Opioid Trial In West Virginia Comes Amid A National Reckoning For Big Pharma wfae.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wfae.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Back in 1999, when I first started reporting in my hometown of Pikeville, the courts and police were just beginning to see the impacts of the growing opioid epidemic.
Just a generation before, police had spent most of their time chasing illegal whiskey manufacturers and distributors and now were having to take a crash course in pharmaceuticals, as new pills, new formulations and new brands came onto the market.
Over the ensuing decades, I left the news business twice, coming back three times, with the last time being in 2007. During that time, I saw people and communities change, but the opioid epidemic remained a constant, taking twists and turns, but being constantly a factor in our communities.
Top officials at AmerisourceBergen sent emails disparaging those who have gotten hooked off of their products, court documents show. It is being sued by West Virginia officials.
Wave of ‘pillbillies’ headed for Alabama, pharma executive joked during opioid epidemic
Updated 10:37 AM;
Today 10:37 AM
Litigation continues over the damage done by excessive distribution of OxyContin, shown, and other opioids. (Photo by Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag
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“Watch out Georgia and Alabama,” a pharmaceutical executive wrote at the height of the prescription opioid crisis. “There will be a mass exodus of Pillbillies heading north.”
In other emails cited by prosecutors, as reported by The Mountain State Spotlight, employees at pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen repeatedly mocked addicts as pillbillies and hillbillies; referred to Kentucky as “OxyContinville,” a twist on the Jimmy Buffett song “Margaritaville;” and even lampooned the “Beverly Hillbillies” theme song with a version in which Jed travels in search of pills.
Executives at one of the US’ largest drug distributors circulated rhymes and e-mails mocking “hillbillies” who became addicted to opioid painkillers even as the company poured hundreds of millions of pills into parts of Appalachia at the heart of the US’ opioid epidemic.
The trial of pharmaceutical firms accused of illegally flooding West Virginia with opioids was told earlier this month that senior staff at AmerisourceBergen, the 10th-largest company in the US by revenue, routinely disparaged communities blighted by the worst drug epidemic in the country’s history.
One e-mail in 2011 included a rhyme built around “a poor mountaineer” named Jed who