In 1983, Ned Chilton, the gruff and tenacious publisher of West Virginia’s leading newspaper, The Charleston Gazette, gave a speech at the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association convention in Memphis. This was shortly after the founding of USA Today, with its tiny articles and bouncy castle graphics. Chilton told his peers that too many newspapers display only “spurts of indignation.” What’s needed, he said, is “sustained outrage over basic injustices.”
The speech made ripples in the journalism world. My evidence for this is anecdotal: When I started my first newspaper job several years later, at a Vermont biweekly, the editor handed me a copy of the speech along with my welcome packet.
Chilton’s phrase — “sustained outrage” — has become the unofficial motto of Charleston’s paper, now called The Charleston Gazette-Mail. The paper, like most others, has struggled in recent years. But a powerful new book, “Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic,” by one of its reporters, Eric Eyre, is evidence that Chilton’s spirit still prevails there.
(Or perhaps it did prevail there. I learned after turning in a first draft of this review that Eyre left the paper last week, not long after the gifted coal industry reporter Ken Ward Jr.)
Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2017, for a revelatory series of articles on West Virginia’s opioid epidemic. Not all books by winners of the investigative reporting prize are irresistible. Some winners are vastly better at reporting than writing. They’re like serious birds that are nonetheless flightless.
Eyre finds a tone for his story. He writes with candor and gravity; a tensile rod of human decency braces every paragraph. He attached himself to this story the way a human fly attaches to a skyscraper, and he refused to let go.
Eyre’s coup was exposing, in exact numbers, the volume of opioid shipments to West Virginia, but he organizes his book as a simmering thriller, in which villain after villain is introduced. I was put in mind of a line from Norman Mailer in “The Executioner’s Song”: “If you jacked up an old plaster ceiling, you couldn’t have more fast-developing cracks in a situation.”
Eyre begins with the story of a single pharmacy in Kermit, W.Va., population 382. In just two years in the mid-aughts, the Sav-Rite distributed nearly nine million opioid pain pills to its customers. People drove hundreds of miles to get there, passing dozens of other pharmacies on the way. Lines were so long that the pharmacy’s owner sold popcorn and hot dogs to people in the drive-through lane.
One woman started the pushback against the pill dumping. After her brother’s overdose from opioids, Debbie Preece began asking questions about Sav-Rite. She got help from a sympathetic lawyer, and later from Eyre, who drove through the state’s towns and hollows in his Honda Civic.
As the book moves forward, Preece learns she has cancer and plays a smaller role. Eyre learns he has Parkinson’s disease. The accounts of his tremors and other symptoms form a kind of shadow narrative to the main one.
Eyre charts the human toll of opioid addiction. The path to dependence, he writes, “often started with a car wreck or a mine accident, and a referral by workers’ comp to a rehab center or pain clinic, places with names such as the Wellness Center and Mountain Medical and Aquatic Rehabilitation.” People “complained of bad backs, torn shoulders and busted knees, and they found doctors and nurses to write prescriptions for hundreds of pain pills and, for good measure, anti-anxiety medication to help take the edge off. It sure did. And before they knew it, they were hooked.”
Pharmacies in West Virginia filled more prescriptions per capita than any other state. “Overdose death rates had quadrupled,” Eyre writes. “The drug crisis was costing the state $430 million a year — babies born addicted, families destroyed, skyrocketing jail bills, hospital emergency rooms overrun.”
This book quickly moves past greed-addled pharmacists and doctors to take aim at bigger fish, notably drug distributors like Cardinal Health, which sent more pain pills into West Virginia than any other company.
Eyre calls the addiction crisis “a man-made disaster fueled by corporate greed and corruption.” Cardinal “saturated the state with hydrocodone and oxycodone — a combined 240 million pills between 2007 and 2012. That amounted to 130 pain pills for every resident.” He writes: “The coal barons no longer ruled Appalachia. Now it was the painkiller profiteers.”
In a book with many villains, one stands out: Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia’s Trump-loving, trash-tweeting, non-loyalist-purging attorney general. Eyre recounts how Morrisey tried to derail his investigation into Cardinal Health, and meddled with an important lawsuit against the company. This was while Morrisey’s wife was lobbying for Cardinal and he had his own ties to the company.
“Death in Mud Lick” is meat and potatoes journalism in a light, sensible broth. There are lawsuits and court fights and public records requests; there is also skulduggery and a mysterious manila envelope dropped into a mailbox. There is unexpungeable grief. It’s 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. There’s one heartbreaking detail after another about the slow collapse of two once-vital Charleston newspapers into the now-skeletal remains of the Gazette-Mail.
Writing in The New Yorker last year, Jill Lepore used the language of battered compulsion to describe journalism today. She wrote that the field is “addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless.”
“Death in Mud Lick” demonstrates why local journalism matters, more than ever. To palliate its burden, it needs readers and subscribers.
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