Eric Eyre Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

New Book Tells Inside Story Of Beginnings Of Opioid Crisis

Former Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter Eric Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his investigation into how drug distributors pumped powerful opioids into some of West Virginia’s most rural counties. In his new book, Eyre takes readers on a journey through the reporting it took to uncover the story, beginning with a single death in one family and detailing how those distributors ignored how addictive the drugs could be.

“Death In Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic” chronicles Eyre’s years-long probe, which began when he was covering the West Virginia statehouse beat, including newly elected West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

“We got a tip that his (Morrisey’s) wife worked for one of these distributors that distributes opioids and other drugs, called Cardinal Health,” Eyre said in an interview “And then we found out that Cardinal Health had donated to Patrick Morrissey’s inaugural party. And it kind of just snowballed from there.”

The story wasn’t an easy one to cover. There were legal fights and efforts by the pharmaceutical industry, the manufacturers and even the Drug Enforcement Agency to conceal records. Morrisey also launched an investigation into the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in what Eyre believes was an attempt to quash the investigation.

“That really took our owners and management back. They were concerned about this aggressive reporting,” Eyre said. Ultimately, the publisher and executive editor at the paper told Eyre to keep at it. “And we won in the end.”

In honoring him the 2017 award for investigative reporting, the Pulitzer Board praised Eyre’s “courageous reporting, performed in the face of powerful opposition, to expose the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties with the highest overdose death rates in the country.”

One guiding principle for Eyre was the idea of “sustained outrage,” a term coined by Former Charleston Gazette publisher Ned Chilton: Newspapers shouldn’t write about an injustice once and then move on, but report story after story on the topic until something changes.

In today’s news climate, with newspapers closing their doors and laying off reporters, Eyre worries that it may be difficult to continue that tradition.

“We laid off upwards of three people the week before last and then another two the previous month and more cuts are coming. This is not just the Gazette-Mail. This is happening all over the country,” he said.

Eyre resigned from the Gazette-Mail on March 31, the day his book was released. He said he wants to focus on his health. In the book he revealed that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2016.

With the coronavirus dominating headlines around the world, Eyre is concerned that the opioid crisis might recede into people’s minds. He noted that many of those same pharmaceutical distributors are using the coronavirus pandemic to “to duck and dodge responsibility for the opioid crisis.

Eyre said he hopes those recovering from substance use disorders don’t experience a setback while the country follows stay-at-home orders.

“A lot of these people who are in recovery, they really, really look forward to group therapy where they have 12 to 15 people. They say that the best part of the whole process is getting together with groups of people. I guess maybe they can do it on Zoom or something or telemedicine, but I don’t think it’s the same,” Eyre said.

He also noted that in more rural parts of the state, and the region, large percentages of people do not have access to reliable high-speed internet and may not be able to join in those online sessions.

“They say the opposite of addiction is connection and we’re not getting much connection now,” Eyre said.

This story is part of an occasional series featuring authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

Investigative Reporter Talks Opioid Lawsuits, Upcoming Book

Community-based efforts can make a real impact in the fight against the opioid epidemic and could benefit from additional funding. One question, though, is whether money from court settlements against drug manufacturers and distributors will trickle down to community efforts.

For some insight, Inside Appalachia guest host Giles Snyder spoke with Eric Eyre, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter whose exposure of the opioid epidemic in West Virginia won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

SNYDER: So what is it, more than 2000 local governments are involved in the national litigation?

EYRE: Yeah, there’s 2000 local governments and tribal governments that are involved. That includes states, cities, counties. The latest we’d heard that there was probably about $50 billion they were talking for a settlement. Obviously that’s up for discussion. There’s another $10 to $12 billion with Purdue Pharma.

SNYDER: So where are we with the national litigation right now?

EYRE: It’s dragged out. We were in the courtroom for one of the cases — the Cabell-Huntington case was argued a week ago. It had been transferred from the Cleveland courtroom where the most of the 2,000 cases are currently housed. And we heard the arguments. I turned to somebody and said, ‘Man, this seems like Groundhog Day’, because I had been hearing this since 2016. I mean, these things have been dragging on and dragging on and dragging on.

Paul Farrell, the plaintiff for the Cabell case, said he was ready to go right then and there, or at least within 30 days. The drug company said they wanted to wait at least 18 months, so the judge said, ‘Well, we’re not going to wait 18 months,’ but they didn’t set an exact trial date. But they’re talking about one in state court in New York that could go off in the next couple months. But the next big one would probably be the Cabell-Huntington opioid case. It was in consolidation in Cleveland, but they were successfully able to transfer it back to Federal court here with Judge Faber in Charleston, which everybody seems to think will make for a much speedier trial.

