Heroin epidemic

[In2Win]

i hate all drugs and i work every day to get them off the street

That's great but its unfortunate that you are misinformed about cannabis/marijuana and the health benefits/and alternatives it offers when compared to big pharma alternatives. Big Pharma is a billion dollar industry and pays for the programs and schooling that our doctors go through. They have a vested interest in medication and crucify the benefits of marijuana.

Eventually in the future people will look back and be like WTF were people thinking

 

[In2Win]

Well I know 2 more people I grew up with that have died from heroin since I made this post ... 1 I went to school with my whole life , he died right around Halloween.. just got a phone call another person I grew up with was found dead.. somebody dumped his body off on the side of the road about 2 miles from my house. They found his body yesterday, what a way to kick off 2017!

my daughters mother flew in from Colorado in November on a Friday and left Sunday just to attend 2 funerals back to back of her old friends that overdosed on heroin .. it never ends!

Sorry to hear about the losses Davey, People are dropping like flies around here as well. Friends I grew up with, Friends of friends. You either get locked up or you die. Its sad......especially when children are losing mothers and fathers.

 

[919]

Same here. It should certainly be a crime, and a major felony -- but murder?

Half the reason these deaths are charged as murder -- it allows the prosecutor/politicians to play the "tough on crime" card. And really, it isn't as though the drug dealers have a multi-million dollar lobbyist group.

How many people have been twittering & texting on their phone, only to kill somebody? How often are those people charged with murder?

Interesting and related

http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20150517/GZ01/150519456/1419

Over five years, out-of-state drug wholesalers shipped more than 200 million doses of two popular prescription painkillers to West Virginia, while turning a blind eye to suspicious orders from “pill-mill” pharmacies, according to the latest filing in a state lawsuit against the companies.
The release of the pill numbers follows a bid by the drug wholesalers to toss out the lawsuit.



Between 2007 and 2012, 11 drug distributors shipped 59.9 million oxycodone pills and 140.6 million hydrocodone pills to West Virginia, according to the filing by lawyers representing two state agencies.
“That’s an extraordinarily high number of medications in a state with less than 2 million people,” said Delegate Don Perdue, D-Wayne, a retired pharmacist. “If I would have been the firm shipping those drugs or seeing those shipping records, I would have looked at that and said, “What’s going on here?’ ”
Oxycodone and hydrocodone are the most widely abused prescription painkillers, and contribute to more overdose deaths in West Virginia than any other drug.
The wholesalers’ pain-pill numbers were culled from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration database, according to the filing.
AmerisourceBergen, the nation’s third largest drug wholesaler, shipped 80.3 million hydrocodone pills and 38.4 million oxycodone pills to West Virginia over the five-year span — the highest totals for both drugs by any company named in the state’s lawsuit, according to the filing.
Miami-Luken Inc. had the next-largest numbers with 20.4 million hydrocodone pills and 8.2 million oxycodone pills sent to West Virginia pharmacies.
Other distributors with high numbers include Anda Inc. and H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Co.
“The drug distributors provided the fuel for the prescription drug problem in this state,” wrote Charleston lawyer Jim Cagle, a special assistant attorney general who’s representing the state, in a brief filed last week.
The pill numbers cited in the lawsuit exclude shipments from McKesson Corp., the nation’s largest drug wholesaler, and Cardinal Health, the second largest distributor.
Last year, state agency officials asked Attorney General Patrick Morrisey to add McKesson as a defendant in the lawsuit, but he rejected the request, saying his office was investigating McKesson. Last year, Morrisey solicited bids for an outside law firm to assist his office with the investigation, but apparently never awarded a contract.
Two state agencies — the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety and the Department of Health and Human Resources — are suing Cardinal Health in a separate lawsuit, but Cardinal’s pain-pill shipping totals have yet to be disclosed. Cardinal supplies narcotics to several of West Virginia’s largest retail drugstores.
“Those [pill] numbers are going to go up even more,” Perdue said.
The state agencies allege that the drug wholesalers shipped “massive quantities” of pain pills to West Virginia and failed to report suspicious orders from pill-mill pharmacies that filled questionable prescriptions from rogue doctors.
“That enormous amount of controlled substances distributed to a [West Virginia] population of 1.85 million is so great as compared to the population that many of the orders were obviously suspicious,” Cagle wrote in a May 11 filing. “Defendants failed to know their customers or . . . chose to turn a blind eye to the obvious in order to make sales.”
In previous filings, the drug wholesalers have said raw pill counts can be misleading. The companies argue that their total distribution numbers, and the percentage of sales of controlled substances compared to all drugs, would put the records in better context.
Cagle responded that the state has asked for that information but the drug companies have refused to release it.
As part of the lawsuit, the drug wholesalers are fighting the state’s request to unseal a revised complaint that includes details about the companies’ pain-pill shipments to individual pharmacies. The records would show the number of pills sent to each pharmacy.
The companies cite a November 2013 “protective order” that allows them to label some information “confidential” and “highly confidential.” The drug distributors say they don’t want confidential records getting into the hands of their competitors — including their co-defendants in the ongoing lawsuit.
Cagle has argued that the pill shipment records are “in the public’s interest,” and the state has a “duty of transparency” to disclose them.
The records are voluminous. One wholesaler gave 10,000 pages to Cagle’s law firm, while another company turned over 12 spreadsheets. The first spreadsheet had 44,275 lines of information.
“If I were a manager at one of those wholesalers, the question I would have would be, “Is somebody in my company diverting drugs, based on the amount of drugs we’re shipping to this small state?’ ” Perdue said.
West Virginia has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation. The state spends about $121 million a year on problems caused by prescription drug abuse, according to the lawsuit.
A lawyer for the drug wholesalers would not comment last week for this report. An AmerisourceBergen spokeswoman said the company would not comment about the case while it is under litigation.
Reach Eric Eyre at ericeyre@wvgazette.com, 304-348-4869 or follow @ericeyre on Twitter.
- See more at: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20150517/GZ01/150519456/1419#sthash.68pJjsmZ.dpuf

