Here’s exactly how many pain pills pharmacies across SC doled out
Enough pain pills were distributed in Columbia from 2006 to 2012 that every resident of the city could have been given more than 56 pills per year, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data recently made public by The Washington Post.
That’s a little more than one pill for every man, woman and child each week, based on the city’s 2012 population.
Though not the S.C. city with the highest prescription rate, Columbia saw more than 51.6 million doses of pain pills — specifically, the highly addictive opioids, oxycodone and hydrocodone — flow from pharmacies within the municipality, according to the data.
Only in Greenville, North Charleston and Spartanburg were more pain pills distributed than in Columbia.
The Washington Post released the DEA data earlier this week, highlighting the flow of opioids across the country.
According to the newspaper’s analysis, Charleston County had one of the highest concentrations of pain pills in the United States. This was due in part to the massive flow of prescription pills through a Veterans Affairs Department retail pharmacy in North Charleston that distributed more than half a billion doses from 2006 to 2012. Those pills likely did not flow to Charleston County residents alone, but to patients regionally.
Additionally, The Post found that, overall in South Carolina, an average of 58 pills per person per year were prescribed from 2006 to 2012, ranking behind West Virginia and Kentucky only.
The DEA data, released publicly for the first time last week by The Post, gives insight into the flow of opioids in the build up to states recognizing opioid addiction as a crisis.
In 2017, S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster called a summit of national and state leaders in health care, state government and law enforcement to discuss possible solutions.
South Carolina overdose deaths increased substantially from 2014 to 2017, according to data from the S.C. Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services.
In 2014, 508 South Carolinians died from opioid overdoses, but just a few years later in 2017, that number increased to 748. Richland County saw 71 of those deaths.
Though Columbia fell below the state average for pills per year per person, several S.C. counties saw massive amounts of pills flow through their pharmacies.
For example, in Darlington County, enough pain pills were distributed from 2006 to 2012 for every 2012 resident to get 84.6 pills per year.
In Oconee County, each resident, based on 2012 population totals, could have been given 77 pills each year given the supply flowing through the county’s pharmacies.
The high dosage ratio in Oconee County, whose population was just above 74,000 in 2012, is hardly a surprise considering the county was home to one of the state’s largest prescribing pharmacies. Ken’s Thriftee Pharmacy in Walhalla doled out more than 5.6 million pills between 2006 to 2012.
This story was originally published July 24, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
