To call Williamson, West Virginia, a town is to exaggerate. It is a pinprick settlement of 2,800 people in Mingo County—yet over a decade two pharmacies there pumped out 21m pills of addictive opioids. Unscrupulous clinics staffed by negligent doctors issued prescriptions to throngs of patients attracted by the lax procedures. These “pill mills” were an open secret, so much so that the town acquired the nickname “Pilliamson”.
In “American Overdose” Chris McGreal of the Guardian looks unsparingly at the causes of the opioid crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Drug firms such as Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, claimed there was an epidemic of chronic pain—and that it could be treated by non-addictive, long-term opioid use. Pliant researchers provided shoddy science; deferential regulators at the Food and Drug Administration (fda) bought it. Drug distributors shipped massive quantities of pills to small-town pharmacies without question for years. Dodgy doctors were recruited to sign prescriptions en masse, making more cash than they knew what to do with.
The current hellscape is the result. Americans make up 5% of the global population but consume 30% of the world’s prescription narcotics. More die of drug overdoses than in car accidents. The White House estimates that the addiction epidemic has cost $1 trillion in lost output. Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton, has found that increased opioid prescription could account for 20% of the decline in male participation in the labour force.
[For more on this book by Chris McGreal, go to https://www.economist.com/book...ricas-opioid-tragedy]
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