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.

Comments

If I lived in West Virginia

[Anonymous Coward]

I would get high every day too.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[RavenLrD20k]

20.8M / 2900 ~ 7,172
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.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[plopez]

realistically how many people per thousand actually need heavy opiates? How many would be in a town that size? 1 in 3 adults are getting prescriptions from the numbers I am finding. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/m...

Let's adjust by 50% to cover children, pregnant women, macho men (I can take the pain), masochists, etc. and divide by 3. That works out to about 483.

483/60 = 8.05 which seems excessive.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[gtall]

So, in your dog-eat-dog world, the children of the unemployed get squat which translates into a new generation of un-educated, malnourished sprogs who will be a burden when they turn to crime to make ends meet. Their parents might be able to give them pointers on how to do it well.

You can either pay them now or pay for them later, either way, you will pay.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[careysub]

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.

Re: If I lived in West Virginia

[reanjr]

So now that cities are thriving and suburbs and rural areas are the center for welfare queen drug abusers, you want to cancel welfare in the rural areas so your rural degenerates will flee to the city and prop up your collapsing home prices. Do I have that right?

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[nomadic]

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.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[thegarbz]

1 in 3 adults are getting prescriptions from the numbers I am finding.

Let me just say: WHAT THE FUCK!

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[rahvin112]

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.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[sjames]

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.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[amicusNYCL]

Up the script to 3 pills per day as needed and you've got a standing prescription for about 1,925 people.

That's quitter talk, every baby should also be on opiates. You'll shit your pants when you see what happens to stock prices and revenue when we get babies addicted as earlier as possible. Because that's literally the only thing that matters, stock prices, and revenue. In fact, the real story here is that these babies ONLY get 2 doses of neo-heroin per day. Those are rookie numbers.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[amicusNYCL]

So anyway, yes, these numbers are notorious half-truths and trumped-up to boot. But at the same time they might still point at a problem.

Is that your takeaway from this story? 20.8 million doses of heavy opiates shipped to a town of 2,900 over a decade and you're takeaway is that this "might point to a problem?" I realize you don't live in the US, but do you understand the number and frequency of opiate overdose deaths that are occurring in the US? Do you understand that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are culpable for pushing this product to people who don't need it so that they make more money, while Congress passes laws to restrict it so that people who actually do need it can't get it? Nothing that I just said is political, people would only have a political position on that if they're being paid to have one, or if they have been preached to by a spokesperson with a profit motive.

And then it's fairly important to frame (or re-frame or counter-frame) the narrative into something reasonably solvable

Holding doctors accountable when their patients die from overdose on an unnecessary medication prescribed by the doctor is a good first step. Maybe it will drive some of them away from prescribing without another thought just because they're going to get a kickback when they do prescribe something the person doesn't need. In other words, the profit motive needs to be removed. A complete overhaul of the health care system would also do that, but there are too many people making too much money in order to expect any meaningful change there.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[amicusNYCL]

realistically how many people per thousand actually need heavy opiates?

According to drug manufacturers and wholesalers? About 1,000.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[amicusNYCL]

Do you have any friends taking 2 opiate pills 3 times per day, at least that you know of?

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[slacktide]

Did you read the link? It says that 1 out of every 3 adults was prescribed opiates at some point in the previous 12 months. That's not particularly concerning if you ask me - I was prescribed them twice in that time period, once for a tooth extraction and once for a broken finger. What I thought was interesting was the amounts that were prescribed - for the teeth, the doc issued a prescription for 3 days worth. (12 pills total) For the finger, that doc issued 30 days worth, which seemed REALLY excessive.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[Erik Hensema]

Where I live you wouldn't have gotten opiates in both cases. Ibuprofen in a slightly higher dosis then over-the-counter, if you're lucky. And then for a week max.

So yes, I think it's quite excessive what you got.

I live in the Netherlands by the way.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[Anonymous Coward]

If it sounds insane, suspect the story first. That town serves a county with a population of around 25K. In that area, the population is extremely spread. People often travel from other counties for service.

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.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[rahvin112]

I don't need friends taking that many, I do.

