They used to have this motto at the Charleston Gazette, the daily morning paper in West Virginia's capital city.

It was just two words, sustained outrage.

And that means, you know, you just don't do a one-off stories that you, in order to, you know, bring issues of injustice to light, you have to really

hammer away.

This unofficial mantra is what convinced Eric Ayer to pack up and move to this Appalachian State

more than two decades ago.

I call sustained outrage the rocket fuel for my reporting.

Eric was a statehouse reporter for a long time,

but he reserved most of his sustained outrage for the opioid crisis.

Compared to other places, people here are much more likely to have an opioid prescription,

much more likely to die from an overdose, too.

Eric got obsessed with puzzling out how so many powerful narcotics got into his state in the first

place. What he found was a web of drug distributors, companies that call themselves the central

nervous system of health care. Companies like Cardinal

Health, McKesson, Amerisource Bergen. They're huge. This company that I didn't know, Cardinal

Health, let me see what it was just last time. 16th largest company in the Fortune 500.

McKesson is the eighth largest, and AmeriSource Bergen is number 10.

So you've got, I think, Walmart's number one in the Fortune 500, and you got Apple and Amazon.

Then you get these companies that nobody's ever heard of.

These companies had heard of Eric, though.

He's learned that this week.

That's because one of the county's hardest hit by opioid addiction in West Virginia has taken these companies to court.

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