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    Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic
    Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic
    Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic
    Audiobook8 hours

    Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

    Written by Eric Eyre

    Narrated by Michael David Axtell

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A New York Times Critics’ Top Ten Book of the Year * 2021 Edgar Award Winner Best Fact Crime * A Lit Hub Best Book of The Year

    From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a “powerful,” (The New York Times) urgent, and heartbreaking account of the corporate greed that pumped millions of pain pills into small Appalachian towns, decimating communities.

    In a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, 12 million opioid pain pills were distributed in just three years to a town with a population of 382 people. One woman, after losing her brother to overdose, was desperate for justice. Debbie Preece’s fight for accountability for her brother’s death took her well beyond the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in coal country, ultimately leading to three of the biggest drug wholesalers in the country. She was joined by a crusading lawyer and by local journalist, Eric Eyre, who uncovered a massive opioid pill-dumping scandal that shook the foundation of America’s largest drug companies—and won him a Pulitzer Prize.

    Part Erin Brockovich, part Spotlight, Death in Mud Lick details the clandestine meetings with whistleblowers; a court fight to unseal filings that the drug distributors tried to keep hidden, a push to secure the DEA pill-shipment data, and the fallout after Eyre’s local paper, the Gazette-Mail, the smallest newspaper ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, broke the story.

    Eyre follows the opioid shipments into individual counties, pharmacies, and homes in West Virginia and explains how thousands of Appalachians got hooked on prescription drugs—resulting in the highest overdose rates in the country. But despite the tragedy, there is also hope as citizens banded together to create positive change—and won.

    “A product of one reporter’s sustained outrage [and] a searing spotlight on the scope and human cost of corruption and negligence” (The Washington Post) Eric Eyre’s intimate portrayal of a national public health crisis illuminates the shocking pattern of corporate greed and its repercussions for the citizens of West Virginia—and the nation—to this day.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 31, 2020
    ISBN9781797104683
    Author

    Eric Eyre

    Eric Eyre has been a newspaper reporter in West Virginia since 1998. In 2017, his investigation into massive shipments of opioids to the state’s southern coalfields was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia, with his wife and son.

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    • 5/5
      This book is, in a word, heartbreaking. But it offers an education in corruption, greed, and cruelty--on a massive scale. Just the same, it's worthwhile to read it, because it may lead to change if enough Americans understand the root causes of the opioid crisis in the United States. Eric Eyre is a conscientious journalist, steadfast, fair, and exacting in his reporting, notwithstanding the forces arrayed against him. It is galling to see moneyed corporate interests, together with the District Attorney's Office, behave like drug pushers and effectively get away with it. The story doesn't have a happy ending, either. The same interests that engendered the opioid epidemic seem ever more powerful and I think they are unlikely to get called to account any time soon. Read it and weep.

      1 person found this helpful