A pharmacy in a West Virginia town of 382 people received shipments of 9 million opioid pills over a decade. Eric Eyre, a reporter for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, investigated how this happened and who allowed it. His Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting revealed that the largest drug distributors in America, companies whose names appear on pharmacies everywhere, had flooded Appalachia with opioids while regulators looked away. This book expands on that reporting, tracing how Eyre obtained internal documents that distributors and the DEA had fought to keep secret. The documents showed that companies knew their pills were being diverted to addiction but shipped them anyway because the profits were enormous. They showed that the DEA, pressured by industry-friendly legislation, had retreated from enforcement. Eyre combines investigative journalism with portraits of people affected: the addicted, the bereaved, the doctors and pharmacists who enabled the epidemic, and the few officials who tried to stop it. He describes his own reporting process, the obstacles he faced, and the industry's attempts to discredit his work. The book is both a chronicle of one of America's worst public health crises and a demonstration of what investigative journalism can accomplish. Readers seeking to understand how the opioid epidemic happened, and who profited from it, will find Eyre's account essential.