Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,20

out an ad they planned to place in the local newspaper, a full-page “open letter” to the people of Lee County. In it, the company contended that Purdue had not targeted its marketing to areas like Appalachia with high disability or Medicaid rates, nor had the company known of the drug’s abuse potential. Purdue Pharma also disputed suggestions that it could quickly or easily reformulate the drug.

The parent meeting had been a setup. Whereas Van Zee thought the company might finally be willing to make some compromises—“Art…really thought Purdue would feel some empathy” toward the banker, Sue Ella recalled—it was plain now that was not the case. The meeting had been brokered to shove the ad down the group’s throat.

Sue Ella blew up, telling Haddox: “You have done more to hurt Appalachia than the coal industry has ever thought about doing.”

Haddox said he resented the implication, and Sue Ella said she didn’t give a damn if he did. “I said, ‘Look, I’m an Appalachian scholar, and my family goes back here forever, and I take tremendous insult,’” she recalled.

She stormed out with the others, and the newspaper ad never ran.

*

The next day Friedman gathered with Richard Stallard and other law enforcement officers at Kathy’s Country Kitchen in the Lee County seat. Sister Beth Davies, the pluckiest of the three nuns who had answered the War on Poverty call, was in attendance.

So was pharmacist Greg Stewart, a miner’s son whose parents had personally helped build the St. Charles clinic. When Stewart filled OxyContin prescriptions, he begged his customers to lock their medication up. He’d already been the victim of two robbery attempts, including one by the son of a neighboring hair-salon owner who crawled in through the ceiling vents connecting the salon to Stewart’s store.

When Purdue Pharma offered to put $100,000 toward expanding the county’s drug treatment and law enforcement efforts, Stewart said he was inclined to accept the donation as partial payback, considering the fortune the company was making off the area’s misery. Van Zee and Sue Ella agreed, and even drafted a letter of acceptance after the meeting. Sue Ella explained that she was initially for accepting the money “because of my experience with the coal companies taking and taking and taking, and all the companies, they sit up north with their inherited wealth and leave nothing behind except broken bodies.”

But Sister Beth, the five-foot-tall redheaded nun, was having none of it. The executives might be able to intimidate the people up north, where their philanthropy held sway in places like Harvard and Manhattan. But Beth was a formidable New Yorker herself, with a master’s from Columbia. More important, she’d grown up under the tutelage of high-powered nuns who ran hospitals and colleges with a firm hand but a fair eye, and a mother who read a book every day.

A Staten Island native, Sister Beth had worked in Stamford, Connecticut, Purdue’s hometown, where she ran a Catholic school before moving to Appalachia in 1971. A former student of hers from Connecticut had recently called to apologize, in fact; he was a reporter at the Stamford newspaper, which had been strongly encouraged not to write anything critical of the company, she said.

In 1996, the same year OxyContin was introduced, Sister Beth had stood up to a crowd of sixty coal miners and executives and their lawyers—all men—to demand the Lone Mountain coal company make reparations for the havoc caused by one of its faulty coal-slurry ponds. A liner had burst, sending wastewater screaming through the village of St. Charles. The water unloosed a boulder that rammed a resident’s house, flooded other homes, scattered coal waste and litter for miles along the Powell River—endangering fish and mussel beds—and generally scared people half to death.

That event pitted company miners from other camps (forced to defend the company or lose their pay for the day) against local miners whose community had been devastated by the flood. Lone Mountain’s defense, as articulated by one of the outsider miners: The town was already full of litter and “Pamper trees”; therefore, the flooding was simply another “act of nature” unleashed on an already diaper-scarred landscape.

Health care administrator Tony Lawson remembered the way Sister Beth stood up in that meeting—“this tiny little thin woman who was so angry the paper she was holding with her statement shook in her hands. But she spoke loud and clear to all those men in that audience. She was absolutely the most fearless, bravest person I’ve ever seen.”

The executives glared, and