government ordered the Cherokee tribe from its western North Carolina land in the 1830s as part of the Trail of Tears, thousands were forced to march to Oklahoma, where they formed the Cherokee Nation. The plaintiffs want the drug companies to pay for the economic burdens opioids have caused - medical care for addicts and babies born to drug-dependent mothers, counseling and increased needs for law enforcement. “By not reporting the predatory numbers it led to more people becoming addicted.” “There’s complicity in this national epidemic because the drug companies were not doing what they were supposed to do,” Sneed said. Now the tribe has joined a federal lawsuit that accuses several drug makers of contributing to the opioid epidemic through corrupt practices, such as shipping too many drugs into the region.ĭrug companies are responsible for reporting suspicious orders of opioids to federal officials, said Chief Richard Sneed. Last year, more than 4,500 patients received such a diagnosis. The number of patients diagnosed with a drug-related condition at Cherokee Indian Hospital increased 300 percent between 20, according to hospital spokesperson Sheyashe Littledave. In September, federal authorities arrested 76 people and seized opioids valued at more than $1 million during a raid on the reservation. The Qualla Boundary was one of 10 locations across the country identified last year as a “high intensity drug trafficking area” by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Today, Brawley helps lead a drug-recovery program in hopes of reducing overdose deaths from prescription drugs and heroin.

Photo by Travis Long/ says she’s been off drugs for two years now.

I’ve done 10 a day.” Samantha Brawley, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, right, hugs a woman who was celebrating a milestone in her addiction recovery during a peer support group at Webster Baptist Church in Sylva last year. “I began taking two or three a day for a year, maybe two years,” said Brawley, 30, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Samantha Brawley got hooked on painkillers after high school, an addiction that stole nearly a decade and cost her most of the savings that were supposed to help improve her life.įinding her next Percocet, and the next, was easy on the Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee reservation home to roughly 8,000 people in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina.

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