Greg Stewart

Greg Stewart was a pharmacist in Lee County, Virginia, and the son of a miner whose parents had helped build the clinic in St. Charles. His place in the community connected pharmacy work to the region’s history of mining and mutual effort. As OxyContin prescriptions became part of his daily work, Stewart saw the drug’s consequences not as a distant policy question but as a danger reaching customers and local institutions. His early warning to Sister Beth Davies, and his later willingness to consider money from Purdue Pharma, make him a figure at the intersection of practical care, community response, and accountability.

Pharmacy and an Early Warning

Stewart’s concerns took shape in the late 1990s, when a confidential informant told a police officer that a new drug called Oxy was already being sold on the street. The officer passed the report to a pharmacist, who contacted Sister Beth. In that chain of communication, Stewart’s warning was direct: although people were calling the drug nonaddictive, he believed it marked the beginning of a serious local disaster. The warning was not an abstract prediction. As a pharmacist filling OxyContin prescriptions, he was already encountering the consequences of the medication’s presence in the community.

Stewart urged customers to lock their medication away. He had reason to take security seriously: his pharmacy had been targeted in two robbery attempts. In one, the son of a neighboring hair-salon owner crawled through ceiling vents connecting the salon to Stewart’s store. The episode shows the pressure surrounding access to the drug without turning Stewart’s role into that of a law-enforcement officer. His response was rooted in the ordinary responsibilities of dispensing medication and warning the people who received it, even as the danger had begun to reach into nearby businesses.

Community Work and the Proposed Grant

Stewart was among the local participants gathered with Richard Stallard and other law-enforcement officers at Kathy’s Country Kitchen in the Lee County seat. Sister Beth attended, as did Art Van Zee and Sue Ella Kobak. The meeting brought together people encountering different parts of the same crisis: law enforcement, pharmacy, medical care, and community advocacy. Stewart’s presence reflected his position as both a local pharmacist and someone already alert to the risks associated with OxyContin.

When Purdue Pharma offered $100,000 toward expanding drug treatment and law-enforcement efforts in the county, Stewart was inclined to accept it as partial repayment. He believed the company was making a fortune from the region’s suffering, and considered the proposed contribution against that imbalance. Art Van Zee and Sue Ella Kobak agreed with his initial position; after the meeting, they even drafted a letter accepting the money. For Stewart, as presented in the account, the question was not whether the community needed resources, but whether accepting funds from the company could return something to a place bearing the costs of its business.

The Dispute over Purdue Pharma’s Money

Sister Beth rejected that reasoning. She threatened to leave the coalition if it accepted the grant, regarding the money as blood money rather than restitution. The difference was consequential: Stewart, Van Zee, and Kobak had considered a donation that might support local efforts, while Sister Beth saw acceptance as an unacceptable compromise. The argument forced the coalition to decide not only how to respond to immediate needs, but also what accepting the company’s money would signify.

The drafted letter was never sent, and the coalition agreed with Sister Beth. That outcome did not erase the practical appeal of the proposed funds or Stewart’s sense that Purdue Pharma owed the community something. Instead, it fixed the limit the coalition chose to draw: resources offered by the company could not be separated from the harm its members believed the company had helped produce. Stewart’s position remains distinct within that decision. He had warned of the danger early, helped protect customers’ medication, and still considered whether money from Purdue Pharma could serve local needs.

Narrative Significance

Stewart’s account helps connect the first local signs of OxyContin’s danger to the later public dispute over responsibility. The warning reached Sister Beth through a sequence of people passing along information, while the pharmacy’s robbery attempts made the crisis tangible in the daily life of a small business. Later, the grant proposal turned that recognition into a disagreement about what community support should look like and whether a company could contribute to efforts addressing damage attributed to its drug.

The book does not present Stewart as the sole voice in either episode. His significance lies in the particular combination of roles he occupies: a pharmacist who encountered OxyContin through prescriptions, a local witness who warned of its danger, and a community participant open to accepting a substantial contribution before the coalition rejected it. Those details preserve the tension between urgent local needs and the demand that aid not substitute for accountability.