Money Means More Than Lives? –
Oct. 2, 2019 – Twenty minutes’ drive to the north, the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in the village of Kermit, population 280 and falling, was outstripping them both … Drug distributors delivered more than 30m opioid pills just to those three pharmacies, in one of the poorest counties in America. Ballengee and the other drug store owners kept escalating the orders, and the distributors filled them without flinching. They shipped more narcotic painkillers to Mingo county per head of population than to any other place in the US.
Opioid makers such as Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson shaped the medical culture that drove the surge in prescribing of narcotic painkillers that caused today’s drug epidemic. Doctors wrote the prescriptions. But at the front end were thousands of pharmacies dispensing the pills, and among the pharmacists were profiteers.
