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Death in Mud Lick

A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

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About The Book

A New York Times Critics’ Top Ten Book of the Year * 2021 Edgar Award Winner Best Fact Crime * A Lit Hub Best Book of The Year

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter from the smallest newspaper ever to win the prize in the investigative reporting category, an urgent, riveting, and heartbreaking investigation into the corporate greed that pumped millions of pain pills into small Appalachian towns, decimating communities.

Death in Mud Lick is the story of a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, that distributed 12 million opioid pain pills in three years to a town with a population of 382 people—and of one woman, desperate for justice, after losing her brother to overdose. Debbie Preece’s fight for accountability for her brother’s death took her well beyond the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in coal country, ultimately leading to three of the biggest drug wholesalers in the country. She was joined by a crusading lawyer and by local journalist, Eric Eyre, who uncovered a massive opioid pill-dumping scandal that shook the foundation of America’s largest drug companies—and won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Part Erin Brockovich, part Spotlight, Death in Mud Lick details the clandestine meetings with whistleblowers; a court fight to unseal filings that the drug distributors tried to keep hidden, a push to secure the DEA pill-shipment data, and the fallout after Eyre’s local paper, the Gazette-Mail, the smallest newspaper ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, broke the story.

Eyre follows the opioid shipments into individual counties, pharmacies, and homes in West Virginia and explains how thousands of Appalachians got hooked on prescription drugs—resulting in the highest overdose rates in the country. But despite the tragedy, there is also hope as citizens banded together to create positive change—and won. A work of deep reporting and personal conviction, Eric Eyre’s intimate portrayal of a national public health crisis illuminates the shocking pattern of corporate greed and its repercussions for the citizens of West Virginia—and the nation—to this day.

Excerpt

1. A Death in Mud Lick 1 A Death in Mud Lick
At sunup, Debbie Preece drove north on the two-lane blacktop that traced the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, hurtling onto a rutted gravel road that tunneled deep into the woods. She stopped with a jolt at the rust-bitten trailer in Mud Lick. The coroner had already picked up her brother’s body and transported it to the morgue for autopsy. Debbie insisted that someone show her where William “Bull” Preece had spent his last hours. She was directed to a back bedroom, vacant save for a dresser and a torn mattress set atop a box spring. The sheriff’s deputies had already removed the blood-spattered clothes and swept up the residue of crushed pills.

It was the first Monday in October 2005, five years since Bull had fallen from a ladder and injured his back at Penn Coal mine and secured that first prescription for pain pills, which led to another and another. Bull kept finding doctors to prescribe OxyContin and Lortab. He had been taking painkillers for two years before Debbie realized he was addicted. He’d slump into the sofa at her house and fall asleep. She tried to reason with him. She checked him into rehab. He’d stay a few days, then relapse. He lost his home after failing to pay the mortgage. He became a stranger to Debbie. The contents of a pill bottle would transform a once strong and proud coal miner into a coward prowling darkened streets and dive bars for his next fix. He tried to shed the addiction at a methadone clinic. He stopped going after six months. He told his sister he was taking pain medication, but he assured her he wasn’t snorting pills or shooting up.

“Be careful,” she had told him as he was leaving their mother’s house in Kermit, the last time they spoke.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

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. At forty-eight, she was three years older than Bull, so nicknamed because he was a bullheaded child.

Debbie noticed a white truck parked beside a shotgun-frame house with a broken porch. It was Bull’s Ford Explorer. She swung open the passenger-side door and retrieved a stack of family photographs—Bull with his thirteen brothers and sisters, Bull with his arm around his father, Bull dressed in a navy firefighter’s uniform and white cap beside the fire truck outside the Kermit VFD.

A man emerged from the house and waved Debbie inside. He wanted to show her something he had discovered in the truck’s glove box. Prescription receipts and four orange plastic prescription bottles. They were empty. Every one of them.

