Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic by Eric Eyre (review)

While the opioid epidemic has raged across the nation, attentions lately have turned to Appalachia, where the people of the region have been hardest hit with the issue. Eric Eyre, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Investigating Reporting, weaves the tale of the battle those in southern West Virginia waged against the source of the epidemic itself. Death in Mud Lick, the culmination of nearly fifteen years of Eyre's reporting for the Charleston Gazette newspaper in Charleston, West Virginia, brings to light the full story of the state's battle against the pharmaceutical distributors of name brand drugs like Oxycontin, Lortab, and other potent opioid drugs that ravaged the people of the region. This battle, Eyre says, "set up a collision course with three of America's largest corporations" (xiv).

In a journalistic-driven narrative, Eyre begins his work with the story of one victim of the opioid epidemic. When Debbie Preece finds her brother William "Bull" Preece's cause of death was actually side effects of opioids, she sets out on a mission to bring to light the terrible truth of the reality concerning prescription drugs in southern West Virginia. From small-town lawyers to rural local judges to corrupt politicians, Death in Mud Lick elucidates the exact ways the wicked web of deceit allowed drug distributors to send millions of pills to small towns throughout the coalfields of West Virginia. Catching the attention of the national spotlight, Eyre's initial reporting highlighted the fact that distributors "shipped 20.8 million prescription opioids to two pharmacies four blocks apart in Williamson" located in Mingo County, which "had one of the highest overdose death rates in the nation" (xiii). Fighting corruption at the local level with a state attorney general too involved with drug companies and taking the issue to the federal level, the state of West Virginia ultimately won the battle. While not completely admitting fault in their role concerning the opioid epidemic, the drug distributors eventually settled the issue, making the state one of the first to win against such a powerful network of businesses.

At a time when other narratives of Appalachia—those blaming the ravishes of the drug epidemic on the people or the region themselves—Eric Eyre's excellent work focuses the issue back to the true root causes. Historical narratives have illuminated the ways in which corrupt politics have been part of the equation, leading to Appalachia lagging behind the rest of the nation in several arenas. Eyre's tale adds to that history, elucidating ways in which political corruption is still active today, focusing on West Virginia attorney general Morrisey's office and their attempts to play it soft against the drug distributors, as well as the lack of oversight from state and federal agencies, which allowed the distributors to line their pockets with profits from the misery in southern West Virginia caused by these prescription pain killers. While other recent popular works expound the tired trope of lazy people from the region who would rather receive government handouts and continue destroying themselves with drugs, Eyre's story refutes this false narrative, showing the ways in which locals fought for addicts' rights while standing up for the state and region through the courts, hitting these Fortune 500 companies where it hurt most: their bottom line. While the history of this story is still to be written, Death in Mud Lick joins other journalistic works such as Dopesick, Dreamland, and American Pain, which work together to bring to light the true horrors the drug epidemic has reeked upon our nation and the Appalachian region especially.