48 Quotes by Sam Quinones

Walmart, for a long time, did not require a receipt for returned goods. Anything stolen could be returned for a gift card for the full value of the merchandise. Dealers bought those cards for half their value in pills. A five-hundred-dollar Walmart card was worth three OxyContin 80s – for which the dealer had paid a few dollars with the Medicaid card scam. A vast trade in Walmart cards kept Portsmouth’s army of pill dealers in household necessities.

She once found herself in an abandoned farmhouse with people she didn’t know, unaware how she got there. A pit bull ran through the living room, chased by an enraged rooster.

In May 2001, Hale filed what is believed to be the first Oxy-related wrongful-death lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, on behalf of Jackie Burton. “Purdue.

Unable to afford street OxyContin, Matt at some point switched to the black tar heroin that had saturated the Columbus market, brought in by young Mexican men from a small state on Mexico’s Pacific coast called Nayarit.

We can talk morality all day long, but if you’re drawing five hundred dollars a month and you have a Medicaid card that allows you to get a monthly supply of pills worth several thousand dollars, you’re going to sell your pills.

The pain-treatment revolution had many faces and these mostly belonged to well-meaning doctors and dedicated nurses. But in the Rust Belt, another kind of pain had emerged. Waves of people sought disability as a way to survive as jobs departed.

As I tried to chart the spread of the opiate epidemic, one thing dawned on me: Other than addicts and traffickers, most of the people I was speaking to were government workers. They were the only ones I saw fighting this scourge. We’ve seen a demonization of government and the exaltation of the free market in America over the previous thirty years. But here was a story where the battle against the free market’s worst effects was taken on mostly by anonymous public employees.

Multidisciplinary clinics began to fade. Over a thousand such clinics existed nationwide in 1998; only eighty-five were around seven years later.

My footsteps echoed down small-town Main Streets. On one, a pharmacist left a note in the window of her store. She had enjoyed serving the town, she wrote, but couldn’t hang on anymore and she hoped they’d understand why she was leaving like all the rest. She left no forwarding address. Walmart.