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.

 

 

Drug deaths draining state’s indigent burial program

With West Virginia’s drug deaths at three times the national average the state’s $2 million indigent burial program is running out of money four months before the fiscal year ends.

The program offers an average of $1,250 to help cover funeral expenses for families who can't afford them.

1,508 burials have been submitted for approval. There’s only enough money for 63 more burials.

In 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, West Virginia's drug overdose death rate stood at 41.5 cases per 100,000 residents, the highest rate in the country and nearly three times the national average.

Painkillers flood West Virginia and 1,728 died using them

Out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million addictive and potentially lethal hydrocodone pills in two years to one pharmacy in Kermit, which is in Mingo County, which has the 4^th highest prescription opioid death rate in the nation’s counties, according to a Charleston Gazette-Mail article by Eric Eyre.

A small pharmacy in Oceana, which is in Wyoming County, received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drug store eight blocks away.

In six years, drug wholesales moved 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into West Virginia, where 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those painkillers. That’s 433 pain pills for every person living in the state.

No stopping this killer tsunami?

The heroin laced with fentanyl drug dealing is rampant in Marion County, Harrison County, my Ohio county of Summit County and throughout America.

People, many of them young, are dying every day from this new scourge.

Fairmont’s Taylor Syslo, 23, seems to be the poster woman dealer for this outrage. She was arrested in July for heroin charges in Harrison County. Before she could even come to trial for that, Syslo was arrested again Thursday for selling heroin laced with fentanyl that killed one of the two people who overdosed.

Syslo’s fatal sale was near the Shop N’ Save on Fairmont Avenue on Wednesday.

Finally, she is in the North Central Regional Jail in lieu of $750,000 bond. Syslo is charged with two counts of delivery of a controlled substance and one count of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance.

Police arrested Syslo Thursday at an apartment on Walnut Avenue, where they found an additional 71 stamps of heroin behind a wood-framed picture on the living room wall along with $100.

Walnut Avenue is where my Austrian-Italian born maternal grandparents had a well-kept home with the obligatory grape arbor for winemaking in the back yard, which sloped toward a ravine.

When I visited Walnut Avenue a decade ago, I was appalled by how rundown the once-clean and inviting neighborhood had become.

Drug dealers completed the decay of the area, I guess.

Another five people were arrested earlier this week for selling heroin laced with fentanyl in the area.

What’s the solution? Apparently, society hasn’t found one … yet.

State sues painkiller vendors

The state of West Virginia is suing pharmacies and drug distributors accused of making millions pushing narcotics to anyone who wants them.

No state has had more trouble with prescription pain pills, and no town more trouble than Kermit -- population 400.

"They filled more scripts for oxycodone than all but 21 pharmacies in America," said Jim Cagle, who represents the state in the groundbreaking lawsuit against pill mills and wholesale drug distributors.

More than three million doses of hydrocodone were ordered by a Kermit pharmacist, James Wooley. In one year, he paid drug distributors hundreds of thousands while netting more than $6 million in profit.

Wooley lost his license in 2012 and served six months in prison for illegally dispensing drugs.

A pharmacy called Tug Valley is being sued for negligently filling prescriptions. Records show the pharmacy was filling more than 150 pain prescriptions a day from one clinic alone.

AmerisourceBergen is the third largest drug distributor in the country, and one of 11  defendants in the state's case. Over a five-year period, they filled orders for 118 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills -- enough to supply every West Virginian with thirteen pain pills a year.

The trial is set to begin in October.