At the half-dozen or so pain clinics in this Appalachian county along the banks of the Ohio River, a handful of licensed doctors pump out prescriptions for an estimated 35 million pain pills a year to an ever-mushrooming population of pill-crazed patients who come from near and far just to cop.
Do the math, and it comes to roughly 460 pills for every man, woman and child in this county of 76,000 residents, according to 2008 state pharmacy board statistics.
It's gotten so bad that last year the local health commissioner declared a public health emergency, a rare step usually reserved for disease outbreaks.
Lisa Roberts, a city of Portsmouth public-health nurse on the front lines of the epidemic, says locals call it the "attack of the pill heads." She says a "pharmaceutical atom bomb" has brought the county to the verge of complete social collapse.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
OxyContin epidemic brings Southern Ohio county to its knees | cleveland.com
via cleveland.com
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