Portsmouth was the pill mill capital of America, really. They had more pill mills per capita in that town than anywhere else in the country. Pill mills are where a doctor prescribes pills for cash without almost any diagnosis of any pain problems or anything like that. Pill mills usually have long, long lines — Portsmouth had a dozen of these, and they prescribed millions of pills a year and was one of the main reasons why so many people got addicted there.

The godfather of all that was a guy by the name of David Proctor. And by the 1990s when the main painkiller in all this, Oxycontin, is released, he sees this as basically a business model. You can prescribe these pills and people will pay you $250 every month to get that prescription, and you will always have your clinic full. And that's what happened for many years in that town. He also taught a lot of doctors who came to work for him how to run these pill mills.

So he became kind of the Ray Kroc, the McDonald's of pill mills with one Kentucky cop — and all these doctors went out on their own and spread this pill mill phenomenon to eastern Kentucky, parts of West Virginia and other parts of Ohio. It was a big part of how this epidemic got going early on.

Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton announced on Thursday he would not run for president, ending his months-long flirtation with a White House bid centered on national security.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, gearing up for a Democratic presidential primary in which he will likely be massively outspent by Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Wednesday the modern campaign finance system had reduced elected officials to “telemarketers.”

Saying he plans a decision on whether to launch a White House bid soon, O’Malley added “any member of Congress” should welcome publicly financed campaigns because the fund-raising demands prevent them from performing other work. He used a barnyard epithet to offer his opinion of the current system, which allows for unregulated money to flow to outside committees organized to support or oppose candidates.

“We’ve turned them into a bunch of telemarketers. They’re no — how can you tell me that you’re actually representing the interests of your district when you’re spending 20 hours a week on a telephone like an idiot in some little room calling people again and again and again asking for PAC checks. I mean, this is bull----.”

Attendees included Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout, who challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last year, as well as her former running mate, Columbia Law professor Tim Wu. Also in attendance were several MSNBC contributors and hosts, sources said.

And mingling with the crowd were O’Malley operatives Bill Hyers, who served as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign manager in 2013; spokeswoman Lis Smith; and Karine Jean-Pierre, O’Malley’s PAC’s new national political director.

“I’m so thrilled we’re getting a competitive primary,” Teachout said after the meeting. “I’m happy [Bernie] Sanders is in the race, but it sounds like O’Malley’s going to run and that’s important.”

O’Malley spoke for about 15 minutes and then took questions, according to attendees. “What came through very clearly was that he’s running as a strong progressive,” said one attendee who declined to be identified. “He hit on big banks and regulations and the shortcomings of the administration.”

Martin O’Malley ought to be a Democrat’s dream candidate. In two terms as the governor of Maryland, he’s ushered in a sweeping liberal agenda that includes gay marriage, gun control, an end to the death penalty, and in-state college tuition for undocumented immigrants. He’s trim and handsome; he plays in an Irish rock band; he even served as the basis for a character on The Wire (sort of—more on that in a minute). He shows great zeal for improving things both large and small: during a recent visit to the Light House, a homelessness-prevention center in Annapolis that provides job training and other assistance, he said that he had, as governor, taken the state’s traditional Day to Serve and made it 17 days long. “I really enjoy progress, and making progress, and my joy comes from understanding that it happens one life at a time,” he told me, reflecting on the center’s work.

O’Malley refuses to pout about his negligible public image. “My process doesn’t involve polling; it involves listening,” he told me sunnily, leaning back in his chair. We had moved to one of the Light House’s back rooms, which smelled faintly of disinfectant. I wondered aloud whether it might heighten O’Malley’s profile if he were to pick fights from time to time, particularly with Clinton, whose every sneeze launches a thousand cable-news segments. But O’Malley claimed he did not resent Clinton’s prominence: “She’s an iconic figure, and someone who has so many accomplishments in public service, that it doesn’t surprise me at all.” Asked whether he had something to offer that Clinton did not, O’Malley said, “I do.” I pressed him as to what that might be. Finally, after praising Clinton and Biden, he said, “The thing I believe presents something of value to my country, especially in these times, is my experience as an executive, and as somebody that was able to bring people together in order to get things done.”

In his travels around the country, O’Malley said, he had discovered that people were looking for a new kind of leadership. It was this realization that convinced him that the polls don’t matter. “History’s full of all sorts of instances where candidates at various levels, whether mayor or governor or president, have begun a race at 1 or 2 percent,” he said. He wasn’t wrong: both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were considered long shots before beginning their primary campaigns, and Barack Obama trailed in early primary polling. O’Malley emphasized that he had himself gone from single digits to victory when he ran for mayor of Baltimore in 1999. Underdogs have historically succeeded, O’Malley said, when “they knew what they were about, they knew what they had to offer, and they offered it at a time when the people most needed that way of leadership.”

Under O’Malley, Maryland was ranked first nationwide in public-school achievement by Education Week for five years in a row and twice designated the top state for innovation and entrepreneurship by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I couldn’t help but think that, given these achievements, it must be a little galling to be treated as such an afterthought in the presidential race. Wasn’t a successful two-term governor of a populous state due more respect? O’Malley was having none of it. “People in our country can become very famous overnight,” he pointed out. Besides, he went on, laughing: “Why would anyone go into politics for respect? You don’t go into politics for respect. You go into politics to get something done.”

On that debate stage was Martin O’Malley, a little-known City Councilman running a decidedly longshot campaign for mayor. He answered that the questioner and families like hers should stay in the city because if he was elected, he would bring it back, make the place worth living in again.

From 2000-2010, the incidents of crime in Baltimore dropped 43 percent, outpacing by a stretch the 11 percent drop that the nation saw during that period. The crime rate dropped by 40 percent. Graduation rates rose. Median home prices doubled. A new biotech park was built on the city’s east side. A new performing arts center was built on the west side. O’Malley was obsessed with numbers and metrics, and set up a 311 call center to track citizen complaints. A program called Project 5000 enlisted volunteer attorneys to help deal with the city’s massive vacant home problem as titles to those homes was eventually transferred to individuals and non-profits for redevelopment. The school system was pulled back from the fiscal brink. CitiStat, designed to track crime, helped bring the crime rate down and created a budget surplus of $54 million that was then reinvested in schools and programs for children. At last, the population stabilized. It was no longer necessary to flee, if you could. The number of college educated 25-to-34-year-olds living within three miles of downtown Baltimore increased 92 percent in the ten years after O’Malley became mayor, fourth among the nation’s 51st largest metro areas.

“I don’t recall O’Malley stating that he would do something about ‘black crime,’ just crime,” wrote liberal Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodericks towards the end of O’Malley’s time in City Hall. “Coming out of the long, dreary Schmoke years, Baltimoreans appreciated O’Malley’s almost singular focus, along with millions in increased funding dedicated to drug treatment for the city’s thousands of addicts who contribute, directly and indirectly, to 80 percent of crime.”

“He was trying to stop the crime on the streets. People were getting killed daily on Old York Road and in Park Heights,” Robert Nowlin, a Baltimore community activist told The Daily Beast. “He did something a lot of these mayors don’t do: He walked with the small people. A lot of these mayors stay in the affluent areas. He walked the streets.”