HUNTINGTON, West Virginia — The raw majestic beauty in this corner of the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains is breathtaking; situated along the Ohio River, with Kentucky just nine miles down the road, there are few words that give justice to its abundant natural resources and natural glory.
It is those very natural resources that contributed in large part to this Cabell County city’s’ success for centuries; coal, oil, chemicals, and steel along with the railroads and waterways that transported those goods helped make it the second largest city in the Mountain State.
Yet, neither this natural beauty nor the area’s abundance of these resources has been able to curtail the despair and decline that has befallen Huntington’s treasure: its people.
Decades of job decline have led to people either fleeing the state or dying off. The latest U.S. Census Bureau population data show that Cabell County has lost nearly half of its population since 1960, falling from 84,000 in that year to 45,000 in the 2019 estimates.
Today, it is hard to find anyone who stayed here who hasn’t seen a friend, neighbor, co-worker, or a family member fall to something else: addiction, and opioids and meth in particular.
For years, no one appreciated or attempted to publicize the magnitude of the problem, said Cabell County Sheriff Chuck Zerkle.
“Nobody wanted to talk about the dirty needle-using, heroin, and all that stuff,” he said. “And then, it just kept coming, and it never let up.”
Zerkle said the addiction problem didn’t start on the streets; it started in doctors’ offices. “At one time, the medical profession, their thing was medicate people to the point of no pain, no complaint.”
It happened with the elderly, their children, and their grandchildren, Zerkle said. “We’ve seen this thing come full circle. In Cabell County, especially, and it is part of the lawsuit, that every man, woman, and child was prescribed hundreds of opioid pills a year.”
Zerkle was referring to a lawsuit that the county filed against opioid distributors for their role in the addiction epidemic the year he took office as the county sheriff, “the year before 28 people overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin within a couple of hours.”
The city and county’s case against several opioid distributors is set to go to trial on May 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. Nationally, McKinsey & Company, the government and Big Business consultant, recently agreed to pay nearly $600 million to settle investigations with attorneys general in 49 states for its role in facilitating OxyContin distribution sales through its client, Perdue Pharma.
“You just don’t understand the magnitude of how much medicine was dispensed,” Zerkle said. “A lot brought in here from Detroit or wherever else come through our pharmacies and through our doctors. That’s part of the lawsuit. What we’re touching on is these dispensaries knew the magnitude of what they were sending here.”
The National Institutes of Health reported in 2018 that West Virginia providers wrote 69.3 opioid prescriptions for every 100 persons, compared to the average U.S. rate of 51.4 prescriptions.
It is unclear what is more shocking in that data — that that is one of the top ten rates in the country or that it was the lowest the rate has been since 2006, when the data first became available.
Zerkle explained that the isolation of the pandemic has exacerbated the problem. “The change was abrupt, and the impact was immediate,” Zerkle said of the sudden closure of businesses and public places.
The Huntington and Cabell County uptick in overdoses did not quite reach 2020 levels, but Zerkle said he believes that is because of recent improvements in how health authorities handle such incidents. “We’ve got a team here, that EMS has, called the QRT,” he said. “It’s a quick response team. What we do is we go back and follow up with these people a few days or a day or so after their overdose to try to let them know that there is a choice other than what they’re doing right now.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data report that nationwide, more than 81,000 people died from drug overdoses between June 2019 and June 2020, a 21% jump over the prior comparable period. That makes last year the deadliest year for overdoses in U.S. history.
“This epidemic is as much of an epidemic as the pandemic,” West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, speaking to the Washington Examiner from his office in Charleston, said.
Manchin referred also to recent CDC findings that an HIV outbreak here is “the most concerning in the United States,” precipitated by drug use and the exchange of dirty needles.
On Monday, Manchin submitted a congressional inquiry with the CDC regarding the HIV outbreak. West Virginia state health department data show that in 2019, over 64% of HIV cases were a direct result of intravenous drug use. Five years earlier, it had been only 12%. The increase was largely found in clusters here in Huntington as well as in Charleston.
Neither Manchin nor Zerkle could pinpoint the day that West Virginia started down the slippery slope of addiction. Maybe it was during the Great Recession of 2008, or maybe before. But it has been real here for a very long time, long before the national media began making a spectacle over it.
The problem stands in such stark contrast to the profound beauty of the state and its people. Drive in any direction here, and the contrasts are everywhere. There are steep mountains and deep valleys abundant with trout, hiking trails, roaring rapids, and hardworking people. There are also run-down homes in secluded hollows. Even right in the center of the state capitol, one can find a dispiriting number of people who have lost their souls to addiction.
“It’s a slippery slope, and you don’t know where to go back, how far to go back,” Zerkle said. “You just woke up one day, and it was horrible. … We’ve learned long ago, we can’t arrest our way out of this thing. We can’t put everybody in jail. We’re going to have to come up with a plan that we can have enough money to fund viable projects and things that we can use to really, seriously get people fixed and not create a bunch of bureaucratic red tape, where we form a bunch of committees and institutions and we spend all the money on the leadership of it and the money doesn’t trickle down to the street.”
Both Manchin and Zerkle said they worry over how politics and the impulse to throw money at problems may be worsening and not ameliorating them. They said they are also frustrated over society’s inability to address mental illness. Both men are elected Democratic officials who struggle with many aspects of a national Washington-based party that has long forgotten the state, its people, and its problems.
Manchin said that one of his biggest concerns is the temptation, made available by the government, for addicts or recovering addicts to use their COVID-19 relief money on drugs rather than their families or their children.
“If you have an addicted couple, husband and wife, they might be living, who knows, together or whatever, and they have three children and that type of an atmosphere. They’re going to get … on top of the [original] $9,000, $3000 per child,” Manchin said. “They never had money. That’s when it comes to them. Then, they’re going to get [another] $1,400 per child. That’s another $4,200. So, now there’s $13,200. The parents are going to get 14 a piece. That’s 28. Now, there’s $16,000. You imagine what they would do with that buying drugs.”
“Somehow, before the money went to addicted parents, it should have been controlled to [the] child advocacy’s office to make sure that the children had a place to stay, a safe place, nutrition, things of that sort,” Manchin continued. “If it’s not managed properly, that’s what bothers me. So, we will watch it very carefully.”
Zerkle agreed, only his focus is on the institutions receiving money. “You’ve seen it before where you throw some money at things, and you create this hierarchy of this committee or whatever, and everybody’s making big money. And then, at the end of the day, you spend all your money, and the people that you intended to help don’t get help.”
Zerkle, 62, who has been in law enforcement all of his life, was elected sheriff twice, in 2016 and 2020, years in which Republicans swept Democrats out of office up and down the ballot in this once impenetrable Democratic stronghold.
He said he isn’t all that sure he will remain a Democrat.
“What I’ve believed in for 30-some years is being questioned greatly. I’d like to see some of this stuff come out of Washington, if they actually pass some of this stuff, what path I’ll choose to go down,” he said. He added that he may just consider changing his party, although he has reservations about that, too. “We’re a supermajority Republican right now in the House and Senate of West Virginia, and they’re doing some of the craziest things that I’ve ever seen.”
Zerkle is term-limited out of the sheriff’s job after this new term, and he said he is fine with that. As for running for another office, it is still just an idea under consideration. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I’m kind of like a lot of people right now. I got my belly full of politics.”