I'm a chronic pain sufferer and I take significantly more than that, but that's what happens when your bones have so many bones spurs on them they look like steak knives. Yes, someone that twisted an ankle shouldn't be taking anywhere near that much but you people have NO IDEA how many people in this country are in chronic unrelenting pain for various conditions. Destroyed nerves, damages joints, blown out muscle groups, out of control immune systems. Pain is a common problem.

The fact is you wouldn't even know if someone around you was on opiate pain treatment. It's highly stigmatized and most people outside an anonymous forum like this wouldn't tell you to save their lives. You probably know several people taking that level of treatment and don't even know it because people with chronic pain usually don't advertise it because of the social stigma.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[amicusNYCL]

My wife has chronic pain, as does a close friend. I realize the usefulness of opioids or any other pain relieving drug. But I don't think that it's likely that a majority of the people living in any one town all have chronic pain to the level that it requires opioids to treat. That's part of the problem. A doctor hears that someone has a toothache, so might as well give them some opioids because the pharmaceutical manufacturer will pay the doctor for every prescription. They are over-prescribed big time. This is the not the same thing as saying no one needs them. In fact, if they were not over-prescribed then the people who need them would probably have an easier time of getting them. Every person I know who needs and takes prescription medications, especially controlled ones, complain about the process to get what they need.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[rahvin112]

It's not the majority, it's the county seat and at 2600 people probably the only town in the entire county large enough to support pharmacy locations. When put in that perspective 900 people out of 26000 in the county isn't as bad and reduces the percentage by a factor of 10. You should also keep in mind that's averaging, a half a dozen stage 4 cancer patients would heavily skew the numbers because the volume of pills they'd be taking would skew the average and mean.

That's the point most of the rational posters have been trying to make, this is a statistic manipulation by a politician for political gain. From what I've seen of the Hillbilly Heroin epidemic most of the pharmaceuticals were being traffic'd in from out of state (Florida was a major source point for the entire south) and very few were being obtained with valid prescriptions locally. The addicts were buying their pills from local dealers, not going down to the local pharmacy.

Don't get me wrong, there's always going to be people doctor shopping and trying to abuse the system but their solution to this was to dramatically shut down all pain prescriptions hurting people with real pain and forcing all the addicts onto street drugs instead of pharmaceuticals. In the end the result was shifting the sales to out of country drug cartels with unregulated doses and killing lots and lots of people with those unregulated drugs. If those same people were taking their pharma Oxy they wouldn't be overdosing left and right and there wouldn't be a heroin tainted with fentinyl problem running rampant over the population. The very action to "solve" the drug problem made it 10 times worse. That's what's fucking crazy about this.

And the best part is the politicians are trying to blame pharmacies for filling prescriptions they were given which may not even be out of line for numbers of pills being dispersed because the politician is cooking the statistic to make it look awful. Drop the outrage and look at this logically. Every solution to "fix the problem" ends up making it worse.

Re:If I lived in West Virginia

[fafalone]

You do realize the vast majority of suffering inflicted by opiates is because of the War on Drugs right? Your solution would increase total suffering by at least a couple orders of magnitude. Education, prevention, and treatment are what minimize the harm caused by dangerous drugs. Prohibition maximizes it, and you take it further by inflicting suffering on people who aren't even abusing drugs.
You're an ignorant sadomoralist of the worst kind, the kind that foolishly believes they're helping. Could you look down at your own young child, dying of cancer, crying from the pain all day and night, and say "Sorry, there's a 1-2% chance you'll start abusing pain meds, and we're obligated to financially destroy you, lock you in a cage as we flush your future down the toilet, and make you play Russian roulette with fentanyl analogs, instead of help you in the event that happens, so just toughen up buttercup!"?

Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[ColdWetDog]

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.....

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[110010001000]

It wasn't detected until AI deep learning software was invented this year.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[jebrick]

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.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[pr0fessor]

They were shipped to two pharmacies in the small town but is also county seat and has the only hospital in the county. They are forgetting that this town with the only hospital serves other communities inside and outside that county of 26,000+ people.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still having a hard time deciding which side of the fence I'm on here.

