Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses
This story isn’t just rewriting AP wire copy and adding in a few totally unrelated incidents culled from 5 minutes of Lexis Nexis searches.
The motivation isn’t particularly obvious. The paper has a reputation of being labor union friendly, and the Teamsters were involved in the creation of the story. Charleston is the capital of West Virginia. Perhaps there is some legislative proposal up for consideration next year. I suspect this has a personal link where people at the newspaper know people who died from this. To date, the primary response of government has been to mandate that first responders carry treatments for opioids overdose so the addict can live to repeat the processs next week.
Part of the reason I wanted out of Connecticut was my growing awareness of the pervasive abuse of prescription drugs that I had been completely oblivious to, and how the social services entities were feeding the problem.
There is a part two of this story
http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161218/suspicious-drug-order-rules-never-enforced-by-state
Over the weekend, I noticed a line of people waiting in the drivethru line at the CVS pharmacy across the street. The couple times I was in the store (to pick up antibiotics), I was shocked at the racks overflowing with prescriptions waiting for pickup. Another disturbing thing was that I didn’t present any medical insurance card to them (I knew it was a very inexpensive prescription), but they aggressively searched for me in their computers because I had bought prescriptions in Connecticut in 2009, which gave them my DOB, which they then used to search Blue Cross and saw I had prescription drug coverage, and filed an insurance claim without my consent. So much for HIPAA.