Smoke'Em Out

Mike Moore wrote the legal playbook that took down Big Tobacco. Now he’s going after the opioid industry.

- Esmé E . Deprez and Paul M. Barrett 

Seven years ago, Mike Moore stepped from the 2 a.m. darkness into the light of a small home off Lakeland Drive in Jackson, Miss., to find his nephew close to death. The 250-pound 30-year-old was slumped on the living room couch, his face pale, breath shallow, and chest wet with vomit. It was his fiancée who’d called Moore, waking him in a panic. Now they were both screaming in the man’s ears, dousing him with ice cubes and water, and pinching him as his respiratory system began to collapse.

Moore had become familiar with the signs of an overdose since his nephew, for whom he’s a father figure, filled his first legal prescriptions in 2006 for Percocet, an opioid painkiller made by Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. By 2010, his nephew, who asked not to be named, was obtaining generic fentanyl on the street. Another synthetic analog to the opium poppy, fentanyl— the drug that killed Prince—is as much as 100 times stronger than morphine. The night of the overdose, Moore’s nephew had been wearing a fentanyl patch on his arm and sucking on another. “An ordinary horse would have been dead,” Moore recalls in his Mississippi drawl.

Rather than waiting for an ambulance, Moore dragged his nephew to his car and raced toward the hospital. As doctors revived the unconscious man, the stares of the staff and other patients were made worse for Moore by recognition. Once his home state’s highest-profile public official, now he was just one more American confronting the opioid epidemic.