The doctors were careful to insist their prescriptions were filled only at pharmacies that would take the money and not ask questions. Each day, hundreds of people lined up outside an old animal feed store where a group of doctors were set up by a former pimp, just out of federal prison for running a gay prostitution ring in Washington DC, to churn out opioid prescriptions faster than West Virginia’s major hospitals.īefore long, people in town were calling the Williamson Wellness Center a “pill mill”. At first he planned to approach it the way he investigated marijuana: by working along the chain from the user to the dealer to the producer with the threat of jail to prise information from suspects.īut Smith quickly discovered that users were happy to tell him where he could find doctors to write prescriptions and drug stores to fill them – no questions asked. In 2001, the West Virginia bureau of criminal investigation sent Smith to investigate a surge of opioids pills on the streets.

But at the front end were thousands of pharmacies dispensing the pills, and among the pharmacists were profiteers. 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. They shipped more narcotic painkillers to Mingo county per head of population than to any other place in the US. Ballengee and the other drug store owners kept escalating the orders, and the distributors filled them without flinching. Twenty minutes’ drive to the north, the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in the village of Kermit, population 280 and falling, was outstripping them both.ĭrug distributors delivered more than 30m opioid pills just to those three pharmacies, in one of the poorest counties in America.

Mingo county west virgina