Sull'Autore
Eric Eyre has been a 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.
Opere di Eric Eyre
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Eyre, Eric
- Data di nascita
- 1965
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Istruzione
- Loyola University, New Orleans
University of South Florida, Master's in Mass Communication - Attività lavorative
- journalist
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Pulitzer Prize (Investigative Reporting, 2017)
Utenti
Recensioni
Premi e riconoscimenti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 1
- Utenti
- 98
- Popolarità
- #193,038
- Voto
- 3.7
- Recensioni
- 6
- ISBN
- 6
Drugs in the United States are delivered by distributors, who purchase them from the manufacturers, and then deliver them to hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies, the ordering entities. This makes the distributor both buyer and supplier. As distributors, they were required by the federal DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) to flag and report unusual ordering activity. This was not happening.
Sav-Rite, the only pharmacy in Kermit, processed roughly a prescription a minute, mostly for painkillers. That was more than a prescription a day, every day, for every resident in Kermit. Who was receiving these drugs? A look at the parking lot on any given day showed that many purchasers came from out of state.
Many of the prescriptions were written by Dr Donald Kiser. He had lost his West Virginia license for lying to the medical board after being charged with trading prescriptions for sex. It wasn't the charge that bothered the board; rather it was the fact that he lied about being charged. Dr Kiser moved across the state line to Ohio, and continued writing prescriptions for his patients back in West Virginia. There was even a weekly bus to take them to his clinic and home again.
In October 2005, 45 year old Bull Preece died from an oxycodone overdose. In the week before his death, Kiser had written prescriptions for Preece for 90 Valium, 60 oxycodone, and 30 Zestril, a blood pressure medication. In the six weeks before he died, Preece had also been prescribed 90 hydrocodone and 60 Xanax for anxiety at a clinic just outside Kermit, as well as another 120 hydrocodone and 90 Xanax by another doctor at the same clinic. All prescriptions had been filled by Sav-Rite.
In 2007, Preece's sister, a former addict who along with her police chief then husband had served time in a federal penitentiary for drug offences, launched a wrongful death suit against Dr Kiser and Sav-Rite with her lawyer Jim Cagle. What followed was over a decade of investigations and suits involving the DEA, a state attorney general who was suing drug distributor Cardinal Health, congressional investigations, and armies of lawyers as distributors tried to pay their way out of any responsibility.
Eric Eyre became part pf the investigation in 2013 after a tip about millions of dollars the attorney-general's wife's lobbying firm had received from Cardinal. Eyre was working for an independent newspaper the Charleston Gazette-Mail at the time, and started writing a series of articles exposing the political corruption, and the machinations of the companies, including efforts to shut down and bankrupt his employer. Eyre's work would win him the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism: For 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.
His work is a strong case for supporting the disappearing independent newspapers that care about and focus on local issues often ignored by the large papers and chains until they explode into headlines with stores like a decrease in American life expectancy due to the number of deaths from overdoses.… (altro)