The evening before his death, Bull and his estranged wife and another man had been drinking beer at a honky-tonk called Sweeties Teardrop Inn. They drove back to Mud Lick at 1:00 a.m. that Sunday. Bull fell asleep on the mattress. The man swiped Bull’s truck and drove across the Tug Fork into Kentucky to buy more beer. On the way back, he lost control of the Explorer, ran it up a hill, and slammed into the neighbor’s porch. Someone rushed the man who wrecked Bull’s truck to the hospital in Louisa, Kentucky. He slipped out of the emergency room before the authorities figured things out and tried to arrest him. He got back to the trailer around 1:00 p.m., fell onto a couch, and turned on the television to watch the Cincinnati Bengals game. Bull was still on the mattress in the bedroom. He hadn’t moved. Nobody bothered to wake him.

The recounting of events was unsettling. Debbie rolled the hard plastic bottles in her palm, then gripped them tight. The white labels revealed the missing contents: ninety Valium; sixty oxycodone; ninety OxyContin, an extended-release form of oxycodone; and thirty Zestril tablets. She recognized the drugs. A sedative, painkillers, a blood-pressure medication. She knew the dangers of mixing them. She had attended too many funerals not to know.

She squinted at the labels more closely, the fine print displaying an eleven-digit code, as well as the names of a pharmacy she had frequented dozens of times and a doctor she had known for years. Dr. Donald Kiser had worked at the Wellness Center and the hospital emergency room in Williamson, the Mingo County seat, a twenty-minute drive from her home in Kermit. But he had written Bull’s prescription from his new office in Marietta, Ohio, three hours away. Nothing kept Kiser from practicing in Ohio, even though his lies had cost him his license in West Virginia. In late February 2005, Mingo County deputies had arrested Kiser and charged him with trading prescriptions for sex. The medical board rejected his request for a new license after Kiser marked no to a question about whether he had been charged with a crime during the past two years. Kiser alleged that Mingo authorities had trumped up allegations against him in retaliation for a lawsuit he had filed against them near the end of the previous year. That suit claimed Mingo deputies had falsely arrested him during a child custody dispute with his ex-wife. Debbie didn’t trust Mingo County authorities either. She didn’t discount that Kiser might have been railroaded. She had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The move to Ohio didn’t slow down Kiser’s business. His Mingo County clientele wouldn’t desert him. Every week or so, a van would pick up Bull and other passengers at stops along the two-lane and shuttle them north to Marietta. The fare was paid in pills—twenty for each prescription filled from each passenger. The drivers, in turn, sold the painkillers on the black market. Kiser arranged the shuttle service. Everyone made a lot of money.

Thirteen days before seeing Kiser, Bull had picked up a prescription for ninety hydrocodone pills for pain and sixty Xanax for anxiety at a recently opened pain clinic in Stonecoal, just north of Kermit, and he had receipts for another 120 hydrocodones and ninety Xanax prescribed there that month by a doctor who had never laid eyes on Bull. That, added to Kiser’s prescriptions, placed six hundred and thirty pills in his hands over the past forty-five days, or nearly three times the recommended dosage for a patient with severe pain—all dispensed by Sav-Rite Pharmacy, the lone drugstore in Kermit. He paid $558 in cash.

Bull’s last prescription was filled on September 29. He’d lumbered into the Sav-Rite on Lincoln Street, and the pharmacy’s owner was there that day. His name was on the storefront sign: JIM WOOLEY’S SAV-RITE PHARMACY. He was sixty-eight now, his beard bushy and white. Wooley was affable, friendly to his customers, always a smile on his face, a people person, a salesman. Bull’s prescription caught Wooley’s attention, but not because it was written by Dr. Kiser at a clinic 170 miles away in Marietta. Wooley not only knew Kiser, but he had recently loaned him $5,000, two days after Kiser was arrested at the pain clinic in Williamson. Everybody knew one another in Mingo County. Bloody Mingo, the locals called it—birthplace of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, the Matewan massacre, a place where mine owners and union workers settled disputes with rifles, but now a place where drug merchants were calling the shots. The pain-addled addicts didn’t stand a chance.

