Posted on 01/30/2018 7:28:06 AM PST by markomalley
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.
The letters outline high-volume shipments to pharmacies over consecutive days and huge spikes in pain pill numbers from year to year.
Between 2006 and 2016, drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in Williamson, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data obtained by the House Committee.
Springboro, Ohio-based Miami-Luken sold 6.4 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy from 2008 to 2015, the company disclosed to the panel. That’s more than half of all painkillers shipped to the pharmacy those years. In a single year (2008 to 2009), Miami-Luken’s shipments increased three-fold to the Mingo County town.
Miami-Luken also was a major supplier to the now-closed Save-Rite Pharmacy in the Mingo County town of Kermit, population 400.
The drug wholesaler shipped 5.7 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to Save-Rite and a branch pharmacy called Sav-Rite #2 between 2005 and 2011, according records Miami-Luken gave the committee. In 2008, the company provided 5,624 prescription pain pills for every man, woman and child in Kermit.
In its letters, the panel also raised questions about Miami-Luken’s shipments to Westside Pharmacy in Oceana, Wyoming County. The committee cited documents that show a Miami-Luken employee reported a Virginia doctor, who operated a pain clinic located two hours from Oceana, was sending his patients to Westside Pharmacy, which filled the prescriptions.
In 2015, more than 40 percent of the oxycodone prescriptions filled by Westside Pharmacy in Oceana were coming from the Virginia doctor, according to the committee’s letter. The following year, the Virginia Board of Medicine suspended the doctor’s license, finding his practice posed a “substantial danger to public health and safety.”
The panel’s letter also mentions Miami-Luken’s suspicious shipments to Colony Drug in Beckley. In a five-day span in 2015, the drug wholesaler shipped 16,800 oxycodone pills to the pharmacy.
“In several instances, Colony Drug placed multiple orders for what appears to be excessive amounts of pills on consecutive days,” the committee wrote.
The House committee questioned H.D. Smith’s painkiller shipments to Family Discount Pharmacy in Logan County. The drug shipper distributed 3,000 hydrocodone tablets a day to the pharmacy in 2008, a 10-fold increase in sales from the previous year, according to the committee’s letter. The pharmacy, located in a town of 1,800 people, was shipped 1.1 million hydrocodone pills in 2008.
The House panel also cited Springfield, Illinois-based H.D. Smith for spikes in painkiller shipments to Sav-Rite, Westside Pharmacy, Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug.
Oxycodone is sold under brand names like OxyContin, while hydrocodone brands include Vicodin and Lortab.
“The committee’s bipartisan investigation continues to identify systemic issues with the inordinate number of opioids distributed to small town pharmacies,” Walden and Pallone said in the statement. “The volume appears to be far in excess of the number of opioids that a pharmacy in that local area would be expected to receive.”
In a statement, H.D. Smith said it was reviewing the committee’s letter Monday.
“H.D. Smith works with its upstream manufacturing and downstream pharmacy partners to guard the integrity of the supply chain, and to improve patient outcomes,” the company said.
Miami-Luken did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In February 2016, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey ended a state lawsuit against Miami-Luken after the company agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle allegations that it flooded the state with painkillers. Morrisey, a former lobbyist for a trade group that represents Miami-Luken and other drug distributors, inherited the lawsuit in 2013 after ousting longtime Attorney General Darrell McGraw.
H.D. Smith paid the state $3.5 million to settle the same pill-dumping allegations in January 2017.
The committee gave H.D. Smith and Miami-Luken until Feb. 9 to turn over documents and answer dozens of questions about what steps, if any, the companies took to stop the flood of pain pills into Southern West Virginia.
“We will continue to investigate these distributors’ shipments of large quantities of powerful opioids across West Virginia, including what seems to be a shocking lack of oversight over their distribution practices,” Walden and Pallone said.
The state has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation. More than 880 people fatally overdosed in West Virginia in 2016.
Makes me think of the tv show “Justified”.
The pharmacists are registered with the DEA. They do not write a single prescription that the govt does not know about. How bout reviewing their records? We know the companies make them by the zillions. The DEA’s charter and partial reason for existence is to monitor and control this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The DEA has FAILED miserably at its charter since its inception. It should be dis-banned right along with the FBI.
“To get a feel for that area of the country, watch “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.””
One of the absolute best documentaries ever made. It is totally compelling story telling, and like watching a human, slow-motion train wreck, and implicitly says a tremendous amount about how free government money perpetuates dysfunctional populations like this who leach off the rest of us.
I HIGHLY recommend it to all Freepers if you’ve never seen this movie!
Over the weekend, I watched a drama set in Australia around the 50’s.
One woman was severely distraught, totally out of it. Her sister remarked to her mother “ I gave her a sedative. That heroin is powerful stuff” or words to that effect.
Words fail me.
It’s just awful. These people in these towns are just non-functional now. There are so many tattooed toothless addicts. And their scads of children, born of prostitution, are raising themselves, which never turns out very well.
One of the more interesting scenes:
Sitting in the recovery room after giving birth and waiting to see if the state will allow you to keep your baby, and doing a line of coke. Just wow.
book ping
I don't feel my pain.
