Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre

Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre

A New York Times Critics' Top Ten Book of the Year * Edgar Award Winner Best Fact Crime * A LitHub Best Book of the Year

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a "powerful" (The New York Times), urgent, and heartbreaking true crime account of the opioid epidemic and the corporate greed that pumped millions of pain pills into small Appalachian towns, decimating communities.

In a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, 12 million opioid pain pills were distributed in just three years to a town with a population of 382 people. One woman, after losing her brother to overdose, was desperate for justice. 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 product of one reporter's sustained outrage [and] a searing spotlight on the scope and human cost of corruption and negligence" (The Washington Post) 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.

Eyre, Eric: - 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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781982105310
ISBN 10	1982105313
Title	Death in Mud Lick
Author	Eric Eyre
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Scribner Book Company
Year published	2020-03-31
Number of pages	304
Prizes	Winner of Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Fact Crime) 2021
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.