Fat city?

I love the city of Huntington. I'm no doubt biased. It's my county seat and it was always the city we could go to when we need a break from our small town. It's home of Marshall, my alma mater twice over.

It's been hit by tidal wave after tidal wave. Major deindustrialization, bad health, ground zero for opioid overdoses. But it keeps fighting back.

Usually any national attention it gets has to do with the opioid epidemic. This would be a case in point. Things are still bad there, but the fact that the city has made major progress in reducing overdoses doesn't always get the same level of attention.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this Washington Post story about how Huntington turned the corner from being America's most obese city. According to the CDC, the rate dropped by 13 percentage points over the last decade.

Some may remember when Jamie Oliver did a Food Revolution TV series about Huntington, with plenty of made up drama, but the heroes and heroines of this story are local.

And the city keeps plugging away.

Houston, we've got a problem

It's no secret that West Virginia, and my own county of Cabell, is ground zero for the opioid plague. As of 2015, Huntington had the highest drug overdose rate in the nation, with West Virginia "leading" the pack among states.

To get a sense of just how bad things are, consider this: yesterday between 3:30 and 9:00 pm fully 26 overdoses were reported in Huntington. It's almost miraculous, but so far nobody has died. While there's no such thing as a good batch of heroin, this one was particularly powerful. Some patients required more than one dose of naloxone to come out of it.

This year's overdose rate for the city is about the same as last year, but there is a bit of good news: the rate of overdose deaths is down by about 25 percent, from 35 last year to 26 this year.

The epidemic has got to be exhausting to the emergency medical service workers. According to this MetroNews report, some individual first responders helped save as many as eight overdose patience in one day.

This clearly shows the need for more investment in drug abuse prevention, treatment and recovery. And don't count on "the market" to provide it.