Opioid trial: Why did six requests for a pharmacy investigation in WV go ignored?

In 2012, Doug Emma sent a concerned email to his bosses at Cardinal Health, one of the country’s largest drug distributors. He’d identified two pharmacies requesting suspiciously large orders of opioids.

The company knew so little about what was happening at these pharmacies that Emma called them “black holes” in the email, which came up at the continuing trial of Cardinal and two other huge drug distributors in Charleston.

Both pharmacies were in West Virginia.

One was a small pharmacy in Van, a community of around 200 people in Boone County, that was filling prescriptions from Georgia. That pharmacy, Emma noted, had been cut off from buying oxycodone, the popular pain-reliever that drove the early opioid epidemic.

But there was no indication that the same had happened to the second “black hole” pharmacy, a Medicine Shoppe in West Huntington that was experiencing “significant growth.”

Read more: https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2021/05/20/opioid-trial-why-did-six-requests-for-a-pharmacy-investigation-in-wv-go-ignored/