This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian Donnis: Why did you want to tell this story?
Phil Eil: Well, what initially caught my attention was the simple wildness of the two facts that I first had. One, that this guy Paul Volkman had gone to medical school with my dad and they had both graduated with MD PhDs from the University of Chicago in 1974 and then they had gone in such wildly different directions. My dad is still a practicing physician here in Rhode Island and in Fall River, and Paul Volkman is now in federal prison for serving a life sentence for prescription drug dealing. So the sheer mystery of that, along with the personal connection, was what caught my interest. But as I got further into the story and learned about the community where these crimes took place in Southern Ohio, which has been hit so hard by prescription drugs and later other kinds of opiates. And when I learned about the lives of the folks who went to Paul Volkman and who died shortly thereafter from apparent overdoses, the story just kept getting more and more urgent as I went.
Donnis: As you recount in the book, Volkman was able to remain in business distributing opioids for almost three years despite law enforcement raids and complaints from patients’ family members. Why did it take so long for him to face accountability?
Eil: Well, that’s a really good question and one that I still have, all these years later. I think there are a few reasons for that. One, it’s harder to prosecute a doctor than it is the average street corner dealer of illicit drugs. They have a DEA registration, they have a name and an address, and it’s, you know. The law that the DEA and the U.S. Attorneys down in Ohio used to prosecute Volkman was built on this subjective word of legitimate medical practice. Was he prescribing these medications in a legitimate way and that was open to interpretation. And there were Experts called to testify on both sides and it was a real blurry area. So I think if I could step into the shoes of law enforcement briefly I think they were waiting to make the case as strong as possible. But I do think it’s an open question to ask what happened down there. And, one of the aspects of this story is, as you said, this guy was doing this activity for nearly three years, really long time.
Donnis: You seem to recognize from the start that pursuing this book project could cause additional pain for people whose family or friends were affected by Volkman’s actions. How did you navigate researching and writing your book while trying to be sensitive to the fallout from all this?
Eil: Well, in my book talks and at my book events, I feel like I’m returning to the refrain, “and that was another reason why this took 15 years.” And to your question, I really wanted to get this story right. I wanted to be as thorough as possible. I wanted to get to know the community down there where I, unlike here in Rhode Island, am not from there. I’m a guy from out of town with out of town plates, and they’ve had many reporters come through and write stories that don’t make the place look so great. So I went to Southern Ohio 10 times over the course of more than a decade, and I really spent a lot of time talking with these folks. And what I really wanted to do was just kind of earn their trust. And it was also helpful to me that I wrote an article for Cincinnati Magazine about the case in 2017, which was a much shorter version of the story I tell in the book. But that allowed, that was a bit of a mark of credibility that I got published in this incredible publication and they could see the approach I was taking toward the story. But even now I am somebody who reads a lot of true crime, watches a lot of true crime. And I was doing that for many years and kind of taking notes as I went to see which stories, I thought handled the loss of folks’ loved ones with dignity and with honor and with respect. And I was trying to emulate those and trying to avoid the mistakes of, some of the less impressive, entries in the genre.
Donnis: Your book is now part of a pantheon of books about the opioid epidemic in America. There’s another excellent book, Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, a writer for the New Yorker, and he describes how the Sacklers, the owners of Purdue Pharma, basically had their way with the Food and Drug Administration in being able to get okay for much greater distribution of opioids in a way completely different from the past. I wonder, do you put any responsibility on the federal government for enabling a doctor like Volkman who really went off the rails in causing a lot of harm.
Eil: So, we are many, many years into this epidemic, and I always emphasize in my book events and in conversations like this, this is a man-made epidemic. The opiate epidemic was not a natural disaster, it wasn’t a tornado or an earthquake. People caused this. And I think it’s really important for us to look at the many, many different places where people can rightly say this person or this organization bears some of the blame. you mentioned the book Empire of Pain, which of course is masterful in its own right. Telling of the story the Sackler family. There’s another excellent book called Drug Dealer MD by Anna Lembke out at Stanford, and she casts a pretty wide net in in pinning responsibility. She blames the insurance companies and academic medicine to some extent and regulators as you say. So I think there’s a really long list of folks who were partly responsible.
As far as Volkmann goes, it goes back to our earlier question. I think the DEA ought to answer questions about why it took three years, nearly three years to bring this guy down. And I will say, although I don’t necessarily hold the federal government responsible for this. But one of the things that drew me to this case was that my dad and Paul Volkman received federal scholarships to go to medical school. They were part of this federally funded MSTP Medical Scientist Training Program. So one of the things that initially fascinated me about the case was this kind of symmetry of Paul Volkman was given a federal scholarship in the late 60s and the mid 70s to become this highly credentialed doctor and then 30 some odd years later, another part of the federal government investigated him and brought him down.
Donnis: You’re still involved in promoting and getting the word out about your book. I wonder what is next for Phil Eil. Do you have another book project that you’re working on?
Eil: Well, I have been in this very studio to talk about the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that was a part of this book projec. In which I enlisted the help of the Rhode Island ACLU and two local pro-bono attorneys to sue the drug enforcement administration for thousands of pages of unreleased evidence that was shown during Volkman’s trial. Over the course of the many, many years that I was sitting around waiting for an answer in my FOIA case, I got really interested in that law and I wrote about the law and I researched the law and I met people who were equally passionate about it. And I also discovered that nobody had really written a kind of engaging, colorful popular history of the Freedom of Information Act. So, that’s the story I have my eye on next. I would love to write, maybe not the definitive version, but an entertaining and enlightening, history of the Freedom of Information Act. Because I think there’s so many kind of untold stories there.
Donnis: Well, Phil, we’ve known each other for a long time. I’m so happy for your success with Prescription for Pain. How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer”. Thank you so much for joining us.
Eil: Thank you so much for having me, Ian.
