Executives at one of the US’ largest drug distributors circulated rhymes and e-mails mocking “hillbillies” who became addicted to opioid painkillers even as the company poured hundreds of millions of pills into parts of Appalachia at the heart of the US’ opioid epidemic.
The trial of pharmaceutical firms accused of illegally flooding West Virginia with opioids was told earlier this month that senior staff at AmerisourceBergen, the 10th-largest company in the US by revenue, routinely disparaged communities blighted by the worst drug epidemic in the country’s history.
One e-mail in 2011 included a rhyme built around “a poor mountaineer” named Jed who “barely kept his habit fed.”
According to the verse, “Jed” travels to Florida to buy “Hillbilly Heroin,” the nickname for OxyContin, the drug manufactured by Purdue Pharma which launched an epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives.
Florida was well known through the 2000s for lax regulation of pain clinics where doctors illegally prescribed and dispensed large amounts of opioids to those the verse calls a “bevy of Pillbillies.”
Another rhyme described Kentucky as “OxyContinville” because of the high use of the drug in the poor rural east of the state.
When Kentucky introduced new regulations to curb opioid dispensing, an AmerisourceBergen executive wrote in a widely circulated e-mail: “One of the hillbilly’s [sic] must have learned how to read :-).”
Another e-mail contained a mocked up breakfast cereal box with the word “smack” under the words “OxyContin for kids.”
One of those who wrote and circulated disparaging e-mails was Chris Zimmerman, the senior executive responsible for enforcing AmerisourceBergen’s legal obligation to halt opioid deliveries to pharmacies suspected of dispensing suspiciously large amounts of the drugs, often in concert with corrupt doctors who made small fortunes writing illegal prescriptions.
After Florida cracked down on pill mills in 2011, Zimmerman sent an e-mail to colleagues.
“Watch out George and Alabama, there will be a max exodus of Pillbillies heading north,” he wrote.
Zimmerman told the trial he regretted circulating the mocking rhyme, but it was “a reflection of the environment at the time.”
He said the e-mails were simply a means of expressing frustration as the firm worked to prevent opioids falling into the wrong hands.
Zimmerman said the company culture was of the “highest caliber.”
Paul Farrell, a lawyer for a West Virginia county, put it to the executive that the e-mails reflected a culture of contempt.
“It is a pattern of conduct by those people charged with protecting our community, and they’re circulating e-mails disparaging hillbillies,” the Mountain State Spotlight quoted him as saying.
The city of Huntington and surrounding Cabell County are suing AmerisourceBergen and two other major distributors, McKesson and Cardinal Health, as part of a series of federal cases over the pharmaceutical industry’s push to sell narcotic painkillers that created the opioid epidemic.
This is the first case to go to a full trial after AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and two other companies agreed to pay US$260 million to settle another of the bellwether cases in Ohio two years ago.
The two West Virginia local authorities accuse the distributors of putting profit before lives and turning Cabell County into the “ground zero” of the epidemic.
A data expert on Tuesday told the trial that over nine years the three distributors delivered about 100 million opioid doses to the county, which has a population of just 90,000.
Farrell put it to Zimmerman that he failed to enforce company policies to report suspicious orders to the US Drug Enforcement Administration and to withhold deliveries while they were investigated.
Zimmerman said that if the company had stopped deliveries it would have harmed patients who needed the drugs.
“We’re a company, we’re not an enforcement agency and we’re not a regulatory agency,” he said.
Drug distributors delivered 1.1 billion opioid painkillers to West Virginia between 2006 and 2014, even as the state’s overdose rate rose to the highest in the US.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS