Over the past decade, out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers to two pharmacies four blocks apart in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people, according to a congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee cited the massive shipments of hydrocodone and oxycodone — two powerful painkillers — to the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, amid the panel’s inquiry into the role of drug distributors in the opioid epidemic.
“These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia,” said committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., in a joint statement.The panel recently sent letters to regional drug wholesalers Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith, asking why the companies increased painkiller shipments and didn’t flag suspicious drug orders from pharmacies while overdose deaths were surging across West Virginia.
www.wvgazettemail.com/news/health/drug-firms-shipped-m-pain-pills-to-wv-town-with/article_ef04190c-1763-5a0c-a77a-7da0ff06455b.html
West Virginia, ground zero for the Opiod Epidemic in America.
Here you have a prime example of what is completely fucked up about the Opiod Epidemic being allowed to run roughshod over America but mainly in the Midwest in places like West Virginia.
Williamson, a small town in West Virginia with a population of just 2,900, received more than 20 million powerful painkillers like Oxycontin and Vicodin from 2006 to 2016 from a handful of Big Pharma companies, but the main one is called Miami-Luken.
According to this article, Miami-Luken shipped more than 10 million painkillers from 2006 to 2016 to Williamson, West Virginia alone.
Those numbers are mind boggling.
h/t User_Name13