48 Quotes by Sam Quinones

OxyContin is a simple pill. It contains only one drug: oxycodone, a painkiller that Germans synthesized in 1916 from thebaine, an opium derivative. Molecularly, oxycodone is similar to heroin.

But across America, thousands of people like Matt Schoonover were dying. Drug overdoses were killing more people every year than car accidents.

Cocaine and methamphetamine – the popular drugs through the 1980s and 1990s – are damaging drugs, but people don’t often fatally overdose on them. Heroin, which people do overdose on, hadn’t been a sustained problem since the 1970s. Drug overdoses in Ohio had remained pretty constant for decades.

A pill mill was a pain-management clinic, staffed by a doctor with little more than a prescription pad. A pill mill became a virtual ATM for dope as the doctor issued prescriptions to hundreds of people a day.

Another veteran Wal-Mart booster told me he would wear very baggy clothing, with long-john underwear underneath, taped at the ankles. He’d walk through the store stuffing merchandise in his long johns, which would balloon out, though nothing would show under his baggy pants and shirt. “I walked out of there, it looked like I was four hundred pounds,” he said.

Phillip Prior was now knee-deep in what was unthinkable a few years before: rural, white heroin junkies. “I’ve yet to find one who didn’t start with OxyContin,” he said. “They wouldn’t be selling this quantity of heroin on the street right now if they hadn’t made these decisions in the boardroom.

By 2006, Brownlee’s staff believed they had evidence that the company had knowingly misbranded OxyContin as virtually nonaddictive.

There was a little of nineteenth-century patent medicine in Valium’s DNA. It didn’t treat any root cause of stress. Instead, it treated vague symptoms and thus allowed doctors to avoid the complicated work of understanding the causes of that stress. Like patent medicines, Valium was a name-brand drug, promoted together with the idea that a pill could solve any ailment.

One of them was Kathy Newman, who in 1996 was a high school cheerleader and the daughter of a contractor. Kathy had just graduated from Portsmouth High School when she broke ribs in a car accident. The emergency room in town was wary of prescribing more than ibuprofen for pain. You should go see David Procter, her friends said: He’ll give you something that works.