Fracking corporations, not poor people, should pay for West Virginia teachers’ raises
A new documentary about the opioid crisis shows the undeniable value of funding public services.
With all the dysfunction in Washington and seemingly endless talk about the economy, it’s hard to remember that the government literally saves people’s lives.
I was reminded when I watched a new documentary, Heroin(e), which was nominated for an Oscar but lost on Sunday night.
It follows Jan Rader, a fire chief in Huntington, West Virginia, a city of about 50,000 on the Ohio River and nestled up against the Appalachian Mountains. Rader runs from fast food bathroom stalls to empty apartments trying to save people from overdosing on the region’s latest drug of choice, heroin. Her weapon is the drug Naxalone provided by the local public health department, which when injected rapidly blocks the effects of opioids.
“I fear that we’ve lost a couple generations, not just one generation,” she says. “This is my community. This is our community. We will not be defined by this problem.”
Rader has her work cut out for her. Huntington has been called “the overdose capital of America,” its overdose death rate 10 times the national average. Shots of subtle but gorgeous mountains, rows of porched brick homes, and regional fast food joints — Tudor’s Biscuit World and Sheetz — remind me of visits my family made when I was growing up in nearby Maryland. My father’s side is from a small West Virginia town about three hours southeast, but one of my grandmother’s sisters once owned one of those Huntington brick homes.
But I was too young then to register the suffering of a rust belt city trying to make it work in a new economy. Heroin(e) shows a city not only suffering through a crisis, but getting used to it. No one in the film appears shook up or surprised about any of the overdoses, even when a woman passes out on a gas station counter. “It doesn’t shock me anymore,” says a firefighter after injecting her Naxalone.
But it also shows the value of public services and why we pay taxes in the first place. This world can be tough, especially in an economy designed to pit us against each other. All of us need help in one way or another. None of us are truly self-made.
Rader exemplifies that. “It’s a moral obligation to me. I’m an old medic. I’m a nurse. I’m a firefighter. I’m built to help people,” she says. By the end of the film she’s promoted to fire chief, the first woman to hold that position in the state’s history.
Heroin(e)’s message is all the more urgent after what happened in West Virginia this week. Some Republican lawmakers who agreed to raise pay for teachers and other public employees after an historic strike have said they plan to afford it by cutting social services like Medicaid rather than raising taxes on fracking corporations.
That can’t happen — people will die.
Jeremy Mohler performs strategic communications for In the Public Interest, a nonprofit that advocates for the democratic control of public goods and services.
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