Charleston reporter wins a Pulitzer

Charleston Gazette-Mail statehouse reporter Eric Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in journalism, for his articles about the gigantic pill mill in West Virginia that helped contribute to thousands of deaths in the Mountain State.

Eric Eyre

The Gazette had never won a Pulitzer. The Daily Mail did, in 1975, for editorial writing.

Eyre, appropriately, was born in Broad Axe, Pennsylvania, and graduated from New Orleans Loyola University. He has been at the Charleston newspaper for nearly two decades.

The Pulitzer committee praised Eyre “for courageous reporting, performed in the face of powerful opposition, to expose the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties with the highest overdose death rates in the country.”

Drug wholesalers pumped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia in six years. 1,728 people fatally overdosed on the painkillers during that period.

Tiny pharmacies in southern West Virginia, collaborating with the drug wholesalers, were handing out thousands of pills a week under false pretenses.

818 people died of drug overdoses in the state in 2016. West Virginia is #1 in the country in per capital drug deaths. New Hampshire and Kentucky, 2^nd and 3^rd, weren’t even close.

Everyone involved just counted the money cascading in. They didn’t care that thousands in the poorest counties were dying because of what they did.

The Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio won four Pulitzers during my 26 years there. It’s a great honor.