Here's How Many Pain Pills Highland Park Pharmacies Receive

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — A new report shows billions of painkillers flowed through nearly 83,000 pharmacies across the country, including several in Highland Park and Highwood. A previously unreleased database managed by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration logged where roughly 70 billion pills containing oxycodone and hydrocodone were shipped to, The Washington Post reported Monday.

While the database doesn’t specify what happened after the pharmacies received the shipments, it does illuminate the sheer number of pills that flooded communities. The data includes numbers from 2006 to 2012, the Post reported. Chain and retail pharmacies were included.

Six pharmacies in Highland Park and Highwood received 3,835,200‬ pills from 2006 to 2012, but none of them accounted for more than five pills per year for every resident within five miles, according to the database. The nearest pharmacies with abnormally high rates of pills per resident per year were in Buffalo Grove, Deerfield, Libertyville and Wheeling.

Here’s what the database found for local pharmacies:

Bond Drug Company of Illinois
655 Elm Place, Highland Park
Pills received: 1,340,600

Highland Park CVS
1539 Clavey Road, Highland Park
Pills received: 1,195,500

Bond Drug Company of Illinois
320 Waukegan Ave., Highwood
Pills received: 492,730

Bond Drug Company of Illinois
632 Roger Williams Ave., Highland Park
Pills received: 311,800

American Drug Stores
1600 Deerfield Road, Highland Park
Pills received: 274,640

Target
2099 Skokie Valley Road, Highland Park
Pills received: 219,930

Five pharmacies in Kentucky, Idaho, Illinois and Kansas received the most painkillers per person each year, the Post found. With a total of nearly 6.8 million pills, Shearer Drug in Clinton County, Kentucky, saw the most pills per year per nearby resident at 96. It was followed by Hardin County Discount Pharmacy in downstate Illinois, with 90 pills per person every year.

JHC Acquisition in Des Plaines, received the largest number of pills for any Chicago area pharmacy during the period studied. Nearly 16.5 million opioid pills were shipped to the business, enough for 57 pills every year for every resident within a five-mile radius.

Areas deluged with pain pills saw far higher death rates related to opioids, the Post found. While the national rate was 4.6 deaths per 100,000 residents, counties that received the most pain pills per person saw rates that were more than three times higher.

Perhaps the most startling finding was that just 15 percent of pharmacies received nearly half of the pain pills.

According to the latest provisional data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were nearly 68,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States last year, a 5 percent decline from 2017. The agency predicted that number will rise to more than 680,000 once all data is reported to them.

In its previous report in July, the Post said 75 percent of the pills distributed in the seven-year period came from six companies with pharmacies: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart. Four other companies were identified by the paper as being among the top 10 distributors of opioids: Smith Drug Co., Rite Aid, Kroger and H.D. Smith.

Patch national staffers Dan Hampton and Feroze Dhanoa contributed to this report.