How a Pharma Giant Flooded the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation With Opioids

It was easy for Jana Wolf Necklace to get painkillers on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. She developed an opioid addiction while working at her dad’s bar in Fort Yates, the main town on the North Dakota side of the tribe’s land. Eventually, she started trading alcohol to customers for pills they obtained from the reservation’s federally-run Indian Health Services pharmacy.
“There was all kinds — whatever you wanted was around here, and a lot of it,” Wolf Necklace, 43, recalled. “People would come and they would have big bottles....