Analysis: There’s nothing funny about an addiction crisis
By Eric Eyre, Senior Investigative Reporter at Mountain State Spotlight
When I read the email, it made me cringe.
A lawyer representing a county in West Virginia that’s suing the nation’s largest drug distributors for their role in the opioid crisis grilled a senior executive with AmerisourceBergen about the decade-old email message in federal court Thursday.
The email reveals that while drug overdoses were surging in West Virginia, top executives at AmerisourceBergen, ranked number 10 in the Fortune 500, were having a laugh at our expense. The internal company email features the lyrics to a parody song sung to the tune of “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme that ridicules “pillbillies” addicted to OxyContin.
INTRODUCTION
As I’ve learned from my own experiences in the classroom both as a student and as an instructor, poetry is so often taught badly to us in grade school (if at all). I am, to this day, learning how to undo the myth of poetry being the work of certainty a perfect command of a subject, experience, event proclaimed through verse. This is obviously a byproduct of the ways in which the Western canon is taught: the work of “great masters” whose genius we are trained to admire and respect. But my immersion in queer and disability writing has taught me the value of