Drug Companies Say their Big Business in West Virginia is None of Yours

West Virginia is ground zero for the prescription drug epidemic. We lose more people per-capita to this scourge than any other state. The addictive power of hydrocodone and other man-made drugs far exceeds that of even once-feared street drugs like heroin or cocaine. In fact, nationally, prescription drug overdoses are now more common than those two drugs combined. As this becomes better understood, new strategies are emerging to fight the problem.

But fighting the problem means understanding its source. Unlike street drugs that are often smuggled into the United States from distant countries of origin, prescription drugs are produced right here at home. They serve lawful, even essential purposes, for people in serious pain. But to fuel the epidemic, pills must, by definition, be produced and sold in vastly greater numbers than the actual medical need in West Virginia.

In 2012, West Virginia, through its then-Attorney General Darrell McGraw, filed a case against eleven drug companies accusing them of knowingly shipping and selling far more pills to West Virginia than legitimate medicine could possibly justify. Some of these drug companies have already tacitly admitted to violating the law to push excess pills in other states.

Now those drug companies are in court, refusing to allow the public to know the numbers of pills they shipped to our state in the relevant year. Legal cases involving “trade secret” information — the formula for Coca-Cola, for example — sometimes involve so called “protective orders” that allow a company to keep that information secret within the confines of the case.

But as Delegate Don Perdue, (D-Wayne) pointed out, there is a strong public interest in knowing what these companies are up to:

“With this issue, we’re not only called on to be transparent, we’re duty-bound to pursue transparency in a situation where we have numerous deaths, addictions and a tremendous economic impact on the state. The state of West Virginia has every right to provide those statistics to the public that’s paying the bills for what’s happened.”

Perdue is himself a retired pharmacist. We’ve all got a right to know how many pills these companies are shipping into our state and how much profit has been made off the human misery caused by the distribution of excess pills. We are all paying the bills: for enforcement, for treatment, for incarceration, and for the indelible harm to our society caused by prescription drug abuse. It’s time the companies making a buck off this statewide disaster came clean, told the truth, and paid their fair share of the cost they’ve imposed on West Virginia.

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