with common sense 392 eve person, man woman and child needed 23,000 pills a year of hydro codone. there is no way. it was a pill mill. we had doctors that went to jail. you had a clinic that was closed for corruption. you had a pharmacist who said on record, testified, was making $500,000 a month, a month. a pharmacist? a pharmacist and his pharmacy testified, jake, he was making as much as $500,000 a month. wow. i have to ask, sir, your daughter is ceo of a pharmaceutical company, not one named in any of these suits. no. but have you talked about this general issue with her and the responsibility of pharmaceutical companies in addition to distributors and pharmacists to prevent this from happening? well, from a pharmacist i mean from the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture it, i would say to all of them,
whether it s my daughter where she works in this industry or not. if that s the catalyst of your business, you better find another direction to go because i m going to do everything i can to stop the hydro codone products into the market. i have said this. how can the fda keep bringing more allowing these they re all good companies and they re all intended well. but if there s a demand for the product, but how do pharmaceuticals how does the fda allow these new products that keep coming onto the market without taking anything off the market? how does the dea, drug enforcement agency, allow for the distribution and supply of all this? how do we not hold doctors accountable that will give you 30 days of oxycodone for a tooth extraction? maybe you might need two days, but not 30 days. everything has to change and we have to work hard. if there is a pharmaceutical company that says, i built my business around manufacturing hydro codone, opiates, i m saying you better find another
confidential drug shipping sales record from the d.e.a. what does it show? what it showed was that, between 2007 and 2012, the drug wholesalers shipped 780 million pain pills into west virginia. those were of two particular kinds. oxycodone and hydro codone. that translates into about 430 pain pills of those particular kinds over the six years. and at the same time one of the examples that we sort of cited in the article was what we were seeing is there was a lot of shipments that were going to small, what i call mom and pop pharmacies in one town of about 400 people, in kermit, west virginia, in southern western. over two years there were nearly
no one is overseeing the doctors, making sure that they re competent enough and educated well enough, understanding the pearls rils o overprescribing. most of the states where your pharmaceutical boards basically should be looking at these rogue pharmacies. i don t care who they are. and we ve got to shut them down. it s awful! senator, why do you think west virginia has become the epicenter of opioid addiction? first of all, we re a heavy-lifting state. we have done heavy jobs. we ve done manufacturing. we do the extraction. we ve done manufacturing. we have done it all. so people are going to be prone to injuries that sometimes relates to a lot of pain. and you know, i don t know when i was a kid growing up, up until the 80s, we never saw all these products on the market. now we have doctors i couldn t even get hydrocodone, lortab and vicodin
lewitski, a 36-year-old man who died in bed show high levels of several drugs in his system. dr. spitz records the cause of death as an accidental overdose. it shows he was acutely intoxicated by alcohol at a .15. it showed that he had methadone, hydro codone and morfone. some pretty potent medications. lab results also solve the mystery of how andrea beam died. she was found in bed with blood smeared throughout the house. tests show that a severe electrolyte imbalance caused her death. dr. spitz believes it was accidental, brought on by a rare psychiatric condition that caused andrea to drink too much water. the terminology that s used to describe the situation is called psychogeneric polydipsia, a compelling urge to consume