In 2007, physician Paul Volkman was charged with illegally distributing opioids through ache clinics in southern Ohio, resulting in the overdose deaths of over a dozen sufferers. Journalist Philip Eil was drawn to the case as a result of of a private connection to the 60-year-old physician: Volkman was a med faculty classmate of Eil’s father. Relying on over a decade of analysis, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer” retraces Volkman’s steps from the celebrated University of Chicago Medical School to the cash-only ache clinics in rural Ohio the place Volkman liberally prescribed opiates and different managed substances throughout the early-aughts opioid growth. “What on earth had happened in the thirty-some-odd years between these two facts?” Eil asks in his prologue. “I found the mystery irresistible.”
Eil leans into the contradictions of Volkman’s world, beginning together with his decline from promising honors pupil and med faculty grad to sad pediatrician going through malpractice lawsuits that pushed him to post-industrial Ohio, the place he made a contemporary begin constructing a ache clinic empire on the expense of rural communities whereas arousing the suspicions of pharmacists and authorities alike. After Volkman’s eventual arrest, Eil dug into transcripts and sources from the court docket case, exploring the weather in Volkman’s nature and surroundings that led him to plead “not guilty” to the deaths of his sufferers.
Through his personal interviews with Volkman and dozens of others who interacted with him or had been impacted by his crimes, Eil depicts the physician as a person perpetually satisfied of each his superior intelligence and his underdog standing, warping his notion of the world in an effort to depict himself as a persecuted sufferer. Highly financially motivated, largely absent within the lives of his younger youngsters and continuously on the highway between his luxurious residence in Chicago and his clinics in Ohio, Volkman amassed a fortune prescribing wild volumes of treatment indiscriminately: to these with official ache in addition to to longtime addicts to drug sellers. One former affected person testified in court docket that he prescribed her 34 tablets per day.
Eil supplies context about malpractice regulation, drug rules and the historical past of opioids in America. He additionally provides care and area to the lives and predicaments of numerous Volkman sufferers, devoting his afterword to the reminiscence of the 13 individuals who died, as described by their households and communities. With Prescription for Pain, Eil joins the ranks of investigative journalists like Sam Quinones (Dreamland), Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain) and Beth Macy (Dopesick), including a vital piece of the puzzle to understanding an epidemic that continues to arrest the nation.
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