Wooley would claim at a deposition that he didn’t know about Kiser’s troubles with the Mingo County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and the West Virginia Board of Osteopathic Medicine. Nobody had told Wooley, and, no, he hadn’t read about it in the Williamson Daily News or Mountain Citizen, the newspaper published across the river in Kentucky. What gave Wooley pause about Bull’s prescriptions was the switch from hydrocodone to oxycodone. So he pulled Bull aside and counseled him, right there at the pharmacy, warned him about the change to a stronger painkiller, and not to take the extended and immediate release at the same time, and, whatever you do, don’t chew on the OxyContin. That was his advice. That was it.

Three days later, Bull was dead. He was forty-five. The autopsy report showed he died of oxycodone intoxication. He had five times the lethal limit for the drug in his blood. His death was ruled an accident. Four days before Christmas, the state’s investigation and postmortem for William H. Preece—Case No. WV 2005-1018—was officially closed.

Debbie took the empty prescription bottles home with her and secreted them in an upstairs dresser drawer for safekeeping. She wanted something to hold on to. Bull’s death wouldn’t be forgotten. He wouldn’t be another number, a statistic, in the overdose death toll. Somebody was going to pay, no matter the repercussions, no matter what her enemies and the scandalmongers might dredge up about the past. There would be a reckoning.

Several weeks after they lowered Bull into the ground, the phone rang at Debbie’s house. Dr. Kiser wanted to talk. It was urgent. Was he calling to offer his sympathies? No. He asked Debbie for a copy of Bull’s MRI, the one taken after the ladder fall. Could she send it? The doctor needed something to put in Bull’s empty patient file.

Some things about Bull’s death still troubled Debbie. The bloody clothing, for instance. Could someone have murdered her brother, then tried to cover up the crime by making it look like an overdose? Debbie hadn’t ruled that out. Stranger things had happened in Mingo County. She wanted an appointment to speak to the medical examiner. She wanted to know why the autopsy was taking so long. She kept calling the morgue.

“I want to look at the man who did the autopsy on my brother,” Debbie told the secretary who answered the phone.

After finally receiving a copy of the autopsy report, Debbie hopped in her car and headed north on the four-lane highway to the medical examiner’s office in Charleston. Corridor G, as the route was known, was built for trucks to haul coal out. Debbie wound her way through humps of mountains, their ridges glowing red, orange, and yellow with the change of season. She passed three prisons and two Walmarts during the hour-and-forty-five-minute trip. Her destination, a tan-painted building with barred windows, stood across the street from a NAPA Auto Parts store and the First Advent Christian Church. A receptionist directed Debbie and her questions to Dr. Zia Sabet, the chief deputy at the morgue, the man who conducted Bull’s autopsy. Had he kept blood and DNA samples? Yes. Were there any marks on the body? No. Could her brother have been killed? No marks, no bruises, nothing to suggest someone had attacked Bull, Sabet said. But what about the bloody clothing beside the mattress in the trailer? She had seen evidence photos taken by the sheriff. Sabet told her he did not have the clothing.

Debbie had questioned everything about her brother’s death. His Explorer had been taken for a joyride. Someone had stolen Bull’s gold necklace and the pills left in his prescription bottles after he died. Why did his so-called friends let Bull lie passed out in the trailer so long? Why did it take them so long to call the sheriff? She was told someone hid her brother’s pill bottles in a stack of cinder blocks while the ambulance made its way to the trailer. They later partied with Bull’s remaining pain medications, she heard.

“I suspicioned everything when those things were missing,” Debbie said.

“Your brother died of an overdose,” Sabet told her.

There was also the pill residue—and an empty bottle of Lortab that belonged to the trailer’s owner.

“My brother did not snort pills. When you crush them, that’s what you crush them for.”

“How do you know your brother didn’t do that?” Sabet asked.

“Because he told me he didn’t.”

And she believed Bull. He had always been a man of his word, hooked but honest.

