Team Pillbillies, FTW

Oxycontin in various forms ready for ingestion. Photo by 51fifty, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

I was wrong.

I thought I’d heard every West Virginia joke there is.

There is of course the fact that we hillbillies invented the toothbrush, evidenced by the fact that had anyone else invented it the branding would have been teethbrush.

There’s the dead give away of matrimonial bliss, which is shown by the fact that the spit tobacco stains are down both sides of the truck.

Of course, there is the long running debate about whether if you get divorced, are  you still cousins, or if your parents divorce are they still brother and sister?

Understand, we only go to movies in the mountain state in groups larger than 18, since 17 and under are not admitted to those grown up moving picture shows.

Oh, and of course there is also the concern if the state library burned down how would they replace both books.

I’ve heard them all. I’ve had them all slung at me at one time or another. I’ve even told most of them myself, in one form or another. From the cringey to the eyerolling to the downright offensive, West Virginia has been the butt of the joke for as long as there has been a West Virginia.

You will never understand the amazing display when, as a recruit at basic training during initial issue, Staff Sergeant Perez called the entire room to attention to mark the occasion of me and one other West Virginian “getting our first ever pair of shoes.” Proud moment for me and my family, you see. A family that has been on the land I left to enlist since before there was a West Virginia. Or a Virginia. Or an America for that matter. I wonder if the Native Americans that kept my distant forebearer Ned captive before he escaped and spent weeks in the wilderness returning to the Gauley River Valley in pre-revolution America told hillbilly jokes…

Bring your jokes, I thought. I’ve heard them all, I assumed. None can bother me, I arrogantly thought.

You know the saying about what assuming makes you. Here I stand one, after this:

At the height of West Virginia’s opioid epidemic, executives at a leading drug distributor exchanged emails making light of the crisis.

The emails were put forth by Cabell County attorney Paul Farrell Jr. during trial at U.S. District Court in Charleston. The trial pits the county and the city of Huntington against the nation’s three largest drug distributors, who they argue fueled the overdose crisis.

In one, shared on Thursday, AmerisourceBergen executive Chris Zimmerman shared a lyrical parody of the theme song for “The Beverly Hillbillies,” making fun of “a poor mountaineer” who purchased pills at a “cash ‘n carry” pain clinic.

Another was titled “OxyContinVille” and included a parody of a Jimmy Buffett song that described driving from Kentucky to buy pills.

In a third email, a member of Zimmerman’s team wrote, “One of the hillbilly’s must have learned how to read :-)” in response to an email detailing Kentucky’s new opioid regulations.

Zimmerman apologized in court for the contents of some of the emails, including the use of the term “pillbillies,” which he said referred to drug dealers, not patients.

“I shouldn’t have sent the email,” he said, but added that he took the attacks upon his credibility “personally.” He said the documents were cherry-picked out of context and defended the corporate culture at AmerisourceBergen, one of the three opioid distributors on trial in Charleston, and said it was of the “highest caliber.”

But Farrell disagreed. “It is a pattern of conduct by those people charged with protecting our community — and they’re circulating emails disparaging hillbillies,” said Farrell.

Who exactly did Jackass McGee here think the drug dealers were selling the pills to? I’m just tickled pink he feels the need to defend the corporate culture of his multi-billion dollar company at the expense of joking about my culture. But that’s fine, we’re used to it. We are the state that when you win $3 million in the lottery, they send you $3 a year for a million years, after all.

It’s all just jokes. Just funnies. Just them dumb hillbillies. Not the type of folks in fancy offices with suits that cost as much as few months of mortgage payments on the double wide. No need for the distressed and dying to be known as anything other than jokes in memos and line items on the P&L spreadsheets.

Legally and in the grand scheme of things, the insults in inboxes are not a big deal. It’s an emotional point of order rather than a legal one. This is a trial, after all, and it’s a small piece of the much bigger picture: of an industry that flooded enough pills into West Virginia that if the residents took a thousand each they couldn’t consume them all in a decade or longer. The three companies on trial, AmerisourceBergen Corp, McKesson Corp, and Cardinal Health Inc, insist that they are not to blame. The doctors are. The Pharmacies are. And especially responsible are those darn rapscallion pillbillies.

“We are a mirror on what happens in healthcare,” Enu Mainigi, a lawyer for Cardinal, said Monday. “We reflect it, we don’t drive it.”

They were just following orders, of course. The doctors give orders and the FDA sets quotas and we just follow the orders, you see. When it comes to accepting blame, there is no joking about. “We reflect it, we don’t drive it” is something I’m sure those companies’ investors and stockholders are thrilled to hear. I doubt they find it funny either.

Just look at the reflection of those pillbillies in the unimpeachable executives:

Following further questioning of Zimmerman, U.S. District Judge David Faber denied the introduction of more emails exchanged between members of his team, despite acknowledging that they revealed insight into attitudes within the company at the time.

In 2011, after Florida passed legislation to crack down on pill mills, Zimmerman sent a team-wide email joking that the “Pillbillies” would head north to Georgia and Alabama instead. Later, a corporate investigator forwarded an email titled “Oxycontin for kids” with a picture of a Kellogg’s cereal box altered to read “SMACK.” “You’re just a barrel of laughs today,” responded a coworker.

But it’s just pillbillies. So who cares, right?

Well, we do. We who have friends, loved ones, sometimes even ourselves who struggle, and strive, and sometimes fail and die. Even in the darkness brought about by the opioid crisis there are small sprouts of light. And those glimmers are not from outside. I hope Cabell County and the City of Huntington — where I’ve lived and worked before and know first hand the hammer blow addiction has landed on the tri-state area — get every dime possible from AmerisourceBergen Corp, McKesson Corp, and Cardinal Health Inc.

But it won’t be millions in judgement funds that fixes this. It won’t be a federal court or a billion dollar company with product to move at the cost of lives they deem worthless except as a joke and profit. Those pillbillies and their loved ones, friends, and neighbors will dig their own way out from under. They’ll survive the opioid crisis like they have the mines closing, the demographic shifts, the Civil War, the slow bleeding demographic death that has made the West Virginia strand of the hillbilly subspecies an endangered one, and a million other things.

We will scrub off the dark and wickedness of the opioid crisis with guts, and grit, and our bare hands, and our toothbrushes if we have to. And folks will probably make jokes about that too, pillbillies trying to better themselves. But we will get it done in the end.

And the drug companies and anyone else that won’t help can go to hell. Laughing or otherwise.