The Gazette-Mail tracked the deluge of prescription opioids into West Virginia, following them to individual counties, pharmacies and families. The newspaper’s investigation found that drug distributors shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia in just six years, a period when 1,728 people fatally overdosed on those two painkillers. The wholesalers supplied ever-higher doses of the pills — a telltale sign of growing addictions — even as the death toll climbed. The largest shipments often went to mom-and-pop drugstores in poor, rural counties in southern West Virginia.
An example: In Kermit, population 382, a single pharmacy was shipped nearly 9 million hydrocodone (Lortab) pills over two years. The wholesalers distributed a disproportionate number of pain pills to poor, rural counties in southern West Virginia. Those counties had the highest drug overdose death rates in the nation. For more than decade, the same distributors shirked their responsibility to report suspicious orders for controlled substances in West Virginia. And the state Board of Pharmacy let them get away with it, failing to enforce rules that were on the books since 2001.