The film begins with attorney Paul Farrell Junior giving a tour of his hometown – Huntington, West Virginia.
“There’s been a slow decay. Like a lot of rural communities, the jobs have dried up," he says. "Certainly the coal industry has had its challenges. I think it was the perfect storm with a lack of employment, a ton of prescription opiates, and once that demon got ahold of its victims, you can’t come out of it!”
We hear from the cops.
“We average 3 to 5 overdoses a shift, so this will be our fourth one for the night,” says one officer. On his radio he reports that a 40-year-old male has overdosed. A woman sobs in the background.
And then Farrell tells us what he’s discovered.
“Everybody’s aware of Perdue Pharma. We all understand that there are pill mills and there are rogue doctors, but what I think people missed was that there was a control valve established by Congress in 1970. Congress created this closed system where it doesn’t go directly from the manufacturer down to the pharmacies. It goes through the wholesale distributor. They were tasked with controlling the flow of prescription opiates -- identify and report suspicious orders, which is defined as unusual size, deviation from normal patterns or unusual frequency, and if they get a suspicious order, they have to halt the shipment and notify the DEA, and they didn’t do it.”
So Farrell launched a lawsuit against 30 different distributors, including three in the Fortune 500. At first, he was representing his community alone, but hundreds more counties and cities would join as plaintiffs, and one of Farrell’s colleagues said they needed more attorneys.
“Somebody said, ‘Let’s call Mike Papantonio from Levin Papantonio -– get him on the line to see if there’s any interest,’ and I was like ‘Yeah. Let’s do that, and I’ll get the Pope on my phone.’”
In fact, celebrity lawyer Papantonio was interested. He told filmmaker Clay Tweel about a color-coded CDC map that showed where people were dying from drug overdoses.
“McKessen knows, Cardinal knows, AmeriSource knows, Perdue knows. All of them understand what this death map means. These are MBAs. My god, they’re from Harvard, they’re from Yale, they’re from Princeton. This isn’t ‘Joe Lunchbucket’ making these decisions.”
The legal team, which grew to include hundreds of lawyers, demanded and got records that could have saved lives.
“The distributors have been arguing with the DEA for a decade – saying that’s not our job,” Farrell explains. “They said this is a doctor problem. If a doctor writes the prescription, it’s not suspicious. If a pharmacy gets a prescription that’s written by a doctor and they fill it, and they have a DEA registration, it’s not suspicious. They’re supposed to be watching so that if one particular pharmacy in a town of 50,000 people is selling a million pills a year, that’s a problem.”
Lawyers for the defendants pushed back hard in court and before a Congressional committee. Filmmaker Tweel presents a montage of remarks recorded at one hearing.
“Was anybody fired?” asks a member of Congress?
“Many of them have left the corporation,” a corporate attorney replies.
“But they weren’t fired?” the politician presses.
“We don’t talk about specifics,” says the lawyer.
“I’m not asking you to talk about specifics. I’m asking you if anybody got fired.”
“Why did you ship five million pills?” asks another lawmaker.
On it goes until a representative from West Virginia gets his chance to speak.
“The fury inside me is bubbling over,” says Congressman David McKinley, “and for several of you to say you had no role whatsoever I find particularly offensive.”
And then Farrell got some disturbing news. Attorneys General from across the nation were mounting their own case.
“I feel like I’ve built this incredible team of basketball players, and we’ve made it all the way to the playoffs, and now Charles Barkley wants to come out from the news anchor desk and put on a jersey and be the captain of the team."
Farrell was offered one percent of a possible settlement to join but refused.
“They want the money to be able to do state run programs on roads and bridges and pension funds, because AG stands for ‘aspiring governor.’”
Those who attend the Virginia Film Festival can find out how it ended, but Clay Tweel hopes they learn something more.
“I hope that people get a sense of what it takes for one person to try and get justice in this country -- what does justice in America look like and feel like, and how much impact can one person have?”
The Bitter Pill will be shown Saturday, November 2nd. Tickets are available at virginiafilmfestival.com. Tweel will speak and answer questions afterward.