After Bull’s funeral, Dr. Kiser was frantic. For weeks that autumn of 2005, he kept calling Debbie, asking whether her dead brother had ever had an MRI and offering to pay for the film. In fact, Bull did have one. It was in a big brown envelope stored upstairs beside the prescription bottles. But why on earth would the doctor need the scan? Kiser had an explanation: He admitted to Debbie that he had no justifiable reason for prescribing OxyContin to Bull, and the authorities—Kiser wouldn’t identify them by name or agency—were starting to ask questions about Bull’s death.

Debbie was helping to care for an elderly man on kidney dialysis, and she still thought Kiser was a respectable doctor. She would call him for instructions about what color of dialysis bag to administer based on the man’s blood work. Balancing the chemical levels wasn’t easy. She respected Kiser’s medical advice and appreciated his help. He didn’t ask for anything in return. Even when Debbie heard about the charges against Kiser in February 2005, the news didn’t change her opinion.

“They’re saying they’re going to indict me over your brother’s death,” Kiser told Debbie.

Kiser was hatching a cover-up for Bull’s death, and somehow he had convinced Debbie to take part. At first, Debbie thought she was doing the right thing. She wanted to help Kiser. He had always helped her. They kept talking on the phone, never in person. Then one Sunday in November 2005, Kiser’s girlfriend showed up at Debbie’s house. Debbie handed her the brown envelope with Bull’s MRI tucked inside. She never looked at it. She couldn’t remember where or when it had been taken—probably at the hospital emergency room in Louisa, after the mine accident.

And now that her brother was dead, she was giving it up, just like that, a willing accomplice. She watched Kiser’s girlfriend—Debbie’s former sister-in-law—drop the envelope in the trunk of her car, close the hood, and drive away to Kiser’s new office in Ohio.

Weeks later, Debbie started having second thoughts. Everyone knew Kiser was writing prescriptions for pain pills. Why else would vanloads of addicts travel three hours to see him? She was helping the doctor who had written the prescription that killed her brother. Had she lost her mind? Had she forgotten her promise? Finally, she picked up the phone and called the Mingo County sheriff and then the prosecutor.

“I’ve done something I probably shouldn’t have done,” she confessed.

About The Author

Photograph by Chris Dorst

Eric Eyre has been a newspaper 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.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Scribner (March 31, 2020)
  • Length: 304 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781982105310

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Raves and Reviews

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Investigative Reporters & Editors Book Award
.Winner

"Powerful . . . . [Eyre] writes with candor and gravity; a tensile rod of human decency braces every paragraph. . . . . [Death in Mud Lick] is the work of an author who understands that objectivity is not the same as bland neutrality. I expect it will be taught to aspiring reporters for many years to come. It's the story of an epidemic; it's also the story of a newspaper."
New York Times

“Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2017, for a revelatory series of articles on West Virginia’s opioid epidemic. His new book is a well-written account of that reporting. It’s a profoundly human document that also reads like a simmering John Grisham thriller. Eyre begins with the story of a single pharmacy in Kermit, W.Va., population 382. In just two years in the mid-aughts, it distributed nearly nine million opioid pain pills to customers. We meet some of those customers, and this story expands until it takes in corruption and greed on a gruesome scale.”
New York Times, Times Critics' Top Books of 2020

"Death in Mud Lick is a product of one reporter’s sustained outrage: a searing spotlight on the scope and human cost of corruption and negligence."
Washington Post

"At the Gazette-Mail, Eyre’s career has been the stuff of quiet legend ... Eyre served his community in a time of need. With his new book, he took the death of a coal miner, William (Bull) Preece, found dead in a trailer in Mud Lick amid a residue of crushed pills, and told the how and the why. His reporting led to restrictions on prescriptions, greater tracking, more transparency. He shamed an industry and saved lives. Working at a small newspaper, Eyre made a big difference."
—NewYorker.com

“[An] important new book . . . . “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. . . . [and] a real-life legal thriller that barrels along like a runaway coal truck on Horsepen Mountain. "
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Death in Mud Lick is full of sharp reporting and story-telling. But is also infused with the kind of compassion and moral outrage necessary to understand how a man-made disaster like this one happens."
Pittsburgh Current

