Nearly 9 Million Pain Pills Sent to Small Town Pharmacy, Investigation Finds

Thursday, December 22, 2016 | 0

The opioid crisis has hit especially hard the southern portion of West Virginia, which includes four of the top counties in the nation for fatal opioid overdoses, according to an investigative report in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

The region includes Kermit, a town with population of 392, where out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million hydrocodone pills to a single pharmacy in a two-year period, the newspaper reported.

For its investigation, the Gazette-Mail obtained drug shipping records that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sent to the West Virginia Attorney General's office. The records show the number of pills sold to every pharmacy in the state from 2007 to 2012.

In six years, drug wholesalers shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into the state, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those painkillers, according to the report. The amount of drugs shipped works out to 433 pills for every state resident.

The report notes the role of the “big three” drug wholesalers — McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen — which earned a combined $17 billion in net income from 2007 to 2012.

A second part of the investigative series details how the state failed to investigate reports of suspicious drug orders.