Posted on 07/11/2018 10:41:07 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Reliably red on the political map, Huntington is a West Virginia town with a 191-year-old university, a storied football team and more than 100 churches.
It’s where Will Lockwood graduated from high school. It’s where he enrolled at Marshall University.
It’s where he first tried OxyContin.
By the time Lockwood entered Marshall as a freshman, Detroit dealers were trickling into Huntington selling OxyContin and pills with OxyContin’s active ingredient, oxycodone.
Even though Lockwood could step out his front door and get the drug, Detroit street dealers weren’t the preferred supplier.
Florida was.
It may be 1,000 miles away, but to Lockwood, getting OxyContin and oxycodone from Florida’s loosely regulated pain clinics “was legal, in a sense.”
Twice a month, different “crews” from the tiny town crowded into vans and headed south, where Palm Beach and Broward counties were home to hundreds of pill mills — clinics where anyone with a fake ache and hard cash could walk out with pills and prescriptions.
After hitting a string of clinics, the Huntington crews drove back with “around 500 to 600 pills per person,” said Lockwood.
But it wasn’t just a few hundred pills. It was tens of thousands.
And it wasn’t just Huntington.
The West Virginia vans were part of a nationwide caravan heading to South Florida. Cars bearing tags from Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia and Ohio crowded into one clinic parking lot after another, loading up on pills and prescriptions.
News stories and law enforcement focused on those “parking lot” states in Appalachia, where dealers and addicts with a tank of gas or a cheap plane ticket traveled the “Oxy Express” to Palm Beach and Broward.
But Florida’s pill pipeline reached far beyond those roadways....
(Excerpt) Read more at metrowestdailynews.com ...
this is why we need smaller governments..
because the govt will not guard the public tax dollar...
they fritter away billions to illegal immigrants, to welfare cheats, to tort lawyers, to Florida drug mills...
regular working Americans our being scalped and the govt just doesn't care...
Damn snowbirds...
Government agencies always tell congress that prosecuting or otherwise reining in waste, fraud, and program abuse would be cost prohibitive due to attorney fees and lost man-hours due to assigning vast numbers of government personnel to enforcement efforts where the database of offenders is massive. The IRS uses this argument to perpetrate the continued theft of social security numbers by illegal aliens, refusing to prosecute even when it is presented with conclusive evidence of the dollars lost paying out fraudulent refunds, arguing it is cheaper to just pay the criminals the money than it would be to prosecute them. These refusals to enforce standing law are pure excursions into Orwellian dyslogic and are seditious in the extreme, justifying illegality on the basis of a cost/ benefit analysis.
Oxy has always been there for people who had a vice. Rush, a admitted addict, was abusing oxy 15 years ago in Florida.
Huntington is Communist ?
As long as campaign financing is the conduit of graft and bribery things aren’t going to change.
[WSAZ News Staff] UPDATE: 5 arrested in Huntington drug raid --The following five suspects are facing these state charges/warrants:
Something that puzzles me with this new drug epidemic is why Appalachia? I get big cities and larger urban areas having drug problems but it seems to me this area has been deliberately targeted for drug saturation. I mean, drug dealers from Detroit going to the mountains?? Seriously??
I am a West Virginia native and I can tell you that the depth of hopelessness in this beautiful state is rarely equaled.
“Hillbilly Elegy”.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079L5DDB4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Some old stoonts there
I read several, several years ago that when mail order pharmacies became popular UPS had to add a large number of trucks in the Appalachia area just to deliver pain medication. This is nothing new.
Two words: Marco Rubio.
He put very personal politics above anything else.
As for Scott and the rest, I wish them all luck in Nowember; they’re going to need it.
“I am a West Virginia native and I can tell you that the depth of hopelessness in this beautiful state is rarely equaled.”
Obama damn near killed the coal industry.
“Something that puzzles me with this new drug epidemic is why Appalachia? I get big cities and larger urban areas having drug problems but it seems to me this area has been deliberately targeted for drug saturation. I mean, drug dealers from Detroit going to the mountains?? Seriously??”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Born and raised in Appalachia (Eastern Kentucky) - my people settled there in the early 1800’s and there still are some living by the creek where they settled back then. My parents, grandparents, etc - grew up dirt poor, but they were fiercely independent and proud.
I definitely think Appalachia has been targeted (like the blacks) by SOB politicians, as a group that can be torn down and then built back up to be dependent on the gov’t. LBJ said he’d get the ******* voting Democrat for two hundred years.
As bad as things have been here - Barack Obama damn near finished it off.... destroying the coal industry and the multitude of industry and businesses that proliferated from it. Coal miners made good money and then Obama closed it down. Terrible times ensued - and that’s when I noticed the influx of the drugs - BIG time!
Trump came and promised to bring their jobs back. That was music to our ears as most all politicians before only promised handouts and dependence...... and they did it for the votes. Just another targeted group that was vulnerable to being bought off.
I think Obama attacked Appalachia with a vengence, because we are the epitome of Bible clingers and gun toters.
We had a business in Huntington, West Virginia. I can tell you that the drug woes are very real - horrifically real - the situation is critical!
Thank God for President Donald J. Trump - you go Mr. President!!!!
Amen! I thank God for Trump on a daily basis!
I spent a lot of time in the mountains of NC and Gatlinburg, TN as a child. I always loved the people and the area. I finally got my husband, an Expat from England, to travel to Western NC and Tennessee in the past couple of years. He now loves the area and people as much as I do- we are considering retiring to that area in the next 10 years. One of the reasons we like it so much is the people and their independent spirit. Where we currently live we have been inundated for years with the liberal mantra “everything about America was built off the black man” its nice to go somewhere where this argument doesn’t hold water. I honestly think that’s one reason Obama hated that area so much because Appalachia blows that idea out of the water. And I do believe you are right- Obama targeted this area because of the quality of the people and tried to beat them down to submission to the almighty government. People of Appalachia defy the liberal belief system every second of every day and I pray those suffering from drug addiction can find the strength they need to beat it.
Do you have any ideas on how to combat this??
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