"Eyre mined for the truth not with a hard hat or heavy machinery, but with notepads, pens and a doggedness to keep digging. Death in Mud Lick is for readers who root for the underdog, who want justice served and who love newspapers."
Roanoke Times

"Death in Mud Lick is an insistent narrative about one American town that became every American town not only because of addiction to drugs, but because the companies that pushed them became addicted to money."
LitHub

"Compellingly told ... a tale of compassionate people deeply wronged and a dogged journalist who won't stand for it."
Booklist, starred review

“Packed with colorful details and startling statistics, this page-turning journalistic thriller shines a brilliant spotlight on a national tragedy.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Timely and well documented, with appeal to a broad range of readers.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Disturbing, moving, and heart-wrenching…”
Kirkus Reviews

"Compelling and terrifying... In many ways [Death in Mud Lick is] as interesting as a John Grisham courtroom thriller, featuring an extended series of legal actions, the requisite heroes and villains, and personal problems that add to the drama."
The Daily Beast

"How did they get away with it for so long — the corrupt drug manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and physicians who flooded the most vulnerable communities in America with highly addictive pain pills, raking in billions of dollars even as thousands died from overdoses? Read Death in Mud Lick and understand. It is a stunning story, and Eric Eyre tells it with compassion, grit, deep knowledge and the 'sustained outrage' (as he puts it) that is the rocket fuel of great journalism."
—Dan Fagin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Toms River

"Death in Mud Lick is simultaneously a gripping account of the corporate interests who started the opioid epidemic and a vivid illustration of the power of scrappy, relentless, investigative journalism. Eric Eyre is not just a great West Virginian; he’s a national treasure."
—Keith Humphreys, former White House drug policy adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama

"Eric Eyre represents the absolute best of newspaper reporting: He’s dogged, fair, and as scrappy as the mountains he calls home. His book, Death in Mud Lick, is a riveting, intimate look at the corporate greed, regulatory failure and lobbying shenanigans that led to pill mills complete with “courtesy snacks” and cash registers so full they wouldn’t close. In the most opioid-ravaged place in America, Eyre makes you see the opioid crisis anew."
—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America

"I thought I knew about the roots of the opioid crisis in rural Appalachia. Then, I read this book with my mouth agape. The larger-than-life characters, the vivid scenes, so many deaths, and so much money made from an alliance of local crooks and global corporations. With searing storytelling and deep investigative reporting, Eric Eyre has written an indispensable book that you won't be able to put down."
—Anna Sale, host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money and author of Let's Talk About Hard Things

"In his newspaper work, Eric Eyre performed a historic public service, with his pioneering coverage of America's opioid disaster. In this book, he converts that achievement into a riveting drama of crime, collusion, coverup — and then unveiling, by a reporter and a news organization that refused to give up. Death in Mud Lick attaches names, stories, and vivid characters to the major public-health story of our times."
—James Fallows, author of Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

Eric Eyre blows the lid off the corporate malfeasance and institutional greed that created the greatest public health crisis in a generation. Death in Mud Lick raises the curtain on the players, tactics, and corruption that continues to rip our communities apart. A uniquely American tale and heartbreaking account that will leave every reader certain on how we got into this nightmare otherwise known as the opioid crisis."
—Ryan Hampton, nationally recognized recovery activist and author of American Fix: Inside the Opioid Addiction Crisis and How to End It

"At a time when real journalism is under attack, Death in Mud Lick stands as a clenched fist of rebuke. Eyre and the scrappy Charleston Gazette-Mail exposed the hellacious mendacity and moral criminality of America’s biggest businesses and richest executives, and the hack politicians and lobbyists who enabled them to exploit some the most vulnerable people in this country and then leave them to die. Eyre’s book is a thrilling recounting of how it all went down in the tradition of Call Northside 777 and Spotlight."
—Brian Alexander, author of Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

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