Richard Stallard

Richard Stallard, a lieutenant patrolling Big Stone Gap, becomes an early law-enforcement witness to OxyContin’s arrival in the coalfields. In 1997, an informant told him the new painkiller was already being sold on the street; Stallard’s follow-up call to the town pharmacist confirmed that the drug, newly available in the area, was being abused almost immediately. His observations give the crisis an early, concrete signal: a powerful prescription drug had entered a region where the consequences of addiction would soon reach far beyond the people taking it.

Identity and Setting

Stallard was making his usual rounds through Bullitt Park in Big Stone Gap, in Wise County, Virginia, near the Lee County, Virginia, line, when the first encounter described in detail took place. The book situates the patrol in a small Appalachian town still commonly called part of the coalfields, although mining employment had been declining for years. The contrast matters: the region retained the name and history of coal country while facing persistent poverty and high levels of disability and prescription-drug diversion. Stallard’s work brought him into contact with that changing landscape through its immediate street-level effects.

He was not encountering prescription-drug misuse for the first time. In the area, diverted Lortab and Percocet were already familiar, and each sold on the street for about ten dollars per pill. Dilaudid, a brand name for hydromorphone, had been the most expensive painkiller commonly available on the black market, at about forty dollars. This existing market supplies the baseline for Stallard’s account: OxyContin arrived not in a place untouched by diversion, but as a drug whose strength and effects altered what local officers and clinicians were seeing.

The 1997 Warning

Stallard was sitting in his patrol car in the middle of the day when a familiar informant leaned in with news of a new product called Oxy. The informant described it as a desirable drug already being sold locally. Stallard asked him to clarify what he meant. The exchange was brief, but its significance comes from its timing: OxyContin had only recently reached the area, yet the report was not about a distant or hypothetical risk. It was already on the street.

The informant also described how users were defeating the tablet’s time-release design. They softened and removed its coating, leaving oxycodone that could be crushed and snorted or mixed with water and injected. The colored residue left by the coatings—orange from forty-milligram tablets and green from eighty-milligram ones—made the method visible on users’ shirtsleeves. Stallard’s account thus registers not just the drug’s arrival but the quick discovery of ways to seek a faster, more intense effect. The book places this development against an earlier pattern in which stronger heroin had drawn users toward snorting before increased tolerance led some to injection; the comparison makes Stallard’s concern about what might follow more than a reaction to a new street name.

Once back at the station, Stallard called the town pharmacist. The pharmacist was surprised that the drug had already appeared on the street, since the pharmacy had only received it a month or two earlier. He had read the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved package insert: OxyContin was designed to provide longer-lasting pain relief than ordinary pain pills, and its maker claimed that delayed absorption would reduce its potential for abuse. Stallard’s report challenged that reassurance with local evidence. If the drug was already being sold and people were finding ways around its time-release mechanism, the pharmacist concluded, the abuse risk was not merely theoretical.

From Diversion to Community Harm

A year later, Stallard’s account of the difference between older diverted painkillers and OxyContin sharpened. People had used Lortab and Percocet, he recalled, while continuing to function; OxyContin, by contrast, could leave users unable to function. His distinction is not a general history of addiction but a police officer’s observation of a change in the people and behavior he encountered. The book places that observation alongside reports from worried parents and doctors: families were losing jobs, homes, spouses, and children, while one farmer had sold land and possessions to sustain his addiction.

As the crisis intensified, Stallard described a break-in attempt at a pharmacy in nearby Clintwood. The store stood across the street from both the courthouse and the sheriff’s department. After the alarm sounded, a deputy saw a man fleeing and dropping pill bottles as he ran. The detail is characteristic of Stallard’s role in the narrative: he records how an addiction that might be discussed in terms of prescriptions, dosage, or treatment became an immediate public-safety problem, visible in a desperate escape and discarded bottles.

The wider pattern around his observations was increasingly stark. Residents in small towns accustomed to leaving doors unlocked began encountering stolen lawnmowers, four-wheelers, and garden equipment. A local minister whose son was addicted described the daytime scouting and nighttime thefts as a recurring practice. In Lee County, Virginia, overdose deaths, injection of crushed pills, and overcrowded jail cells marked the larger emergency. These developments are not presented as Stallard’s individual actions, but they enlarge the significance of the warning he helped sound: diversion was growing into a crisis that affected households, businesses, law enforcement, and the community’s sense of security.

Narrative Role

Stallard functions as an early-warning witness rather than as the center of a separate personal storyline. The narrative returns to his 1997 encounter because it captures the gap between a drug’s intended medical use and its rapid transformation into a street commodity. His informant’s report, the pharmacist’s surprise, and the evidence of altered tablets form a compact chain: OxyContin had arrived, users had found a way to defeat its delivery mechanism, and local professionals were already confronting the consequences.

His later recollections carry that warning forward. The contrast he drew between people using Lortab or Percocet and people using OxyContin marks a perceived change in the severity of the local crisis, while the Clintwood pharmacy incident shows the consequences entering ordinary public spaces. Stallard’s importance lies in the precision of this vantage point: he notices the new drug before its consequences have become the region’s defining story, then describes the shift as it becomes harder to mistake.