Small-town America does have an opioid problem, but not in this Alabama town
Gilbertown welcomes you.
That’s the simple message greeting visitors to this picturesque town of about 200 people, delicately placed inside less than one square mile of southern Choctaw County and seemingly designed to make you feel as nostalgic as possible.
It’s that version of small-town America we all hope to find when we take a random right turn on the interstate. Gilbertown is like apple pie and white picket fences. The sort of place where you expect to see a lemonade stand in every neighborhood. It’s kids playing in streets against a backdrop of beautifully manicured lawns and American flags fluttering in the wind.
And of course, everyone’s doors are unlocked, so they say.
Gilbertown has, for now at least, retained a unique charm that cannot be said for so many similar sized towns across the country, apparent victims to the unique demands of 21st century life. When jobs leave, so do the people.
But this snippet of traditional southern life, nestled quietly on either side of state road 17 about eight miles from the Mississippi line, has managed to keep its mom-and-pop stores open against national trends. It still has a newspaper, if you can believe that. Hunting camps dominate the vast forests in the area, while a nearby paper mill provides jobs to a large number of locals.
Despite what it does have going for it, Gilbertown is unfortunately not immune to another increasingly familiar aspect of small-town American life: its recently reported relationship with opioids.
Over a seven-year span starting in 2006, a single pharmacy dispensed 1.3 million pain pills to patients, placing it retrospectively at the heart of the opioid crisis in Alabama, according to recently released federal data obtained by the Washington Post. The D&L pharmacy, which has been closed for about six years and is now an insurance business, later sold its dispensary business to the Hometown Pharmacy, located about 200 feet away.
While the overall figure of opioids dispensed does appear alarming, the current owner of the Hometown Pharmacy told AL.com that the initial calculations made, apportioning as many as 928 pills to each of the 200 residents over the seven years, is misleading.
“The simple issue is that the pharmacy wasn’t just used by people who live in this town,” said Cole Floyd. “During that time the pharmacy was the only one in southern Choctaw County. While it’s hard to make accurate calculations, each of the three pharmacies in the county probably had as many as 4,500 people using them.
“That drastically changes the number of people per person receiving pills,” he added.
Based on Floyd’s rough number, each person using the pharmacy received about 41 pills a year over seven years. He admitted that some of those people could have had issues, but insisted that the volumes dispensed were not unusually high.
But Floyd also said that had the number of opioids dispensed been over any legal limit, the Drug Enforcement Agency would have likely visited D&L. “At the end of each day, our computer uploads data regarding the number of controlled drugs bought and sold by us in any given day. That includes opioids and other controlled drugs. If that number is above [a certain] percent of all controlled drugs [dispensed], not just opioids, then we would expect a visit from DEA.”
Floyd also said that the wholesale drug companies also had to report sales to the DEA and that his store policy was to not dispense drugs for people who are from outside of Choctaw County. Along with a database for each patient, the strict dispensary controls help his team prevent addicts who are “doctor shopping,’ which is when people visit multiple doctors to maximize the amount drugs they can obtain.
The former owners of the D&L Pharmacy continue to operate drug stores in Birmingham, according to Floyd.
While Floyd had read The Washington Post story, not everyone in Gilbertown was aware of the town’s top rank in state. Indeed, Gilbertown was the only town in south Alabama to make the top 10 list for opioid pills per capita. Most of the heaviest pain pill use in state occurred in the hills of north Alabama, especially in Walker County and other neighboring counties northwest of Birmingham.
In Gilbertown on Monday, Summer Turner, who was working a shift at Magnolia Traditions clothing store, said she had never heard of people abusing any kind of drug in the town. “I’ve been here for 20 years and I don’t remember any trouble like that here,” she said, adding that she doesn’t often lock her door.
Fifty feet away at the Heavenly Creations book store, which also sold flowers, gifts, rental tuxedos, and doubled as a small church, Minister Shirley Pearson said she was also not aware. “I’ve never felt like this is a place where that happens or where people feel fear,” she said. “I suppose I am upset that outsiders are suggesting we have a problem here. We have a lot of spirituality and people sometimes pull over while on road trips to come pray. We turn no one away.”
A stone’s thrown from Pearson’s church is a monument to one of Gilbertown’s past glories and a reasons tourists still visit the town. It was the first place in Alabama to successfully drill for oil all the way back in Jan 1944 and the reason the state started its oil and gas board. At the base of a tall drilling rig monument, which no longer works and was moved about a mile from where the original drilling began, two fresh faced teens diligently worked at a snow cone hut.
“What’s an opioid?” said Hudson Abston,18, while standing next to his colleague and fellow Southern Choctaw High School graduate Emily Phillips, 17. “We don’t get a whole lot of trouble around here. There was a couple of robberies about two years ago,” he added excitedly.
At the rear of the snow cone hut, next to a restored caboose and memorial fountain, and not far from the spotless public bathroom, you’ll find the mayor and police chief’s office. The police chief has two officers working under him and a third part-time officer due to start Tuesday, said Mayor Billy C. May, currently in his first term as mayor after being elected three years ago.
“The new cop isn’t being hired because of the drugs,” joked Mayor May. “I know that this country has problems with these drugs, but that’s not an issue in this town.
“We are a rural town, but we serve as a hub and a destination for thousands of people who live in other rural areas here in Choctaw County. We have people coming from as far as Philadelphia [Mississippi] to use our two medical facilities.”
May said that the downtown medical facility, Franklin Primary Health Center, receives about 25 to 50 patients a day. “They are packed five days a week and sometimes open on Saturdays,” he said, suggesting that the perceived high level of opioid dispensed in the town was due to the large numbers of people coming from out-of-state and other areas of the county.
“People like this town and we’re doing well. We’re growing,” said Mayor May. “We have a county museum, the old oil well, and we have a picture of a dinosaur that was dug up here years ago. It’s in the Smithsonian now. It was a fish dinosaur I think, about 85 feet long.”
But the excitement doesn’t end there.
“We have a Verizon tower coming soon,” he added.
Filed under: General Problems
Nothing will stop the Attorneys General from getting that pharm mfg money. And the Washington Post, formerly one of the very last sources of honest reliable, honest news, is working with them as partners in crime and will certainly get a cut, like so many other powerful organizations that we used to trust.