 

[texansfan]

The 2 major regions where opiate overdoses are middle america and the south. These are the 2 regions of country that have virtually zero states that allow medical marijuana.

Our military guarded the poppy fields for years in Afghanistan so the opium trade could continue to flourish. Now private contractors handle the task.

I am surprised that law enforcement hasn't come down harder on heroin and pills. The majority of people dying from overdosing on them are white. Guess big pharmacy dollars trump skin color.

[h=1]Opioid overdose deaths by state[/h]
2014 stats.

1. Ohio — 2,106
2. California — 2,024
3. New York — 1,739
4. Florida— 1,399
5. Illinois — 1,205
6. Texas — 1,151
7. Massachusetts — 1,140
8. Pennsylvania — 1,092
9. Michigan — 1,052
10. North Carolina — 967
11. Maryland — 921
12. Tennessee — 863
13. Virginia — 758
14. Kentucky — 729
15. New Jersey — 728
16. Georgia — 710
17. Missouri — 696
18. Washington — 673
19. Wisconsin — 627
20. Arizona — 589
21. West Virginia — 554
22. Connecticut — 525
23. Colorado — 517
24. South Carolina — 515
25. Oklahoma — 502
26. Indiana — 462
27. Utah — 455
28. New Mexico — 402
29. Nevada — 375
30. Oregon — 340
31. Minnesota — 318
32. New Hampshire — 297
33. Alabama — 270
34. Louisiana — 260
35. Rhode Island — 205
36. Arkansas — 173
36. Kansas— 173
38. Maine — 171
39. Iowa — 158
40. Delaware — 124
41. Mississippi — 115
42. Idaho — 78
43. Alaska — 76
44. Vermont — 64
45. District of Columbia — 63
46. Hawaii — 59
47. Nebraska — 56
48. Wyoming — 54
49. Montana — 53
50. South Dakota — 33
51. North Dakota — 31

 

[ZJP6050]

big pharma to blame for this mess.

 

[tatehill2000]

Tough scenerio.. but the truth ultimately lays with what's in the mirror..

People hate to hear that cause they want to b lame, and play victim.

The only innocents are children and animals..