Virginia was once a lush heaven of mountains and valleys, where American Indians and immigrants had settled in peace, and toiled side by side. At first, that is.
Once the Indians were sent away on the trail of a million tears, which saw indigenous tribes travel hundreds of miles on foot to lands they had never known, only the immigrants were left.
Virginia was also a harsh country. Soon after the settlers took over the bucolic landscape, Virginia became the coal capital of the world. Rich veins were discovered that ran throughout the state. From this tiny state came the fuel that made America into the economic and industrial power of the past two centuries.
But the coal has been both the saviour and the damnation of the state, where rapacious energy interests have not provided for the locals as they relentlessly extracted the coal, and have never shared in the enormous bounty that came from Virginia's coal beds.
Now however, the coal is slowly vanishing. The deep veins that ran through West Virginia's majestic hills have all but been stripped, and soon whatever meager earnings West Virginians drew from the coal industry will dry out.
Already, the signs of an impending doom are becoming manifest and daunting. Poverty and poor education are paving the way for a drug epidemic that could define West Virginia as the failed state it will probably become.
In some areas, authorities have told teachers and school personnel to be on the lookout for possible abuse, as more and more children go to school unfed and unwashed, often a sign that parents have succumbed to heroin or other severe drug addictions.
In McDowell County, drug addiction levels are unprecedented, and are adding to the crushing poverty and lack of resources of the place. Now that the mining jobs are gone there is nothing to take their place, people are falling into the deepest desperation. The coal industry, which has contaminated and wrought havoc on the West Virginia landscape through leaching of coal processing chemicals and the ripping apart of mountain to expose the coal veins, has never provided for these communities aside from the dangerous and often underpaid mining jobs and the few small enterprises that fed from the meager revenues of the miners.
McDowell, in fact, has the frightening reputation of having the highest drug overdose rate in all of West Virginia, which already has its own dismal rates county-wise and statewide.
The decadence of McDowell county however, is not a sudden event. Since the 1980s when the steel industry all but collapsed and more jobs became mechanized, the moderate wealth afforded by mining jobs was already greatly diminishing.
As more economic instability ensued and small businesses supported by the coal mining jobs shuttered, gloom and anxiety set in. Alcohol was always a favorite escape. Now however, that gloom is fast transforming into total despair and people are increasingly relying on prescription medication, often gateway drugs, and then on hard drugs readily and cheaply available on West Virginia streets.
What has been observed nationally as a trend, the rise in heroin addiction generated by gateway drugs such as Oxycontin and other potent opiate derivatives, is already a full blown crisis in West Virginia.
In one school alone in War, West Virginia, 48% of the students have lost one parent or both to drug addiction, either through death by overdose or because the state had to remove the child from the household. In some more severe cases, children were removed from their homes because the parents were selling them to paedophiles for drug money.
In another school in the same city, 40% of kids need special education assistance and a good percentage of those were born addicted because their mothers used drugs during gestation.
The new generation, in the city of War, and the county and in every city in West Virginia ravaged by poverty, is by many people's assessment a lost one. So many children are scarred biologically and psychologically, that the people who are now taking care of them are almost at a loss on how to deal with their emotional wounds.
Recent data compiled on drug addiction in America pins West Virginia as the hardest case. Appalachia has the highest number of drug overdoses, with 28.9 deaths per 100,000 individuals. That's a 605% increase in 14 years. Back in 1999, the rate was only 4.1 per 100,000 individuals.
Since the late 1990s through today, West Virginia had become the thru way for prescription drug abuse. Couriers travelling to Florida pill mills often made their stop in West Virginia on their way back to the Mid-West. Some of the couriers were West Virginians, who ferried the drugs that were becoming increasingly in demand in the beleaguered state, and created their own pill mills.
Many cities in West Virginia have no infrastructure. Kermit, West Virginia is one of them. Only 300 people live there, but there is no supermarket, no mall, no cinema, not even a city centre.
However, Kermit has a pharmacy, which, until the drug companies changed the formulation of opiate derivatives into non-crushable form, was busier than grand central station. Lines at the drive through sneaked for city blocks and beyond as addicts waited to get their pills.
The pharmacy in Kermit had become a pill mill in its own right, and people knew that just about any opiate could be obtained there easily and seemingly legally. Just like Florida, tiny Kermit had become a pill mecca, and people drove to its remote location all the way from the north east to get their stuff.
DEA finally stormed the pharmacy in Kermit and shut down the operation. They found that the small pharmacy was doling out enough pills for the entire state to consume, to the tune of 3.2 million dosage of hydrocodone alone in just one year, 2006. Cash was so stuffed in drawers at the tiny pharmacy that they would not even close.
The closure of this pill mill however, created a fatal vacancy: soon people were looking for substitutes to the easily obtainable opiates. And that's when heroin dealers moved in. In fact drug gangs from as far as Detroit and Atlanta moved in to provide both the pills and their harder substitute, heroin.
The pills and now the heroin consumption are also bringing the obvious child of rampant addiction: violence. In Mingo county, authorities are almost helpless to stop what they are calling a catastrophic increase in violence that spans the entire gamut, from domestic violence, to murders, to burglaries to DUIs. Mingo county, just a decade ago, was the kind of place where one incidence of violence would have been the talk of the town. Now, no one is talking, as violence engulfs the impoverished county. Shootings in broad daylight have become so common, they barely make the news.
Many people blame the mining companies for more than just pillaging. Many miners are addicted to pills because of the injuries received from the work in the mines. Almost all miners have back problems and lung ailments. Oxycontin, in fact, was probably a staple adopted in the late 1990s.
Just recently, two West Virginia agencies have sued the pharmaceutical companies for causing the drug epidemic that is tearing the state apart. In a state where the Attorney General's wife is a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company that makes opiates, there is doubt that such action will bring a quick or even effective resolution to the problem.
But suing they are. Governor Earl Ray Tombling's office is pushing the action through. All money from possible settlements would go to the families of the people who have been affected by the prescription pill epidemic.
And that is only because the drug epidemic has so depleted West Virginia's medical and enforcement resources that they have to find a solution to the problem.
Partial Sources: Al Jazeera/Healthyamericans.org/Salon/Med. Malpractice: 3.26.14
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