A close one

According to The Hill, WV Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, who has previously supported retaining Medicaid expansion, is now open to phasing it out. This would be a disaster to the Mountain State, where 175,000 people have gained coverage. According to WV DHHR Secretary Bill Crouch, that includes 50,000 people getting treatment for opioid addiction in a state that leads the nation in overdose deaths.

The House plan, according to the CBO, would over time cut Medicaid coverage for 14 million people. Even a kinder, gentler, slower Senate phaseout could end coverage for millions.

Just another reason why it's important for West Virginians to contact Senator Capito's office and urge her to preserve this lifeline for so many West Virginians. To find out how to do that, click here.

780 million opioids?

A bit of a downer before the holidays: the latest Front Porch features Gazette-Mail reporter Eric Eyre on his series about WV's opioid epidemic. It's hard to get my head around this but over a few year's time, 780 MILLION opioids were dumped into WV, mostly to depressed areas in the southern coalfields.

I actually did the math, based on measuring one of my own (not very interesting) medicines: at 2.5 pills per inch w 63,360 inches per mile, 158,400 pills per mile divided into 780M=4,924.24 miles of pills. It's about the distance in air miles from New York City to Honolulu.

Damn.

An act of war

In case you missed it, please take a look at this great reporting from Gazette-Mail journalist Eric Eyre about WV's opioid epidemic. It's really hard to get your head around. Or my head, anyway.

Teaser: a handful of drug companies poured 780 MILLION pain pills into WV over a few years, even while our overdose rate increased. They specifically targeted a handful of rural communities in the coalfields.

It reminds me of Great Britain's shameful behavior towards China (or is that Jina?) during the opium wars, when that empire forced addictive drugs on the Chinese people.

If another country did this to us, we'd go to war. Unless it was Russia, which apparently gets a pass from the president elect.

Sad story. Will it get sadder?

You may have already heard a lot about WV's opioid overdose issue. The short answer to the question "How bad is it?" is "Pretty damn."

Yesterday's Washington Post talks about:

a national crisis that has been worst of all in rural West Virginia, where health officials estimate that overdose rates are now eight to 10 times higher than the national average. Middle-aged white men in this part of the country have lost a full year of life expectancy during the past two decades. Middle-aged white women have lost more than two years. The opiate epidemic has essentially wiped out an entire generation of health advances, and now West Virginia has begun to focus more of its resources on prevention and preservation among the next generation entering into the void.

The crisis has even led to the creation of a new term for children who lost parents due to overdoses: opiate orphans.

Sadly, the president elect and the Republican congress want to wipe out one ray of hope for dealing with this epidemic: Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

Tomorrow, health care advocates are planning to rally around the country urging that the helpful provisions of the ACA not be repealed until they are replaced. An action is also planned for Charleston, which will occur near Senator Capito's office. More on that here.

From the horse's mouth

The city of Huntington is ground zero in WV's opioid crisis. When 26 people there overdosed in a few hours, the story made headlines nationwide. It was nice to see this editorial in that city's Herald-Dispatch about how to respond. Here's bit:

If locking up users and dealers were the "silver bullet," we would have won the war on drugs years ago. Largely because of tougher penalties for drugs, the American prison population rose from 400,000 in the 1970s to record levels of 2.3 million in recent years....

Local, state and federal government has spent billions fighting drugs for the past 50 years. A reasonable investment in prevention, treatment and recovery is long overdue.

The rest is here.

This is a much more productive approach than more mandatory minimums as proposed by Republican candidate for governor Bill Cole.

Prison nation

On the latest Front Porch program/podcast, we spoke with my friend Pastor Matthew Watts of Grace Bible Church and Hope Community Development on Charleston WV's west side. This is a heavily edited version of a long conversation we had about prisons, race, mass incarceration, social changes and more.

WISDOM BOOKS. Regular readers of this blog know I'm a sucker for ancient Greek and Roman classics. Right now, I've made a decent start at rereading three classics that I plan on going through again and again: Plutarch's Lives, Herodotus' Histories and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. (I'm about 320 pages through the first and just finished the life of Timoleon, the Corinthian leader who liberated Sicily from the rule of tyrants.) So it's no wonder that this Gazette-Mail op-ed on Thucydides caught my eye.

SAD SIGN OF THE TIMES. It's no secret that WV has a drug overdose problem and that my county of Cabell is ground zero. It was really sad for me to read that school nurses in that county are preparing to administer naxolone for opioid overdoses.

Big news day in WV

The big news in WV today is the visit of President Obama to Charleston to discuss the opioid addiction crisis. This state leads the nation in overdose deaths.

You can read more or watch the whole thing here. The president also gave Gazette Mail reporter David Gutman and exclusive interview here.

Not surprisingly, coal supporters, many of whom blame all the ills of the industry on the president, also rallied. There was some racial dog whistling at the event. It is my long held position that the blackness of the president has been a gift from the gods both to the industry and to certain politicians.

The state's attorney general also used the visit to show his....position.

"Ripe for the picking"

Here's another great report by the Charleston Gazette-Mail's David Gutman. This one is on how WV came to lead the nation in overdoses.

ANOTHER BAD IDEA. Here's another report on why eliminating WV's personal property tax, a priority for big business, is a bad idea.

WELCOME CANINES! Enter the dog.