A community ponders role of drugmakers in opioid struggle
JACKSON, Ohio — The numbers are staggering: An average yearly total of 107 opioid pills per resident were distributed over a seven-year period in this rural Appalachian county.
The newly released federal data is shocking even to people who live here in Jackson County, where nearly everyone seems to have known someone who died from drugrelated causes. Five children in one elementary school class were said to have lost a parent to an overdose death this past academic year.
Standing at his son’s grave in Coalton, a village of fewer than 500 people, Eddie Davis remembers vividly his last conversation, in his home nearly 10 years ago, with the son he called Bub, “not knowing that would be the last time I would see him or hear his voice or be able to hug him.”
Soon, Jeremy Edward Davis was dead, at age 33.
“My son was accountable for himself; he did what he did, he chose to do that,” Davis, 67, said Wednesday.
But then he wondered aloud about the role of the drugmakers, and those who did the overprescribing. “Again, how did the drugs get here, how did the pills get here, who is responsible for it? I think they should pay.”
The outsized numbers of prescription pain pills have helped fuel many heartbreaking stories of overdose deaths like Davis’. They’ve also contributed to uneven addiction recovery and surging foster care rates as parents lose their children or leave them orphaned.
“When I was an addict, this town was misery,” said William Carter, who struggled with an addiction to pain pills, and then heroin, for more than a decade. “It was nothing but trying to hustle to make your next fix.”
The 42-year-old resident of Jackson, the county seat, started on pain pills in 2000, then later turned to far cheaper and more available heroin as law enforcement crackdowns reduced the availability of pills.
Carter said his life “was pure hell. It was just trying not to be sick. It was shooting up in every gas station bathroom in this town,” he said. “When I think about that, it disgusts me.”
Such stories are all too common here.
“Essentially, there is no segment of our communities that are not impacted by this,” said Robin Harris, executive director for a governmental board that helps provide addiction and mental health services in the region.
Treatment centers and psychiatric hospital beds are full, and while churches and faith organizations are helping the government and agency efforts, resources don’t stretch nearly far enough in an impoverished area, said Harris.
In the elementary class of 53 children, she said, the five who experienced the deaths of parents from overdose included a boy who was alone with his dead father for 12 hours because he had no telephone service to call for help.
Census data shows nearly one in five of the county’s more than 32,000 residents live in poverty in a region that has long lagged the rest of the nation economically as a result of losing coal, iron and steel industry jobs.
Yet people will buy drugs, said Jackson County Municipal Judge Mark Musick, who oversaw Carter’s recovery.