State of Crisis: My Home Under Siege

My home state of West Virginia is currently going through a very well-publicized epidemic with heroin.

My thoughts on the matter follow.

I love West Virginia. It doesn’t get much better than here. It’s beautiful and friendly, the food is terrific, and you won’t find better neighbors. But underneath the tourist reactions and expectations, lies a dark secret.

An impoverished, and addicted population.

According to Talkpoverty.org, the unemployment rate was 5.2% in 2017, 19.1% of all West Virginians live below the Federal Poverty Line, and 22.9% of children are living in poverty in WV’s 2nd District and Capitol, Charleston.

While faced with the growing income and employment disparities, several million opioid prescriptions were being handed out like candy by companies like Purdue Pharma, who manufacture the drugs Oxycontin and Hysingla.

We blinked, and millions of our fellow West Virginians were hooked.

Before long, pills weren’t the only way people were getting high.

When the Bell Tolls

In 1999 overdose-related deaths in West Virginia were 1.8 per 100,000, in 2016 that number had exploded to a whopping 43.4! What’s going on?

I’m watching friends and family die without warning or illness, my classmates are dying, and on every other corner are paramedics trying to revive someone with Narcan.

It’s terrifying.

Why did the number of overdose deaths increase so exponentially?

Heroin.

In 2016 state and local leaders came together to try and address a growing prescription painkiller issue.

Their solution?

Shut it down.

Stop all of it.

Make it nearly impossible to access the drugs and keep tabs on anyone who does.

With the flow of opioids slowing to a trickle, people who were kicked off their medicine by doctors had nowhere else to turn for the addiction that had already started by taking the pills, so they started getting heroin off the streets.

It was ill-planned on the part of the lawmakers, and the heroin epidemic has come to be the downfall of our beautiful state.

There have been few efforts to combat the epidemic here in Charleston.

The health department started a needle exchange, but the rules were lax, people began finding needles laying all over the place, there was outrage, and the exchange program was shut down.

With a staggeringly low number of people in the state covered by health insurance, 9.7% to be exact, finding help for addiction may not be as simple as some think.

You can’t just walk into a clinic and say, “Hey, I’m a heroin addict and would like to get clean.”

It just doesn’t work that way.

You need insurance, or you will be coming out of pocket, and a lot of places only take cash.

So what are people like this supposed to do?

If they want the suboxone, they will need money.

So they steal. They steal your kid’s bike, your grill from your front porch, your tools and anything else they can take to a pawn shop or drug dealer to get money.

Even the addict most concerned with getting clean will likely steal to get cash so they can buy the regulated drug from a doctor instead of heroin from a dealer. Can’t win for losin’.

Aren’t we All Human?

I was a drug addict.

Heroin was never my drug of choice, but I know what it feels like, trapped in that vicious cycle. Knowing you could be arrested and lose your child, your job and your home; it’s a hard thing to go through and to watch others go through.

I see a lot of folks who talk down about addicts, and I get it; they steal and lie, and if you’ve ever found yourself loving an addict, that’s a whole other kind of pain. Regardless, these people are just that, people. They are sons and daughters, mothers and fathers.

No one chooses addiction; it’s disease of the mind.

I know what you’re thinking, they picked up the drug in the first place and now they are where they are.

Well, let me tell you, their circumstances of which you know nothing about, led them to that drug and that life and judging them won’t fix the problem.

Even if you’ve been personally and negatively affected by this crisis, help them, as you would your brother and love thy neighbor, because after all, it is what truly makes West Virginia a special place to call home. Love.

Montani Semper Liberi, Wild and Wonderful, Home.