Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

Today’s Nonfiction post is on Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic by Eric Eyre. It is 288 pages long including notes and is published by Scribner. The cover has a picture of a small town on it. The intended reader is someone who is interested in true crime and corruption. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- An investigation into the corporate and governmental 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.

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. 

Review- An interesting journalist account of an investigation into small town deaths and big time corruption. Eyre was a journalist for a local newspaper when he was contacted by a lawyer he knew about some odd deaths. In the small town of Kermit, VW there were very high numbers of overdose deaths. Through the lawyer, Eyre gets in contact with a sister of one of the overdoses. Then he starts to put together some very odd information about the drugs being shipped into the town and how much.  This was an eye opening book about corporate greed and the true human cost of it. At times while reading this book, my jaw literally dropped in shock of the number of pills in the community and the brass of the corporations in how they blamed others for their greed. If you want an intensive look into the opioid crisis in one small town, then you need to read this book. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.