“The calls didn’t stop. All afternoon, ambulances, police officers and firefighters began crisscrossing the city, responding to reports of more than two dozen men and women overdosing — in homes, in a gas station bathroom, at a Family Dollar store, in a Burger King parking lot, slumped behind the wheel in traffic on the West 17th Street Bridge. Others appeared at the hospital.” The LA Times’ Matt Pearce takes you to a small West Virginia city where officials had to to deal with 26 overdoses within just a few hours. It’s an extreme story. But it’s not a unique one. What happened in Huntington is a microcosm of the havoc wreaked by prescription painkillers, pill mils, and heroin all across America.

+ In case you missed it, here’s Don Winslow on legalized pot and the secret history of El Chapo and the heroin crisis: “I’m always amazed that progressive young millennials will picket a grocery chain for not buying fair-trade coffee but will go home and do drugs that are brought to them by the killers, torturers, and sadists of the cartels.”