The company has previously acknowledged delivering 5.7m opioid pills between 2005 and 2011 to the small town of Kermit, West Virginia, with a population of just 380 people. In 2008 alone, it shipped 5,264 pills for every man, woman and child in Kermit.
Most of them went to two Save-Rite pharmacies whose owner was later jailed for working with a doctor running a “pill mill”, which prescribed narcotics in large quantities to anyone prepared to pay cash and drew people from hundreds of miles away.
Federal prosecutors also charged the owner of the Tug Valley Pharmacy in nearby Williamson, Samuel Ballengee, over his orders from Miami-Luken. The company sold 6.4m pills to the small pharmacy, notorious in a town of about 3,000 people for the long lines of out of state cars at its drive-through window.
Tug Valley pharmacy opened to meet demand to fill prescriptions written by a group of doctors operating from a pain clinic in the Williamson run by a convicted pimp. One of the doctors was revealed to have written prescriptions for more opioid pills than West Virginia’s biggest hospital through the 2000s.
"Federal prosecutors have charged a former president of a major pharmaceutical distributor with flooding parts of Appalachia with millions of opioid pills while ignoring evidence they were driving addiction and death."
It's all about the money.
From 1999 to 2017, 218,000 people died in the United States from overdoses related to prescription opioids, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... I guess nothing matters as long as you get paid and no member of your family or friends is involved (in consumption of opioids).