SNYDER: You mentioned a lot of money at stake there that could benefit local efforts to recover from the crisis. What’s your sense about whether these local efforts will ultimately benefit, or is that still an open question?

EYRE: One thing they’ve worked out is they’ve created this program called the “negotiation class”, and that’s every city/county/town in the United States as part of this negotiation class. They will all band together, and if there was a settlement and 75 percent of all these entities approved it, they would get the money.

But here’s the deal. There’s no stipulation that it would go to recovery. They’re arguing that this is a public nuisance issue. So conceivably, all these cities and towns and counties could take the money and use it for whatever they want. If they needed a new trash truck, if they needed to pave streets, if they needed to hire law enforcement officers, they could use the money any way they want it. So the recovery community’s really upset about that, that you know, the money’s not going to go to fix the problems that were caused.

SNYDER: Going back to the tobacco settlement in the 1990s and checking out how that money was ultimately spent, tell us anything about what could happen here. I guess what I’m asking is, are there any lessons to be learned here?

EYRE: Yeah, well, the tobacco money was significantly more. It was $200 billion. So about four times as much as what they’re talking about here. But the same thing happened there. A lot of that tobacco money, which was supposed to go to be prevention efforts and such, wound up being spent by the cities for other things, which they considered more pressing, that really had nothing to do with the ill health effects of smoking.

SNYDER: You wrote a few months back about one of the more heartbreaking aspects to all this. And that’s the babies who are born dependent on opioids, and how they seem to be left behind in the national litigation. Could you talk a little bit about where that issue is?

EYRE: Yeah, they’re stuck with the cities and counties, and I think that the cities and counties want them stuck there, because, you know, these are obviously the innocent victims of the opioid crisis. Their lawyers are desperately trying to get their cases severed and heard separately from the cities and counties. It just seems like they’re just completely different issues on the one side. There’s a lot of concern there’s going to be developmental delays, that type of thing. It’s going to impact their learning in schools. But so far, the judge in Cleveland has rejected all efforts, and there have been multiple efforts to carve out the baby cases from the other litigation, but so far, he’s rejected all those efforts.

SNYDER: I’m going to switch gears on you now and mention that we ran into each other a year or two ago in Shepherdstown, while you were speaking about your reporting. You were writing a book on the opioid crisis back then. And now I understand, it’s going to be out soon.

EYRE: Yeah, it’s coming out March 31. It’s called “Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic.” It’s basically about how a tenacious lawyer and an ex con actually who had a drug peddling past and myself, all sort of banded together one community to uncover this massive pill dumping in Appalachia how, how these drug companies, and these drug distributors, flooded Appalachia, and frankly for the rest of the nation, with an excessive number of opioids, which of course sparked the greatest health crisis in American history.

SNYDER: How much more reporting did you have to do for your book?

EYRE: I did a lot of extra reporting on impacts of the lobbying that was going on behind the scenes. When my articles came out, I mean, we mostly focused on Kermit, West Virginia, the town that had nearly nine million opioids in a town of like 300 people. But we found that that wasn’t some just outlier, that there were many communities in Appalachia in West Virginia, and other towns across the country that got a similar deluge of opioids.

Eric Eyre is a reporter with the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Giles Snyder is a newscaster with NPR. Their conversation is part of an episode of Inside Appalachia.

Program on Journalism Set Next Month in West Virginia

The West Virginia Humanities Council is presenting the last of its series on journalism and informed citizens next month in Shepherdstown.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Eyre of The Charleston Gazette-Mail and National Public Radio newscaster Giles Snyder will discuss the importance of pursuing complex stories and creating context for them.

Former West Virginia Public Broadcasting Eastern Panhandle bureau chief Cecelia Mason will moderate the free, public program on Sept. 6.

Eyre received a Pulitzer last year for his series on painkillers. Snyder is a former West Virginia Public Radio employee and an alumnus of Marshall University.

The program is the last of three public presentations produced with funding through the “Democracy and the Informed Citizen” initiative administered by the Federation of State Humanities Councils.

Gazette-Mail Reporter Wins Pulitzer for Drug Stories

Reporter Eric Eyre of The Charleston Gazette-Mail has won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for articles showing drug wholesalers shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia in just six years, a period when 1,728 people fatally overdosed on the painkillers.

Eyre obtained previously confidential records sent by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to the office of West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

They disclosed pills sold to every pharmacy and drug shipments to all 55 counties in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012.

The records — which leading drug wholesalers had fought in court to keep secret — show the wholesalers shipped ever-higher doses of the pills even as the death toll climbed.

The Pulitzer board cited “courageous reporting, performed in the face of powerful opposition.”