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Stunning. al.com/news/2019/07/w…
D&L Pharmacy in rural south AL received more than 1.3 million prescription opioid pills between 2006 & 2012. Gilbertown, located in Choctaw County near the Mississipppi line, claims fewer than 200 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It’s not near any population centers.
👀 Yet more than 1.6 million pain pills moved through Gilbertown over that span. That’s nearly 1,500 pills per person per year - nearly double the per capita rate of the next highest town in Alabama.
More than 76 billions pills were distributed across the country during the timeframe. More than 1.7 billion of those pills made their way to Alabama.
Four of the top 10 Alabama cities or towns for opioid rate are in Walker County 🤔 coal correlation 🤷♀️ 
Pharmacies in Walker County received nearly 9 million pills a year there, in a county with fewer than 65,000 people. David’s Discount Pharmacy in Sumiton, Alabama, led the way in Walker County ➡️ more than 9 million pills between 2006 & 2012 ➡️ population just over 2,600 people.
More than 458 prescription pain pills per person per year passed through Jasper, the largest city in Walker County. It’s the only city with a population over 10,000 and an opioid rate higher than 270 pills per person per year, according to the data.
That means, in some ways, Jasper was the epicenter of the opioid problem in Alabama. No other large Alabama city made the top 28. No county saw more prescriptions per person than Walker County. And no county seat in Alabama saw more prescriptions per person than Jasper.
The pharmacy with the most total prescription pain pills was Senior Care Pharmacy in Northport, in Tuscaloosa County. It was the only pharmacy in the state to receive more than 10 million pills over the time frame, according to the data.
The Alabama pharmacies with the second- and fourth-highest number of pills for are located in Huntsville and owned by the same person. Propst Discount Drugs and Star Discount Pharmacy collectively received 17.5 million pills.
❗️ By just about any measure, the opioid epidemic in Alabama hit hardest in poor, rural and white areas in north Alabama, in a seeming band stretching across the hilly stretches from Georgia to Mississippi.
Among the top 10 counties in opioid prescriptions per capita, only Covington County near the Florida Panhandle is in the southern half of the state. And none of the top ten counties are less than 80 percent white.
These are the top five counties in the state in terms of hydrocodone and oxycodone pills per person per year, and they form an unbroken region in the northwest corner of the state.
In 2017, Alabama had the highest opioid prescription rate in the country, nearly twice as high as the national average
Pfft
