Four WV Counties Received High Numbers of Pain Pill Shipments

Drug wholesalers shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia in just six years, a period when 1,728 people fatally overdosed on these two painkillers, according to an investigation by the Charleston Gazette-Mail. That amounts to 433 of the frequently abused opioid pills for every man, woman and child in the state of 1.84 million people. Four counties — Wyoming, McDowell, Boone and Mingo — lead the nation in fatal overdoses caused by pain pills, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The records — which leading drug wholesalers had fought in court to keep secret — show the wholesalers shipped ever-higher doses of the pills even as the death toll climbed.