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

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

[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

[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.

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: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

[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.