When a Company Is Making Money From the Opioid Crisis
In a year of big stories, the opioid crisis has become one of the biggest, though it’s been a problem since the early 2000s. Around then, people in Kentucky, West Virginia, and southeast Ohio started referring to Percocet, OxyContin, and Vicodin as “hillbilly heroin.” The pills were easy to get and easy to abuse. Between those, and heroin and synthetics like fentanyl—which many have since moved on to—West Virginia in 2015 had the highest overdose mortality rate in the nation, with 41.5 deaths per 100,000.
“We were texting when he OD’ed” and died, an Ohio acquaintance of mine told me in a May catch-up phone conversation about a young man we both knew. “He’s, like, the third one in the last 10 days,” she said. She’d had a relapse, too, while she’d been pregnant. Her baby, like her other children, was removed from her care, becoming one more in a wave of children flooding child-services agencies.
The crisis can be attributed to many parties—drug manufacturers, drug distributors, unscrupulous doctors, and, of course, drug dealers, smugglers, and users—some of whom are profiting from it. Last month, a group of shareholders of one distributor strove to bring the company's goals more in line with society's. . .