosecutor
JOE RANNAZZISI: If I was gonna write a book about how to harm the United States with pharmaceuticals, the only thing I could think of that would immediately harm is to take the authority away from the investigative agency that is trying to enforce the Controlled Substances Act and the regulations implemented under the act. And that's what this bill did.
The bill, introduced in the House by Pennsylvania Congressman Tom Marino and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, was promoted as a way to ensure that patients had access to the pain medication they needed.
Jonathan Novak, who worked in the DEA's legal office, says what the bill really did was strip the agency of its ability to immediately freeze suspicious shipments of prescription narcotics to keep drugs off U.S. streets -- what the DEA calls diversion.
The presumption that everybody in town has a prescription for a very powerful narcotic (instead of say, codeine) is the presumption that this is a "pill mill", rather that proof to the contrary.
National dispensing rates are something like 0.75 prescriptions per person per year, so this town would have had 22,000 units dispensed over the ten year period. People are not picking up bottles of 900 pills. Even assuming the rate for this town due to its composition is higher than normal, this is a factor of at least ten fold too high. And these opioid prescription rate are for all opioids not just these powerful and addicting ones. Most opioid prescriptions would normally be for less potent ones like codeine, propoxyphene (Darvon), and tramadol. So getting this much oxycodone and hydrocodone is something like a factor of 100 too high.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The problem with your theory is that opioids are prescribed for extreme pain, and typically only for short periods of time following things like surgery. An entire town being prescribed them is beyond insane and there is no way you can feasibly make it out to sound like everyone in town -- every man, woman, and child -- needs them.
In 2016, the five states with the highest rates of death due to drug overdose were West Virginia (52.0 per 100,000), Ohio (39.1 per 100,000), New Hampshire (39.0 per 100,000), Pennsylvania (37.9 per 100,000) and (Kentucky (33.5 per 100,000).
[https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html]
But that's probably a big coincidence.
Now include the people living in unincorporated areas (so not counted as part of the town's population) for whom the town has the nearest to them pharmacy. Include that coal mining and other physically demanding work is quite common in West Virginia.
In many places, rural doesn't mean farms. It is more or less as dense as suburban areas but with no strip malls or corner stores. All of those people go into town for shopping, including the pharmacy.
Williamson is the county seat of the surrounding county with a population of 30,000. Suddenly, the numbers don't look that out of line, just sensationalistic.
It's not 208 million pills. It's 20.8 million pills.
For a population of 2900 people, across 10 years, it works out to 1.9 pills per day per person.
If you spread it across the whole county, it drops to a lot less.
20,800,000 / 26,839 / 10 / 365 = 0.2 pills per person per day.