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November 14th, 2015 
Awake Goy
America’s Poorest White Town: Abandoned by Coal, Swallowed by Drugs
November 13th, 2015
What you have here mass unemployment, intergenerational poverty and welfare money flowing into the prescription drug industry. It’s like the place has been hit with some sort of zombie neutron bomb.
Via: The Guardian:
Leading the blight is a powerful and highly addictive opioid painkiller, OxyContin, known locally as “hillbilly heroin�. Typically it is ground down and injected or snorted to give an instant and powerful high.
Its misuse is so routine that the bulk of court cases reported in the local papers are drug related. Just about everyone in Beattyville has a story of the human cost. Some mention the decline of the town’s homecoming queen, Michele Moore, into addiction in the 1990s. Moore struggled by as a single mother living in a trailer home before she was stabbed to death by a man while the two were taking drugs.
At about that time, Beattyville’s police chief, Omer Noe , and the Lee County sheriff, Johnny Mann, were jailed for taking bribes to protect drug smugglers. Five years later, the next Lee County sheriff, Douglas Brandenburg, went to prison for a similar crime.
Amid the relentless destruction of life, there is little that shocks. But four years ago residents of Harlan County – a couple of hours’ drive to the south-east – were shaken by a series of deaths over six weeks of parents of members of the local boys and girls club. Eleven of the children watched a parent die.
Getting the drugs isn’t difficult. Elderly people sell their prescription drugs to supplement some of the lowest incomes in the US. The national average retirement income is about $21,500. In Beattyville it is $6,500.
Last year, a pharmacy owner in nearby Clay County, Terry Tenhet, was jailed for 10 years for illegally distributing hundreds of thousands of pills after police tied the prescriptions to several overdose deaths. In 2011 alone, he supplied more than 360,000 OxyContin pills in a county with only 21,000 residents. Those prescriptions were mostly written by doctors in other states.
Prosecutors alleged that for years a single pain clinic nearly 1,000 miles away in south Florida had provided the prescriptions for a quarter of the OxyContin sold in eastern Kentucky. The bus service to Florida is known to police and addicts alike as the “Oxy Express�.
In 2012, Dr Paul Volkman was sentenced to four life terms for writing illegal prescriptions for more than 3m pills from a clinic he ran in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the border with eastern Kentucky. Prosecutors said the prescriptions had contributed to dozens of overdose deaths.
Another doctor, David Procter, is serving 16 years in prison for running a “pill mill� at which at least four other doctors were involved in the illegal supply of drugs to eastern Kentucky.
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