What do you know about Portsmouth, Ohio?

Portsmouth, Ohio is a Rust Belt town that not only felt the pain of deindustrialization but also the intensity of the opioid crisis. In the 1990s Portsmouth had become a place where prescription drugs were being given out more freely by doctors more than anywhere else in the country. In fact, at this time Portsmouth was known as the pill mill of America, there were more pill mills per capita there than anywhere else. A pill mill is defined as a place where doctors prescribe pills for money even though there is no diagnosis of pain or something that would require pain medication. These pill mills are a big reason as to why so many people in the town got addicted, they were everywhere. The man who started the pill mills in the town was named David Proctor. He saw the creation of Oxycontin as a marketing opportunity, much like Purdue Pharma did. David Proctor saw Oxycontin as a steady income because his clinic would never be empty and the same addicted people would continue to come back monthly and pay whatever they had to in order to get a prescription. David Proctor taught a ton of other doctors in the area how to run these pill mills which caused them to spread to parts of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and other parts of Ohio. These pill mills played a big role in how the opioid epidemic took root in the midwest and contained to grow from here on out. Journalist Sam Quinones wrote a book on the topic called "Dreamland: The True Tale of Americas Opiate Epidemic" In which he discusses this issue in great depth. Quinones says in the are there is "Widespread kind of addiction that affects an entire generation in the town of Portsmouth." The drug epidemic in Portsmouth isn't only about pills, due to the cheap price and availability, many addicts turned to heroin. Of this Quinones says "Heroin is the fallback drug."

source: https://www.npr.org/2015/05/19/404184355/how-heroin-made-its-way-from-rural-mexico-to-small-town-america