Paul Farrell Jr. was enjoying his extended family’s Sunday ritual of an after-Mass meal at his parents’ house in Huntington, West Virginia, when the challenge that would transform his life and reverberate across the country landed on the breakfast table.

His father was wearing an apron and cooking bacon. His mother dropped onto the table a newspaper story—which would later win a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail—that first made the country aware of an opioid crisis in which nearly 800 million pills were dumped into a state of 1.8 million people.

“We saw it here first—we call it ground zero for a reason,” Farrell said. “It’s claimed the lives of my friends and my friends’ children, my neighbors. You will not find anybody in this community that has not been impacted. We have an epidemic of grandparents raising grandchildren because of a lost generation.”

“This wasn’t a wave, this was a tidal wave of pills into communities.”–Paul Farrell, Jr.

Farrell’s mother wanted to know what he was going to do about it. He pleaded that he was a personal injury lawyer, but she knew he would fight for his hometown. So Farrell, a political science major who graduated from Notre Dame in 1994, combed through his law books until he found a statute—chapter 7-1-3kk—that jumped off the page, giving the county commission the power to eliminate and abate a public nuisance.

“The opioid litigation didn’t start with a lawsuit; it started with an idea,” Farrell said. “If the Exxon Valdez crashed into our shores and spilled oil all over, we would have the power to force Exxon to clean up the oil spill. Well, somebody crashed into our shore and dumped 80 million pills into Huntington, West Virginia. They broke it. Now they need to fix it.”

Farrell went back to his Notre Dame roots for guidance. He asked economist Bill Evans, a co-founder of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), to curate the data that tracks every pill from manufacturer to distributor to pharmacy for future academic research to study how opioids overwhelmed the health care system—and how to stop it from happening again.

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Originally published by Brendan O'Shaughnessy at al.nd.edu on August 05, 2024.