See how Big Pharma and their lawyers mocked Appalachia “Pillbillies” during opioid crisis!

Posted on December 9, 2021 by State of the Nation

Big pharma executives mocked ‘pillbillies’ in emails, West Virginia opioid trial hears

This article is more than 6 months old

    • Attorney: AmerisourceBergen executive showed ‘contempt’
    • Three companies in dock over crisis which has killed 500,000

The US courthouse in Charleston, West Virginia. The city of Huntington and surrounding Cabell county are suing AmerisourceBergen and two other major distributors. Photograph: Kenny Kemp/AP

by Chris McGreal
The Guardian

Executives at one of the US’s largest drug distributors circulated rhymes and emails mocking “hillbillies” who became addicted to opioid painkillers even as the company poured hundreds of millions of pills into parts of Appalachia at the heart of America’s opioid epidemic.
OxyContin<br>FILE - This Feb. 19, 2013, file photo shows OxyContin pills arranged for a photo at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt. Purdue University wants the public to know that it has no connection to a company blamed for helping drive the nation’s opioid crisis. The university has spent years repeating that it has no affiliation to Purdue Pharma, the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin. But university spokesman Tim Doty says the news that Purdue Pharma is negotiating a multibillion-dollar settlement to resolve lawsuits over the opioid crisis is a good time for the school to repeat that “That’s not us.” (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File)
‘Ground zero of the opioid epidemic’:
West Virginia puts drug giants on trial

The trial of pharmaceutical firms accused of illegally flooding West Virginia with opioids was told last week that senior staff at AmerisourceBergen, the 10th-largest company in the US by revenue, routinely disparaged communities blighted by the worst drug epidemic in the country’s history.

One email in 2011 included a rhyme built around “a poor mountaineer” named Jed who “barely kept his habit fed”.

According to the verse, “Jed” travels to Florida to buy “Hillbilly Heroin”, the nickname for OxyContin, the drug manufactured by Purdue Pharma which kickstarted an epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives.

Florida was well known through the 2000s for lax regulation of pain clinics where doctors illegally prescribed and dispensed large amounts of opioids to those the verse calls a “bevy of Pillbillies”.

Another rhyme described Kentucky as “OxyContinville” because of the high use of the drug in the poor rural east of the state.

___
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/16/amerisourcebergen-pillbillies-emails-west-virginia-opioid-trial-

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.