Name: Ground Zero for the Opioid Crisis
Uploaded: 2017-06-13
Duration: 8 min 12 s
Description: Devastated by addiction, West Virginia is fighting back with lawsuits against big drug distributors.

[ MUSIC ] More people are dying from prescription pills than they are from motor vehicle accidents. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] These are people. These are real people. And they're dying out because nobody seems to care anymore. And it's not right. It's like we've been raped here in this county of any enjoyment of life. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We're considered the poorest county in the state and even on national level, we're listed as a third world country here. It's pitiful what's happened to this county over the years. Our county looks like a ghost town, really. [ MUSIC ] We're the first county in West Virginia to sue three companies that they were sending all these pills out to the depressed areas and things. [ MUSIC ] Now we think that there is tatted up guys walking around the streets, pants hanging down, never held a job Was lying around in an alley shooting up heroine and that ` s not the case. These are kids who are in a mechanical engineering program at WVU or health care professionals or lawyers. [ INAUDIBLE ] And that's kinda what my program does, is educating the public just about this very question that you asked. What do these people look like? They could look like you, they could look like me. They could be employed doing Something very similar to what you do. [ MUSIC ] You know we see cases where millions of pills are shipped into one tiny little pharmacy in a tiny little town. Yep. Mhm. Population of 300 people. Yep. Yeah. Should alarms be going off somewhere? Absolutely! Probably nine out of ten cases that we are involved with are drug- related. I see people that I grew up with, I see people that I went to school with, I see neighbors. These are good people, through surgeries, they've got addicted to drugs and it's taken over their life. And because drugs are so easily available on the streets and through the pharmaceutical companies flooding West Virginia and flooding our county here of McDowell and then people just turn to drugs. [ MUSIC ] You are in The Gary area. This area is known as the Gary bottom. This use to be the richest, largest, coal mining operation in the world. There are pill houses all around here. [ MUSIC ] I've been there so I know how it feels. To want that next fix, that next high, that next feeling of trying to feel normal. Leslie was standing on the street corner everyday begging for money. Every day. That was her job. You would come down the street and you would see her chasing cars getting a quarter. There's no jobs. There's [ INAUDIBLE ] of hope. And see, when you live in a world with no hope, you'll do anything to try to bring hope into your life. And I think they have used drugs as a form of way of coping with what used to be. [ MUSIC ] I no longer wanted to feel. I didn't want to feel the pain, the mental issues that I was going through. It seemed to cover it up, to take it away, that I didn't have to think about it. And all too many times they would have, we sold them to pay electric bills, to get food, to do things that we need to do. They were there. Why sit and be hungry? And now it just doesn't take from the poor side of walk of life. It takes from all of us. I practiced emergency medicine here at Grand Memorial Hospital. For many years, saved a lot of lives. The only kind of passion that I had was I liked racing, I like cars, fast cars and this one time that it was pouring rain, 160 miles per hour, lost control of the car and went straight into the guard rail. Metal guard railing just demolished the car. The very next day I had to be back at work in the And I tried to call, hey can you cover me? No one's covering me and I'm in tremendous pain. So I took hydrocodone out of the sample closet and I remember immediately feeling just, not only was my pain gone, but I felt like. Energy. I feel euphoria, and the next day I took more because I still had back pain. The samples that were available there, I consumed them all. And then I started writing prescriptions. I wrote them in different individual's names. And this may have been a period of Three, three and a half years. Basically the DEA started doing an investigation and they looked and they saw this pattern of him writing these prescriptions in different names. The same names again, and again, and again. My sentence was 48 months. And I served like two and a half years a little more than half [ UNKNOWN ] [ MUSIC ] My mother is a prescription junkie. And because she has a doctor that scream, every time she screams a pain, they write her a prescription, They's much better than they used to be, but years ago, used to be you could say I knocked my pills in the toilet, and guess what. They write you another prescription. I called the attorney general's office, and asked them what could be done. That we're being targeted because of our economic situation that we're in. And I felt That's no different than drug dealers out here targeting people that's got a problem. All they're looking for is the money. [ MUSIC ] What is the topic that you want to tell us about. What I want to talk about today, Steve, is prescription drug diversion in hospice. So what changed for me, number one, was, in prison, I received research. I had my son, my wife, my family, my friends send me anything on drug diversion, anything on doctor shopping. So that really intrigued me. Why don't I know Why can I not get a medical expert to come in here and talk to me about this? Cuz there is no one. And I wanted to be that medical expert, and so I took that on as my life's mission. The economics is what drives this. [ MUSIC ] So the laws are starting to tighten up But we waited so long, till this whole country is just about addicted to drugs. And now we're trying to find answers for it, and it's not gonna come. As long as it took to get it established, it's gonna take that long to get it De- escalated now the problems that we're facing. [ MUSIC ]

Devastated by addiction, West Virginia is fighting back with lawsuits against big drug distributors.