When I'm presented with the choice of:

A) Having access to the medications I'm legit prescribed by my surgeon or doctor, while abusers of the same drugs also have easy access to them
and
B) Not having access to the medications I'm legit prescribed and living in agony, while abusers of those drugs still maintain easy access to them

I find it very difficult to support "B"

As someone who recently had open heart surgery and could only get my initial five day prescription filled followed by my second five day refill being delayed a very miserably long three extra days and having to go without pain relief - I frankly don't at all care what law enforcement wants when their desires result in people immediately out of major surgery are left in agony with no other recourse than wasting (in essence) the ERs time and resources to deal with a problem that shouldn't exist and has a well laid out plan to manage.

Especially combined with the fact that only 4 or 5 less people out of 100 are able to abuse those drugs as a result.

However even if they could promise and follow through on claiming the reverse, that is preventing 95% of the abusers instead of just 5%, the cost of that is simply far too high.

Laws and enforcement isn't the right answer to this problem in the first place.
Laws that result in people out of major surgery being in agony are not an answer to anything.

A very small part of me almost wishes for people who support these laws, and people tasked with enforcing them such as those at the DEA, would get to experience some major surgery that involves their body sliced open and bones sawed apart and sent home with no pain relief, just so they are personally connected to and aware of exactly what they are doing to other human beings.
Yet far more so than that, I wish they actually just spontaneously developed the human ability of empathy instead, as no one deserves to experience such a thing.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[ThurstonMoore]

Speaking as a somewhat local, I wish you were correct, but majority of those pills were abused.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[gtall]

Nothing Marsha Blackburn supports has a bright side.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[Anonymous Coward]

--Whoosh!
select * from lame_ass_slashdot_comments
where user_id = 'anonymous'
and comment_title like '%Almost Heaven%'
and comment_snark_level = 'high'
and commenter_is_a_pompous_ass is not null
;

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[DavidHumus]

> If I ordered 5000 ampules would anyone notice?

Well, yeah, now they would. Thanks a lot, West Virginia.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[rahvin112]

Nothing like a quote from the jack booted thugs in the DEA for how to ruin America.

You know how you actually ruin America? You put law enforcement in charge of a medical issue. Then they do things like threaten people with jail which cuts the pharmaceutical supplies of a drug with physical addiction issues so the users have to immediately turn to street drugs to reduce withdrawl side effects.

Then on top of that you stigmatize drug treatment so that seeking help makes you a looser, then add in a little random drug screening at employers so the person gets fired as well.

Our war on drugs is the most fucked up thing you could EVER do to this country.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[swb]

I think you have to look at the down side of extremely restrictive prescriptions in terms of what it does in the illegal drug market.

Tightening of prescription opiates started happening BEFORE the current overdose crisis and I think drove a lot of more casual pill users to heroin as street prices for pills creeped up. A surge in heroin users and the short-term supply inelasticity of heroin means the market adapts -- hard-to-interdict synthetics from China get turned loose, either on its own or to pump up overly diluted heroin.

So now you have not only a lot of inexperienced heroin users, you have a lot of bad heroin as a result of mostly just tightening down the prescription pill supply.

My sense was that the DEA probably needed to clamp down on the high-dosage pill supply (Oxycontin 30 mg and larger, for example) while mostly tolerating a certain level of abuse and diversion in the low-dosage pill market (your extremely common 5 mg oxycodone and hydrocodones, like Percocet and Vicodin).

While you certainly will have some problems with this -- those with addictive tendences will probably escalate. That being said, the recreational abusers and the overprescribed will be inclined to stick with reliable, relatively low doses, and many will not develop addiction at all let alone overdose. The history of opium has demonstrated that a lot of addicts wind up being maintenance addicts, people who are addicted but maintain their consumption at levels that are long-term sustainable.

The counter to this (existing policy) just seems to cause a lot of problems. Way more black market opiates of unknown quantities, much higher overdose rates, and policy makers making patient care for people with legitimate uses of opiates much more difficult.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[phoenix_rizzen]

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.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[hey!]

In 2016. opioid overdoses claimed 64,000 lives. That's like a 9/11 attack every 17 days. It's like terrorists wiping out a city the size of Topeka KS every two years. It's amazing to me that anything else is news while something this big is going on, and our politicians are literally doing nothing about it.