Precisely— the fact the bulk order pills are shipped by wholesalers to 2 drug stores is highly suspicious. It could be these two stores also have an allied license by WV/DEA fedgov to operate nursing home pharmacy delivery systems— for example the bubble cards of medications prescribed by the physicians who either own or are on medical staff of the private (and/or State) run places, and administered by medication nursing staff with secure lockup. If that is part of the case- then there has to be prescriptions for each patient in those facilities, and not be now dead patients still getting the “pill order” (allowing diversion as it is called). In regular non-narcotic prescription meds for quite a while there was (and may still be) a “grey” market of re-packaged expired medications (in one huge example major heart meds shipped to the old Eastern block and re-packaged with new expiry dates in fake brand labeled bottles and shipped back to US— the chemicals break down and are less or non-effective, and the profit margins on these to rip-off artists were enormous.
The pharmacists had better have air-tight records on their end, and a really good explanation of their customerdemandy. Sort of like Elvis’s highly “helpful” doctor who addicted him to everything, and ultimately (with Elvis’s help) killed him.
But, even that possibility of perhaps 10 or 20, 100-bed facilities with full census 365 days a year— would not account for that volume of opioids (certainly not oxycontin sustained release which is for cancer,terminal). Also would need to look up the number of hospices (which do not, as a rule keep large stocks of prescription meds for long for any short term patient, but would for a certain number of long term cancer patients for pain relief- again an issue as to how many, how long and are the books being padded. These are very large numbers, and there are real physician crooks (ali-babas, red-dot heads and other barely certified foreign origin physicians, whom the professional societies know are dumbos and/or crooks).
It would take time, like the “disability” attorney from WV who was caught in an off-shore caribbean tax haven recently- convicted, and jumped out of country- a real pig. Pretty famous case.
Prescription shopping drug addict patients and their “friends” have a lot to do with this along with willing, cash greedy bent mds, nurse practitioners and even paramedics. It is a racket.
The “meth” epidemic has supplanted the old moonshine networks for more money This is the primary non-prescription addiction being fed, and the nickname for Interstate 81.... all the way down through WV, VA, TN is.... “Highway of Meth”. Truly destructive gomers... white and black and easy to pick out users.
Unbelievable!
meant to copy you on my post #50.
See my post #50. Excellent post on the tragedy that hopefully full employment and good policing can reduce. Meth especially, but crook medicos are something else again.
I work for a law firm in Charleston West Virginia serving subpeonas. i`ve seen some strange stuff in my travels around West Virginia, but nothing compares to the day I served a subpeona at the methadone clinic in Williamson. Scariest bunch of losers I`ve ever seen and i`m talking about the staff that worked there.
60 Minutes did this story awhile back. It was all about the wholesaler that sold the drugs.
I was an adult leader for our high school youth group mission trip to Williamson in 2010. It has the claim to fame of being the official home of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, as well as the nation’s largest rail yard specifically purposed for handling coal cars.
Williamson is also grindingly poor. The high school gym looks like something out of “Hoosiers,” having been built back in the 1930s or 1940s. I expected to find Gene Hackman giving a pep talk in the locker room.
Like many places in America, the town was dying as the coal industry that sustained it was being strangled by the 0bama regime. I suspect that things have not gotten better since I was there. So yes, there’s a lot of pain there. A lot of economic pain.
When you have the economic support for these small towns and cities die, and the people have nothing to do, drug abuse naturally follows. Sure, the pharmaceutical companies sent millions of pills there. But it’s also supply and demand; they wouldn’t ship the pills without the demand. And you don’t have the demand for opioids without a doctor willing to write the prescription.
Sadly, we have become what China was in the 1850s. A once great and powerful country rotting from within, due in large part to a drug addicted population. The Chinese managed to cure their opiate problem, but I doubt we have the political will to apply their methodology.
One good reason for Medicaid and Medicare both to be monitoring the drugs they are paying for.
Conversely, one reason I pay cash for my drugs, as well as the fact that I save my doctor and pharmacy some overhead costs in not having to deal with any insurance, and as such my doctor gives me 90 day prescriptions and my independent non-chain pharmacy gives me a “senior paying cash” discount as well.
America’s REAL drug problem.
That’s 2 pills per person per day for ten years!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3624416/posts
Delaware Sues Pharmaceutical Companies, Drug Store Chains Over Opioid Crisis
We recently had a safety class about spotting drug or alcohol abuse in workers. The class went on for an hour as two nurses described one kind of drug after another after another. The list just kept going on and the side effects included insanity, skin rot, teeth rot, psychotic episodes, brain damage, organ damage and death. Some of the drugs were prescription drugs that somehow manage to hit the streets by the ton, some are natural based drugs and some are just a gross mixture of chemicals.
On Saturday mornings I watch CBS news at Burger King with a bunch of retired people. Every commercial break is filled with one kind of drug after another. It is just silly to look at the names they come up with for the things and there seems to be a whole set of new ones every Saturday morning.
Many of the drugs are actually intended to treat side effects from other drugs.
God never intended man to be dependent on drugs.
I'm 55 and when a doctor or med tech asks what drugs I'm on and I say none, they ask again and can't believe my answer. I don't even "treat" my high bp because I don't believe in drugs nor in the hype that accompanies every single biometric that isn't in some neat little parameter.
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