Tale of Ohio’s ‘Pill Mill Killer’ outlined in Eil’s new book
Pill peddler enabled addictions for dozens
Dr. Paul Volkman viewed himself as a white-coated savior easing the suffering of chronic-pain patients in medically underserved swaths of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky.
He was, instead, a pill peddler for profit who dispensed millions of doses of prescription painkillers in enabling the addictions of those who desperately lined up at his cash-only clinics for their opioid fixes.
Dozens died from overdoses between 2003 and 2005 as the Drug Enforcement Administration chased Volkman out of South Shore, Kentucky, to Portsmouth, Ohio, to Chillicothe before finally indicting him as a drug dealer.
In his book “Prescription for Pain: How a Once-promising Doctor Became the ‘Pill Mill Killer,’ “Rhode Island journalist and first-time author Philip Eil masterfully chronicles Volkman’s life and the sad tales of those who succumbed to the physician’s prescription pad.
Eil at once produces a riveting true-crime page-turner and haunting, exhaustive study of a seemingly brilliant physician who, since 2011, is serving consecutive life sentences for killing patients while nonsensically insisting he is a healer-made victim.
Learning in the mid-2000s that Volkman was a medical school classmate of his father at the University of Chicago, Eil became intrigued and then obsessed with what unfolded in southern Ohio amid the depths of the prescription opioid epidemic.
“Prescription for Pain” is based on 15 years of research and interviews, including a lawsuit to leverage loose nearly 20,000 pages of DEA trial evidence and years of in-person talks and revealing correspondence with Volkman.
Rather than a cut-and-paste recitation of facts afflicting other books in the genre, Eil employs a perceptive touch in weaving his words, his empathy evident in dealing with the survivors of loved ones lost to the massive amounts prescribed by Volkman.
The book is a worthy read about one man’s monstrous role in the pill mills that afflicted Appalachian Ohio before his arrest and a state crackdown on pain-management clinics.