How Heroin Made Its Way From Rural Mexico To Small-Town America

[FSogol]

Portsmouth was the pill mill capital of America, really. They had more pill mills per capita in that town than anywhere else in the country. Pill mills are where a doctor prescribes pills for cash without almost any diagnosis of any pain problems or anything like that. Pill mills usually have long, long lines — Portsmouth had a dozen of these, and they prescribed millions of pills a year and was one of the main reasons why so many people got addicted there.

The godfather of all that was a guy by the name of David Proctor. And by the 1990s when the main painkiller in all this, Oxycontin, is released, he sees this as basically a business model. You can prescribe these pills and people will pay you $250 every month to get that prescription, and you will always have your clinic full. And that's what happened for many years in that town. He also taught a lot of doctors who came to work for him how to run these pill mills.

So he became kind of the Ray Kroc, the McDonald's of pill mills with one Kentucky cop — and all these doctors went out on their own and spread this pill mill phenomenon to eastern Kentucky, parts of West Virginia and other parts of Ohio. It was a big part of how this epidemic got going early on.

Whole NPR story here:
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/19/404184355/how-heroin-made-its-way-from-rural-mexico-to-small-town-america

Article based on a new book by Sam Quiones, "Dreamland The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic"

[Mnemosyne]

1. Just had a 20yo od on heroin here in small town of 7500, second in a couple of months.

The junkies here are all getting on something called suboxin(sp) for addiction and then selling those to get smack, from what a friend with an opiate addicted daughter tells me.

What a freaking world...