Opioid distributors flooded communities with painkillers. Now they deny responsibility

The Advertiser - Even as overdoses and deaths from prescription painkillers devastated the nation, two of the largest drug distributors in the United States delivered at least 12.3 million opioid painkillers to a single pharmacy in tiny Mount Gay-Shamrock, W.Va. — population 1,779 — over eight years starting in 2006.

That’s more than 6,900 pills for every man, woman and child in the small town. Even that accounts for only a fraction of the prescription opioids that distributors pumped into rural towns in West Virginia — a state with the nation’s highest rate of overdose deaths in 2016.