Hillbilly heroin is causing some hillbilly hellraising in West Virginia. There’s a big flap between the state’s attorney general and legislature over the $10 million fine paid by Purdue Pharma last year as part of its deal to settle criminal charges for misleading regulators, doctors and consumers about the addictive risks of Oxycontin. The state received a portion of the overall $634 million paid by the drugmaker, and current and former execs.

Darrell McGraw, the West Virginia attorney general, says it wasn’t his idea to spend $10 million from a 2004 settlement the way it was spent, according to The Charleston Gazette. The money, which has also sparked disputes between the state and the federal Medicaid agencies, has been doled out by McGraw as a result of the wording of the agreement to settle the state’s OxyContin lawsuit.

State lawmakers say the money should have been placed in the state’s general fund, to be appropriated by the Legislature. The feds say they are owed more than $4 million of the total, because McGraw never went through the proper channel of handing it over to the state’s Department of Health and Human Resources. Last month, the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Business and Industrial Council began airing television and radio ads attacking McGraw, accusing him of misspending the money.

But chief deputy Attorney General Fran Hughes says Purdue Pharma demanded the money be used to repair the company’s image. The drugmaker hoped to gain some positive public relations coverage for playing an ongoing role funding programs to help addicted individuals. “That was their demand as part of the settlement,” she tells the paper. “They insisted that the money should go to finance community programs to help drug abusers, law enforcement aimed at reducing substance abuse and medical education to further reduce substance abuse.”

So far, $7.5 million of the $10 million settlement has been spent. One-third of the total went to lawyers hired by McGraw to pursue the lawsuit, the paper writes. In accordance with the settlement, McGraw’s office distributed most of its funds to local and county programs to help substance abusers. Another $500,000 went to the University of Charleston’s new pharmacy school.

Steve Cohen, executive director of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, recently said the $10 million settlement is a “slush fund,” and wants McGraw to turn over all the settlement money to the Legislature, including the $7.5 million already spent, according to the paper. The remaining $2.5 million will be spent this year. But Purdue’s settlement specifically stipulates the “funds shall be placed in trust and used by the attorney general in support of the general welfare of the people of West Virginia” for the three purposes cited by Hughes.

According to a list maintained by McGraw, settlement funds have already gone to county commissions and local health-care centers throughout the state, including $46,669 to Health Right Inc. in Charleston. McGraw and others estimate day-report centers, which are set up to monitor individuals convicted on drug abuse charges, cost county and local officials about $7 a day, less than the $50 a day cost of keeping those same individuals behind bars, the Gazette writes.

When Barry McCaffrey, a retired U.S. Army general who led the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Clinton, spoke in Charleston earlier this month to the West Virginia Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors, he praised such local efforts in West Virginia to counter drug addiction. Calling OxyContin “the new heroin,” McCaffrey said, “We want to get people back to their workplaces, back to their families and out of jail.”

Source: The Charleston Gazette