Drug manufacturers sold more than 5 million oxycodone and hydrocodone pills to pharmacies in Lamoille County between 2006 and 2012, data from a Washington Post study shows.
More than half those pills wound up in one store in Morrisville, Kinney Drugs.
Greg Tatro of Johnson, a Cambridge businessman, thinks one of those 5 million pills might have been the one that got his daughter Jenna hooked on opioids.
Jenna died in February of a fentanyl overdose, after years of struggling with opioid addiction. She would have turned 27 this coming Saturday.
“We feel like if those pharmaceutical companies weren't pushing those drugs so hard that maybe my daughter wouldn't have ever got those drugs,” Tatro said this week. “You know? And then her life could have been just like you and me. Right?”
The Post’s research
The Washington Post acquired a mammoth database from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency that tracks every pain pill sold in the United States and published its findings on July 16, updating the data last week.
The paper went through 380 million transactions detailed in the DEA’s database between 2006 and 2012. The data released by The Post includes only oxycodone and hydrocodone pills, which it says account for three-quarters of the total opioid pill shipments to pharmacies.
“These records provide an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths during the seven-year time frame ending in 2012,” The Post wrote.
The Post made its findings available for every county in the nation “to help the public understand the impact of years of prescription pill shipments on their communities.”
Millions of pills in small towns
Pharmaceutical manufacturers shipped a total of 5,114,370 pills to Lamoille County pharmacies between 2006 and 2012.
In sheer numbers, the majority of pain pills dispensed in Lamoille County between 2006 and 2012 were at pharmacies in Morristown.
The Morrisville Kinney Drugs bought 2,693,360 pills in the six-year period The Post’s database covers.
Rite-Aid in Morrisville had 1,120,750 pills hit its shelves. And drug manufacturers shipped Hannaford Supermarket’s pharmacy 898,430 pills.
Stowe and Johnson no longer have pharmacies, but they did during the six-year span covered by the Post. Heritage Drugs in Stowe went through 388,130 pills and the Johnson pharmacy — which had two owners, Health Aid Inc. and Kinney Drugs — had 13,700 pills.
Kinney Drugs, which has 22 stores in Vermont, is owned by KPH Healthcare Services, Inc., based in Syracuse. Attempts to reach someone in media relations at KPH were unsuccessful as of press time, but the Kinney division has an entire section of its website set aside titled “Opioid Crisis: Prevention Through Education.”
According to the site, “At Kinney Drugs it is a top priority to take an active role in combatting the opioid epidemic. We do many things that are not necessarily visible to our patients and customers that prevent opioids from getting into the wrong hands while maintaining access to needed opioids for patients with legitimate prescriptions.”
Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux said the pharmacies “are very, very good” in combatting the opioid crisis, and he praised Kinney for also taking a stand in deciding to no longer sell vaping devices like Juul. He said CVS has been key in securing enough Narcan, the opioid reversal drug, so first responders can have it on hand — and they use a lot of it these days.
Marcoux added that pharmacies are only buying what they are instructed by doctors. He is also watching to see if new laws limiting the number of pills doctors prescribe make a dent.
“At the end of the day, though, you can’t blame the pharmacies,” he said. “They can’t do anything without a script.”
Take them back
Jamie Van Vught is the pharmacist at Kinney Drugs in Waitsfield — she started working at the store in 2012, the year Kinney took over and the year after she graduated from school, and the last year of The Washington Post’s data. In Waitsfield, 611,970 pills were sold to the pharmacy in those six years.
Van Vught said she has seen the peak and the decline of prescribed opioids. The number has gone down in recent years, after more attention was given to the opioid crisis and after new laws were enacted limiting the number of pills doctors could prescribe.
“It’s slowly going in the right direction,” Van Vught said. “The numbers aren’t quite where they should be yet, but they are definitely going down.”
She said Kinney has made significant efforts to get unused prescription medication back from the public. The drugstore is a key participant in the twice-yearly Drug Takeback Day, organized nationally and statewide by law enforcement officials.
In some occasions, Kinney stores even outpaced the haul by local police departments — for instance, in Lamoille County, the Morrisville store collected 78 pounds of drugs in the April takeback, three times as much as collected by the Stowe Police Department.
Van Vught said the Kinney Drugs stores in Waitsfield and Waterbury have a drug takeback box right in the store entryway. She said she frequently hears the door open and close without any customer actually coming into the store.
Every month and a half, she sends out a full box of unused prescriptions — not just opioids, but all manner of drugs.
“Twice a year is really nice,” she said of the takeback days. “But you can have people stockpile their drugs.”
Marcoux is one of Vermont’s key organizers in the drug takeback; he’s also a former DEA agent. He was surprised by The Washington Post’s numbers, but also not that surprised.
He noted that if you take the number of pills that came to Vermont pharmacies and divide it by the population, the sheer number of pills is mind-boggling.
For instance, Lamoille County’s population is about 25,500. That means that pharmacies dispensed enough pills to provide 200 oxycodone or hydrocodone pills to every resident in the county during that six-year period.
Of course, Marcoux pointed out, nowhere near the entire population of the county was prescribed opioids.
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