Eric Eyre on Corporate Pill Pushers

Dec 5, 2020

An Appalachian coal town of under 400 with a tiny drugstore making so much money selling opioids that the owner served popcorn to the throngs waiting in long lines for their pills. What happened in Kermit, West Virginia is a story of America’s poor being exploited for profit by corporations headquartered hundreds of miles away. Eric Eyre's Pulitizer Prize winning reporting opened the country’s eyes to an epidemic that has taken nearly a million lives. 

Eyre has written a book but the original work for was for a small-town paper in Charleston, West Virginia — the kind dwindling from the media landscape as big media companies take over. His work is a triumph of the kind of investigative journalism that often comes from local papers but sadly, we are seeing the end of an era.