Oh, last year Congress allocated a billion dollars in block grants to be spent over two years, but I have seen what dropping these kinds of hot potato money bombs on state public health agencies does: it just ends up lining the pockets of politically connected contractors. Give a state agency currently operating on a shoestring ten million dollars it has to spend by the end of the year and it won't even have the manpower to oversee that much spending while doing the other things it has to do.

In one case I know of a state public health agency spent a million dollars on a public reporting website that the state's own internal IT people told me they'd have charged back $10,000 for. But they had to spend the money immediately, and so they turned to one of the very few contractors capable of absorbing that much federally encumbered money on such short notice. And because those contractors maintain substantial Washington lobbying presence they were probably ready to take the hot potato off the agency's hand before the agency knew it was coming.

A serious effort to spend 20 million dollars in a state on this problem would give them that money over ten years to be spent at whatever pace they could manage effectively. That would do far more for the people working closest to the problem. Hot potato funding is just a gift to the congressens' political cronies.

In any case a billion dollars is peanuts. We spent trillions in response to 9/11, and even reorganized the Executive Branch, all for what is in comparison a minor event.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[Anonymous Coward]

Her B.S is in home economics, bitch better get back in that kitchen, my sandwich isn't gonna make itself!

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing Marsha Blackburn supports has a bright side.

Marsha Blackburn supports incandescent light bulbs. Idiotic? Maybe. But you can't claim it doesn't have a bright side.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[Darinbob]

I got a prescription for hydrocodone after some dental work, plus an antibiotic. I headed to the drugstore, which I wasn't familiar with since I normally go to my medical foundation's pharmacy. Didn't have an "insurance card" and I wasn't in their system. So they looked at me suspiciously.

However, the hydrocodone they were fine with, but I had to wait around a couple hours (in pain) while they phoned back and forth to see if I was allowed to get the antibiotic.

Re: Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[jittles]

After I had my wisdom teeth out, my dentist told me to get the script filled immediately and take one right away rather than waiting until I felt discomfort (presumably because the medicine takes time to work).

They recommend that you take all pain meds (opiod or otherwise) prior to actually needing the dose. They say that they're more effective if you take them before the pain gets to its worst.

Re:Almost Heaven, West Virginia

[sjames]

A real question though is how many of those opoid overdoses happened because users resorted to street drugs of unknown and poorly controlled strength rather than well regulated pharmaceuticals?

Re:Ironically

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and it was the republicans who passed medicare part B, which forbade the government from negotiating prices for pharmaceuticals...

So yes, on top of everything else, they made sure that we would pay top dollar to get addicted, which then increases Heroin usage when the addicts can no longer afford these overpriced drugs

So lets do some Math.

[jellomizer]

Meds Per Person: 22800000.0/2900.0 = 7862.07
Meds Per Person/Year: 7862.07/10.0 = 786.21
Meds Per Person/Day: 786.21/365 = 2.15

Now it is unlikely that the Town is all on these Meds and 2 of these meds a day is very high. I have family suffering from constant pain, and they only use these once a week, in case of extreme pain (And unlike the media, these meds do work), to bring the pain to a manageable level.

However my main point is the news shoving people with big scary numbers, to really prove a point, but while there is still a problem, the real numbers are not as obvious as the article is lead to believe, as this is over 10 years. Not one big shipment.

Re:So lets do some Math.

[Mashiki]

You're way off. My mom has the nerves in her feet destroyed from diabetes, she takes 50mg 3/daily of long-acting hydromorphone. On top of that she takes 325/5mg acet/oxy upto 5/day for breakthrough pain. This isn't uncommon for people who have severe nerve damage, that's even less then what most cancer patients at stage 2 or 3 take for pain control. Even in my case, I take 50-100mg of tramadol, up to 600mg/daily to control pain from when I broke my back. 600mg is where they switch you to long-acting, and then you take *more* pain meds for when the pain breaks through. If people in your family are only taking something once/week for extreme pain, then they're not really in a constant state of pain, or they're having problems paying for the medication and aren't telling you.

