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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.
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.