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Addiction. Both of those previous books involved cases that had huge impacts. What they did was tell the stories in a way that you simply don’t get from corporate media. The media doesn’t know where all the bones are buried and they don’t take the time to do the digging anymore. People hear bits and pieces of it, but they don’t really get an insights as to what’s really happening.
Cousins: How does Law and Addiction continue the stories of the characters from the
previous installments?
Papantonio: This story picks up a few of
the characters from both book one, Law and Disorder, and book two, Law and Vengeance.
We always hold onto the old characters and
I end up bringing them forward, but the new characters are created because each one
of these big cases—whether it’s opioids,
or whether it’s the DuPont dump of toxins
into the Ohio River Valley, or whether it’s
a pharmaceutical company creating a dangerous toxin like Bayer creating Yaz—brought in new characters because the lawyers involved were different each time. You would have a new lawyer show up on a scene to handle a particular case. With this opioid case, there’s
a lot of new faces because there’s a lot of new involvement in trying to solve the opioid crisis.
Cousins: What can aspiring lawyers get out of this story?
Papantonio: To me, the reason Jake is such an important character in this book is because Jake is a young lawyer. He’s just gotten out of law school. He’s has his degree and his brother
has died from an overdose. Jake understands there’s more to what happened to his
brother than simply taking too many narcotics. He understands that for his brother, Blake, to have gotten to the point that he’s gotten to, there’s a lot of things involved. He goes back home and sees that his entire town is decimated by drug addiction, which is actually the case. If you go to West Virginia, for example, you go to
a city like Kermit, there’s 400 people in Kermit, and the industry was selling six to eight million pills in Kermit every year.
Oakley, the fictional town in the book, is a reflection of Kermit. These events, these cities, and these numbers that I talk about in the book are real. It really did happen.
problem so severe that the emergency care units can’t keep up with the number of addictions? The police department can’t keep up with the number overdoses. The entire infrastructure of Oakley is simply crumbling to where it’s regarded as zombie land.
Zombie land is a term I use in the book, but oddly enough, that is how they refer to some of these areas in West Virginia. If you’re talking to people, they literally will say, “I live right down the street from zombie land,” and that’s how bad it’s gotten. This book embraces all of those parts. It embraces the fact that Jake is way, way under prepared for this. His whole intention
is to start finding out what is it that happened here. It didn’t just happen because of drug pushers. Jake is kicking back the rotted log,
and he’s finding the manufacturers new exactly what they were doing. The distributors knew exactly what they were doing.
Jake understood all that, but to get there
he needed help. So, he brings in Nicholas Deketomis and the Deketomis Firm, but first he brings in a lawyer named Paul Vogel,
who is actually a character that is involved in the opioid crisis. Paul Farrell is his real name, but Paul Vogel is the attorney that helps Jake make this next step. How does he get past all of the money that’s being thrown at him from the standpoint of the defense industry just plowing money into making him go away, plowing lawyers into making him go away, using every bit of force and political power they can to make Jake go away? Paul Vogel comes along and says, “Well, we need to step it up even more,” and they hire the Nicholas Deketomis law firm.
Law and Addiction is available now, and Mike Papantonio will be on-site to sign copies during the Spring MTMP seminar.
Jake is a young lawyer who gets to town and he realizes that he doesn’t have a lot of experience. But he’s done very well in law school, and probably could have gone to work for any
major corporate firm in the United States.
He graduates at the top of his class, and
was really an overachiever as a law student. He realizes that the first thing he’s got to do
is take care of business, and the business is figuring out what happened to his brother, Blake. Why did it happen? Why is Oakley in such terrible shape? Why is there an addiction
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