One of the things I admire most about Providence-based journalist Philip Eil — other than his gifted writing style and uncanny ability to spot story angles that so many others miss — is his patience.
We’ve grown up together in Rhode Island media for the last 14 years or so — me at GoLocalProv, WPRI, and now the Globe, and him as the final editor of the beloved alt-weekly, the Providence Phoenix, and writing profiles for Rhode Island Monthly — and he’s been working on the same project about some pill-pushing doctor in Ohio the entire time.
The doctor, Paul Volkman, is now known as the “pill mill killer” and is currently serving four consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his role in the overdose deaths of four of his patients. He was accused of flooding southern Ohio with prescription drugs, exacerbating the opioid epidemic.
Eil has finally seen his project through, and the result is the exhaustively reported “Prescription for Pain,” which was released April 9.. His book party was held at Riffraff in Providence, and he’ll be at Books on the Square in Providence on April 25 at 6 p.m.
Eil brilliantly chronicles Volkman’s rise from talented undergraduate to lawsuit-laden doctor who has to resort to working for a cash-only pain clinic because he can’t find any insurers to cover him. And because Volkman is one of the rare doctors who stood trial in a case like this — as opposed to taking a plea — there were thousands of pages of transcripts and evidence that allowed Eil to thoroughly examine every facet of the story.
The book itself belongs alongside Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Empire of Pain” and Beth Macy’s “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America” as the must-read tales about a man-made crisis that has devastated families across our country.
But it’s also an incredible personal accomplishment for Eil, who has been reporting on Volkman since 2009, and has written and rewritten book proposals for this project since he earned his master of fine arts from Columbia in 2011.
“I thought I was ready to tell this story at the time,” Eil told me this week. “I wasn’t ready.”
Eil said the experience he gained editing the Providence Phoenix — which, to be clear, mostly meant reporting out dozens of his cover stories — and later writing profiles for Rhode Island Monthly on fascinating figures like US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and prominent attorney Max Wistow — helped build the reporting chops needed to write his book.
Add in a yearslong battle with the federal government over court records from the trial — which the Rhode Island ACLU helped him fight — and you’ve got a journalist who was truly battle-tested.
Eil needed all of those skills to keep up with Volkman, whose irrational confidence in his own innocence was equal parts confounding, intimidating, and at times, convincing.
Volkman also seemed to want to take advantage of the loose personal connection he had to Eil. He attended undergraduate and medical school with Eil’s dad, and Eil acknowledged that for a while, Volkman thought he had an ally.
“He was always trying to argue that I ought to lobby on his behalf,” Eil said. “I repeatedly told him that I was a journalist interested in the truth.”
The two eventually stopped corresponding. Volkman likely realized he wasn’t going to be able to manipulate Eil’s reporting, and Eil continued on the path of telling the stories of Volkman’s victims. He also got a first-class, on-the-ground education about the opioid epidemic.
“To me, there is no greater responsibility as a journalist than telling a story of the victim of a crime who is no longer around to tell their story,” Eil said. “I took that responsibility very seriously.”
I told Eil that every time a new book or movie or hit series about the opioid crisis was released, I felt a little queasy for him because I worried that his book might never hit the market. And he said some of the rejection letters he received did indicate that the market might be oversaturated.
Steerforth Press took a shot on Eil anyway, and as he sees it, “Prescription for Pain” can be a part of the puzzle when historians look back at this catastrophe.
“I think it’s an enormous ongoing horrific crisis, and it’s one that we as a society want to try to understand so that we can avoid having something like this happen again,” Eil said.
Still, Eil, who turns 39 this week, admitted, “If you had told me going in this was going to take 15 years, I probably would have dropped it.”
We should all be thankful that he stuck with it.
Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.