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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.
What gets me about cases like this is how LONG it took to find the pharmacy pushing out 20E6 pills or the individual doctor prescribing hundreds of thousands a year. Yes, the do pop up now and again, but these drugs are tightly controlled. I have to fill out a triplicate form to get a couple of morphine ampules for our ambulances.
Does anybody actually LOOK at those forms. If I ordered 5000 ampules would anyone notice?
Asking for a friend.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
7,172 / 10 (years) ~ 717
717 / 12 (months) ~ 60 pills.
Basically, everyone in town was given a standing prescription of take 2 pills per day as needed for pain. Up the script to 3 pills per day as needed and you've got a standing prescription for about 1,925 people. Consider that pharmacies often keep a stock of these pills for rapid fulfillment (Wal-greens will usually have whatever prescription my doc gives me ready within an hour; narc or not), and it's likely that not even that many people have standing scripts.
Also, how long do pharmacies keep med batches on hand? They often have expiration dates slated for 90 days. They're supposed to dispose of unused portions of batches, right? Well, how are they going to keep the stock up to handle the medicated population when they get their next round of scripts? This is going to inflate the order that the drug companies are going to get.
In short, this sounds like someone with an axe to grind trying to inflate emotional response by using a 10 year metric that only indicates how much opiates are getting shipped into community pharmacies, not how much is actually being doled out and prescribed to the community.
The town's population is 3,100. This city is the largest city in the county which has a population of about 30,000.
Surely these pills didn't get distributed only to those living in the city.... So Why do we discuss the size of the town only and not the county which the pharmacies obviously serve too? I'm pretty sure more than just city folks get their prescriptions filled in town.
Somebody is being misleading here....Very misleading. I think on purpose.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Looks like someone did not pay attention in history class or never has been to West Virginia to throw an unqualified southern state label around. Could WV be a sotherns state? YES....BUT. West Virginia was the part of Virginia that the secessionists either did not or cared not to control during the civil war. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Most of the state's politics are focused today towards re-establishing a diverse manufacturing economy well situated to be part of the manufacturing process for the remarkable number of industries along the Ohio River.
And nobody is looking at OTHER nearby towns that may not have pharmacies, or being this is the only town with a Hospital in that county.
The problem with big numbers, is they can be misleading. Big Numbers over a Long Time look horrible, until you do the math, and then it doesn't look so bad. In fact, it actually starts to look more and more reasonable.
But hey, lets kneejerk reaction based on large misleading numbers!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
WV is a neighboring state, and I happen to know a good bit about its demographics. WV has extremely rural areas - one county has a few dozen zip codes and some only have a hundred people in them, and the entire county only has around 10k people (and it is not a huge county geographically). The fact that the exact town the pharmacy is in only has 2,900 people does not mean those are the only people served by that pharmacy. It may serve the entire county and portions of the adjoining counties as well. The number is very, very deceiving if intended to represent the total customer base of those pharmacies.
Better known as 318230.
Small towns like that are often 50% or more elderly. By my calculations that would offer 962 people in town a monthly supply of 180pills which is a fairly typical maintenance dose (2 pills 3 times a day). Given the size of the town and the likely high numbers of elderly I find nothing wrong with this other than rather obvious political scapegoating. The real political story in this number is the large number of people with chronic pain and/or cancer. Is this is town a cancer cluster?
Short acting opiates take 20 minutes to affect you, require an hour to reach full potency and gradually fall off till the 4 hour point where they begin to drop off steeply until about 6 hours. Anyone that's taking pain meds for chronic pain is going to be taking doses 3-4 times a day minimum. Typically these people are also at least partly opiod tolerant and will need to take 2 pills at a time.
I see nothing out of the ordinary here.
The misrepresentation of the population served is only one of many problems with this article.
Also, if you think opioids are only for short periods of time, you've never lived around a declining population of loggers, miners, and older people who were loggers and miners. Virtually all are suffering injuries sustained in a hard life that will never be fixed. Even if there are surgeries that could help, they can't afford them.
It is interesting that we have laws to require industries that destroy land to restore it, but they are rarely held accountable to restore the lives they used.
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.
Thanks to the overcorrection in opioid prescribing, I know dozens of people who are in extremely severe pain (from injuries fully backed by MRIs etc, so not faking), who were basically told "I know you like playing with your grandchildren, but I'm cutting your dosage so much you'll no longer be able to get out of bed" or "Here's some tylenol to replace your morphine pump, I'm discharging you"... these people then drive hours, sometimes to entirely different states, to find a doctor that hasn't been pressured into sadism. Filling at the nearest pharmacy to the doctor is common.
What evidence is there that these pharmacies served only the local population? My scenario is the norm for pain doctors and pharmacies that keep enough opiates in stock to always fill scripts right away. Did you have evidence that's not the case here, or like the politicians and drug warriors are you engaging in scapegoating due to opioid hysteria when you don't actually know what life is like for people whose doctors deny them the only medications that make life tolerable? Is making sure the 1-2 in 100 people using their meds recreationally switch to street drugs and OD so much more important?
You've fallen for propaganda.