“DEATH IN MUD LICK: A COAL COUNTRY FIGHT AGAINST THE DRUG COMPANIES THAT DELIVERED THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC”
By Eric Eyre
Scribner ($28)
Eric Eyre is a muckraker in the noblest sense. He’s a journalist who isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty to find the truth. As statehouse reporter for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Mr. Eyre won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting on West Virginia’s devastating opioid crisis. Mr. Eyre’s important new book, “Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic,’’ builds on that original reporting by offering a behind-the-scenes look at his years-long struggle to get the facts. “Death in Mud Lick’’ is more than a takedown of the out-of-state predators who exploited West Virginians for obscene profit; it’s a 300-page rebuttal to those who dismiss honest reporting as #fakenews, or claim that journalism doesn’t matter.
“Death in Mud Lick’’ is a real-life legal thriller that barrels along like a runaway coal truck on Horsepen Mountain. Mr. Eyre outflanked and outwitted a phalanx of corporate lawyers, judges, politicians and regulatory agencies to obtain the industry documents revealing the tidal wave of prescription drugs pouring into West Virginia. The numbers he unearthed were, to quote Mike Tyson, ludicrous.
From 2007-12, drug distributors shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia. That’s 433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in the state. During that six-year span, 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers. Pharmacies were dispensing pain pills like volunteer firemen tossing lollipops off the pumper at the Halloween parade.
Mr. Eyre’s dogged digging, carried out as he battled the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, epitomizes the “sustained outrage over basic injustices’’ that the late Ned Chilton, the Gazette-Mail’s crusading publisher, championed as the life force of local newspapers.
John Grisham-style, the plot is set in motion when a grieving sister, scion of a prominent bootlegging family, seeks out a local reporter to help her avenge the overdose death of her beloved brother. William “Bull’’ Preece died, at age 45, after a night of partying at a honky-tonk called Sweeties Teardrop Inn. Preece’s death puts Mr. Eyre on the trail of a sketchy Ohio doctor who had his medical license revoked and a small-town pharmacy attracting customers from as far away as Florida. It’s not long before Mr. Eyre realizes he’s onto “the biggest heist amid the biggest public health crisis in U.S. history.’’
“Death in Mud Lick’’ has a sprawling cast of cast of characters with nicknames like “Pork Chop’’ and “Bulldog’’ and “Tomahawk.’’ And it’s filled with hard-boiled sentences like this:
“After rifling through the single-wide, Debbie stepped outside, her platinum-blond hair afire in the morning sun, her brown eyes, rimmed with red, narrowing to scan the depths of the hollow.’’
The serpentine trail leads us to smug corporate executives, wily coal-country lawyers, and negligent government regulators. Every good legal thriller has a memorable villain. “Death in Mud Lick’’ has a doozy: Patrick Morrisey, a Washington, D.C., lawyer dubbed “Pain Pill Pat’’ because of his lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry. Mr. Morrisey decides to run for West Virginia attorney general after he and his wife, Denise Henry Morrisey, also a pharmaceutical lobbyist, purchase a house in Harpers Ferry. Mr. Morrisey wins election but immediately breaks his promise not to interfere in West Virginia’s lawsuit against several drug distributors. When Mr. Eyre obtains proof of Mr. Morrissey’s duplicity, the attorney general files a lawsuit that threatens to bankrupt the financially struggling Gazette-Mail.
A 2015 report by West Virginia’s lawyer disciplinary board contained Mr. Morrissey’s admission that he didn’t “permanently screen’’ himself from involvement in the pharmaceutical lawsuit. The panel didn’t charge Mr. Morrisey with any ethical violation, but it did put him on notice, saying, “The attorney general is strongly warned regarding his duties pursuant to the conflict of interest provisions of the rules of professional conduct, and warned that any future violations of the rules may result in sanctions.”
It would be nice to report a happy ending, but, alas, it is West Virginia.
The state’s 4½-year legal fight resulted in a $47 million settlement with the drug distributors. But a third of that went to lawyers, and not a single addiction treatment center was built in southern West Virginia, the epicenter of the state’s opioid epidemic. Mr. Eyre, who started at the Gazette-Mail in 1998, announced his resignation last month. As the movie cop once said to Jack Nicholson, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.’’
Steve Halvonik, a former Post-Gazette reporter and editor, teaches journalism at Point Park University.
First Published: May 8, 2020, 2:00 p.m.
