While there are ongoing efforts to stop the opioid crisis in West Virginia, the state is still being flooded with pain pills, according a federal database.
“The widespread availability of these drugs led to extraordinary increases in opioid-related deaths,” said Robin Pollini, Associate Professor in the Department of Behavior Medicine & Psychiatry at West Virginia University.
“Regardless of who is eventually held accountable, they’re not the ones who will be tasked with the hands-on, day-to-day work of solving the problem. That is left to us here in West Virginia and other disproportionately affected states and communities,” said Pollini, also Associate Director of WVU’s Injury Control Research Center.
The Washington Post examined 380 million transactions from 2006 to 2012 in the Drug Enforcement Administration’s database that tracked the sale of every single pain pill sold in the U.S. The newspaper posted the DEA database online.
From 2006 to 2012, the DEA database shows 25.96 million prescription pain pills were supplied to Monongalia County, with the Walgreen pharmacy in Morgantown receiving the highest number of pills. During the same time frame, 5.9 million pills were supplied to Preston County. Kingwood Pharmacy in Kingwood received the highest number of pills, according to the database. Marion County, meanwhile, received 12.68 million pills. The Wal-Mart pharmacy in Fairmont received the largest number of pills.
West Virginia, as a whole, received 853.48 million pill during the seven years. Strosnider Pharmacy in Kermit, Mingo County, received the largest number of pills at 13.16 million, the database said.
“I believe West Virginia was slow to respond to the crisis initially,” said Laura Jones, executive director of Milan Puskar Health Right.
“We still need more syringe access programs, funding to provide treatment, housing, and after care as people who used drugs begin to re-build their lives,” Jones said. “I believe some of the resources are here, but more is needed. We need an assertive campaign to begin busting the stigmas associated with drug use so that more people can access care and communities can better understand what is needed to stop the spread of diseases and overdose deaths.”
In its story, the Washington Post said West Virginia had the highest concentration of pills per person per year with 67. Kentucky was second with 63 followed by South Carolina and Tennessee with 58 each; Nevada, 55; Oklahoma, 54; Alabama, 52; Oregon, 51; Indiana, 47 and Delaware, 45.
Pollini said she was not surprised by the DEA data.
“On a national scale, I think this new ARCOS (the DEA’s Automated Reports and Consolidated Orders Systems) data release just gives us more information to support what we already know – that communities in West Virginia and elsewhere were flooded with these medications, that large numbers of people became dependent on them and that has contributed to high levels of drug-related morbidity and mortality,” she said.
Indeed. In April WVU released findings from a study funded by the National Institutes of Health that found fentanyl-related deaths are on the rise in West Virginia even as deaths related to prescription opioids. The study found that between 2015 and 2017, deaths in the state from fentanyl overdoses were 122 percent of what they were between 2005 and 2014. Researchers said much of the increase could be attributed to the surge in illegal fentanyl imports from China.
“We have good science on the drug treatment and public health interventions that work,” Pollini said. “Nonetheless, West Virginia continues to have the highest overdose death rate in the U.S. and ranks near or at the top for neonatal abstinence syndrome and injection-related infectious diseases like hepatitis B and C. “
“So while there are really heroic efforts going on across our state and across the country to deal with this problem, we need to look critically at whether we have all of the financial resources and political commitment necessary to do the things we know will work to solve this problem that started many years back with the widespread distribution of pain medications,” she said.
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