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    ADDING TO MR. CARDWELL'S 'THUG DEALERS' OPIOID EPIDEMIC (v2)

    It's nice to see...

    Danny Cardwell has caught up with the news...

    Thank you for taking the time spread the news...

    Following are two posts I posted in December of last year behind the paywall at TPM Prime:.

    This is a real eye opener . . . 

    9,000,000 pills and only 392 residents in one town alone?

    December 17, 2016 | West Virginia Gazette-Mail

    Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

    The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.

    In the drug distribution industry, they're called the “Big Three” — McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen — and they bear no resemblance to the mom-and-pop pharmacies that ordered massive quantities of the drugs the wholesalers delivered in West Virginia.

    The Big Three wholesalers together are nearly as large as Wal-Mart, with total revenues of more than $400 billion. Their revenues account for about 85 percent of the drug distribution market in the U.S.

    Between 2007 and 2012 — when McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen collectively shipped 423 million pain pills to West Virginia, according to DEA data analyzed by the Gazette-Mail — the companies earned a combined $17 billion in net income.

    Over the past four years, the CEOs of McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen collectively received salaries and other compensation of more than $450 million.

    In 2015, McKesson's CEO collected compensation worth $89 million — more money than what 2,000 West Virginia families combined earned on average.

    Continues-->

    http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161217/drug-firms-poured-780m-painkillers-into-wv-amid-rise-of-overdoses

    ~OGD~

     

     

    And then this one...

    December 29, 2017

    Pharmaceutical Opioids and Addiction: Putting Faces to the “Diseases of Despair…”

    A very sobering situation... (no pun intended)...

    Take a moment way from Trump and his mindless tweets and his sycophants who wish to cut the safety-nets.

    Read here about what's really rotting our country from within...

    And when you feel like bashing the media, think of these journalists that are really doing their jobs...

    In a year-long series, The Washington Post has explored a complex epidemic that combines an oversupply of addictive prescription drugs with a dismaying demand for them among people struggling with pain and hopelessness.

    These three individuals are just a few of the thousands of souls spread across this "Greatest Nation in the World." Read on...

    Traci Andrus, 45, is known as “Mom.” She had been a city social worker until she needed routine surgery and became hooked on opioid painkillers. Familiar story: The pills led to cheaper heroin, she says, then to all manner of chaos and dysfunction, and unemployment, and jail, and finally this new existence in the little house by the tracks. “I had a home. I had a brand-new car. I had a life,” Andrus says.

    Rachel Kerner, 39, is tall, striking and known as “Fancy” because she’s always dressed to the nines. She had a good career as a flight attendant, but she used cocaine recreationally, failed a drug test and lost her job. She also lost a child three weeks after giving birth, and she began abusing prescription opioids. “I didn’t really deal with my son’s death until I got into rehab,” she says.

    Lisa Touvell, 49, had steady factory work for years but has always struggled with addiction and a decade ago made the transition from pills to heroin. “I gave up. I couldn’t find a job. Two failed marriages. My kids were taken away. I gave up,” she says. She wound up in prison for drug trafficking, and she was released in March. “I’m tired,” she says, persuasively.

     

    The entire article is quite stark...

    December 29. 2016 | WaPo

    No longer ‘Mayberry,’ a small Ohio city fights an epidemic of self-destruction

    And that article is but one of sixteen articles found here in a year-long series in the WaPo:

    Unnatural Causes: Sick and dying in small-town America

    A new divide in American death... Drugs, alcohol, marketing and lax federal oversight are working to defy modern trends of mortality, perhaps most starkly among middle-aged white women.

     

     

    And there are more articles in the series...

    ~OGD~

    Comments

    I'm sorry I got to this so late. This is a crisis. One of my wife's former Head Start kids was murdered by her mother. She shot her 6 year old daughter to death. This epidemic is destroying lives.

    Thanks for taking the time to engage my post.


    Danny... You're welcome...

    How heartbreaking...

    I've seen things I don't even wish to recall. I've worked with this program Cri-Help Organization for the past 45 years when it started in a 2 bedroom bungalow with temp trailers 3 blocks from our home here. And through my association in the musical business I am also an active member since 1989 in the Music Cares Addiction Recovery Programs | GRAMMY.org.

    Never never never give up...

    ~OGD~


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