The whole premise of pain management is to have you at a level of pain medication where it will get you through the day at a bearable level. When you get to more specialized treatments like with pain clinics, then you move onto things like nerve blocks, localized site injections, implant pumps for constant release and so on. The amount of pain meds could be even higher then what you were originally taking, or lower. For instance, one of the other medications that I use for pain management is baclofen(muscle relaxant), the option I can have is for a line placed directly into my spine and have a steady stream of it all the time, instead of taking 20mg/2-3 daily.

I haven't even gotten to the pain medication resistance, and the requirement to switch pain medications every 5-7 years because they become less effective over time.

Re:So lets do some Math.

[ThurstonMoore]

You are assuming that the oxy's were Percocet which would be available in 7.5 and 10mg dosages. A good bit of them were likely Oxycontin which would be anywhere from 10mg to 160mg per pill. They quit making the 160's early on because that's a stupid amount of drug to put in one pill so a lot of them were most likely the 80mg variety until the non crushable version was released, which lead to the intro of and popularity of Opana for a few years until they were also forced to make non crushable, which lead to the intro of heroin to WV.

Fake news!

[OzPeter]

This is all the work of criminal latino gangs. These gangs forced the poor people of the great state of West Virginia into the offices of innocent Doctors and coerced those brave and hardworking Doctors into writing prescriptions for the drugs.

It is only by building a great and yuge wall (the best wall, the most beautiful wall) that we can stop the spread of drugs affecting the little babies all over the country. And today great American companies like Purdue Pharma (real heroes of the economy I tell you) have come out a stated that a wall is the best thing we can do for our country.

Re:Fake news!

[gtall]

Since many of the illicit drugs are shipped from China, we'll be needing a wall there as well. Oh look, they have a nice yuge wall already there across the north. All we need to do is get our lovely construction companies to repair it...we'll charge...err...Mexico for the repair....now where's that fellow Ping's phone number. President Kelly, could you ping Ping for me?

They call it....

[Jfetjunky]

Hillbilly heroine (for a reason). My father has been addicted for a good portion of his later life.

This is part of the reason I can't take people sheltered people seriously when they go off tangents about illicit drugs when people are likely addicted to synthetic opiates all around them. But that's totally fine because it came from a doctor. The older I've gotten, the more the line seems quite arbitrary, which makes it hard to believe in a system of enforcement of any kind.

The population isn't 2,900!

[bobbied]

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.

Re:Technically, is it that many?

[nevermindme]

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.

Community size

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Community size

[DavidHumus]

Interesting how many of the comments here are fighting the numbers. It's not like West Virginia leads the nation in drug-related deaths - oh, wait, they do:

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.

coal miners are in pain and work rules say no pot

[Joe_Dragon]

coal miners are in pain and work rules say no to Medical Marijuana

Re:They probably weren't all for just that one tow

[Immerman]

1.9 pills per day, per person. Better lay off the pills when you're doing math.

Re:Where are they getting the money to buy it?

[AvitarX]

Getting over perscriber and selling half is SOP in my city.

Re:Technically, is it that many?

[bobbied]

I'm with you on this.. They will claim to not be technically lying because what they said is actually true, but they sure messed with the numbers to make a story out of something that wasn't a story..

Figures never lie, but liars figure...

AND

There are lies, damnable lies and statistics..

Re:Two pills a day, per person.

[squiggleslash]

Given your interpretation of those figures, between 1/3 and half of all people in that county, including the children, are on prescription painkillers.

That is completely unreasonable, and the story is absolutely right to suggest it's newsworthy.

Yes, opiods are over prescribed. But not to extent almost half the population is on them.

Re:Two pills a day, per person.

[jittles]

Given your interpretation of those figures, between 1/3 and half of all people in that county, including the children, are on prescription painkillers.

That is completely unreasonable, and the story is absolutely right to suggest it's newsworthy.

Yes, opiods are over prescribed. But not to extent almost half the population is on them.

There are over 26,000 people in that county, with only one hospital. That hospital is in the town in question.

Re:Two pills a day, per person.

[Trailer Trash]

Sure, but how many counties and people does the hospital serve? It doesn't matter how many people are in the county if it's the only hospital in 50 miles.