Trump and the Hopeless
Solving the opioid epidemic
EXACTLY one month before Election Day, on a Monday, Rowen Lally boarded her school bus in McKeesport, Pa. Before the 7-year-old left her house, she cared for her infant sister with a bottle and a diaper change, leaving her 3- and 5-year-old brothers at home with her parents.
On the way home from school, Rowen told the school bus driver her parents looked blue when she left the house and she couldn’t wake them up; a quick call was made to the school, which notified police.
Authorities discovered Rowen’s parents had been dead since Friday of a heroin overdose.
A month earlier and 56 miles west, just over the Ohio border in East Liverpool, a startling photograph was distributed by local police showing a man and a woman slumped over in the front seat of their vehicle after overdosing. In the back sat the woman’s 4-yearold grandson still strapped into his car seat.
Moments like this across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, New York, New Hampshire, West Virginia and scores of other states are becoming frighteningly common as the nationwide opioid epidemic grips once-thriving industrial and rural towns.
Across the country, Main Streets feature boarded-up storefronts and recovery centers for drug addicts. Tiny municipalities with limited budgets must now invest in an abundant supply of Narcan, the life-saving opiate antidote.
This is an epidemic that shows no sign of waning; Ohio alone saw a record 3,050 drug-overdoses deaths last year; nearly 300 in Lorain County, with a population of about 300,000, alone.
In the small Lorain County town of Elyria just east of Cleveland, Pastor Paul Grodell and his ministry are trying desperately to save every soul he can.
Some days are rougher than others.
“This past summer, I did six funerals in two months and none of the people were over 30 years old,” Grodell told me.“Elyria, Ohio, is a small city of only 50,000 people, but proportionally, the overdose and death rates are among the highest in all of Ohio.”
Grodell, a former addict himself, runs Creation House, which focuses on having former addicts work with current patients.
“My addiction began in the ’80s when I was using pain pills to ease the aches of powerlifting competi- tions,” the pastor says. When that didn’t satisfy his addiction, street heroin did.
By 1990, he was indicted on seven felony charges, but he didn’t find sobriety until 1994 when a profound belief in God came calling. Six years later he was ordained, and in 2010 he founded a church to help not only the addicted, but the homeless and single mothers.
The opioid crisis affects all parts of the country, but it has been particularly severe in small cities and post-industrial manufacturing and textile towns, as well as rural areas. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released last week shows opioid deaths last year exceeded 30,000 for the first time in recent memory.
More people died from heroin-related causes than from gun homicides in 2015. Those staggering numbers coincide with the first decline in American life expectancy in 30 years.
During the campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly visited the regions hit hardest by the heroin epidemic. They’re the same places that have been hollowed out by job losses and hamstrung by a lack of education.
And on Election Day, he crushed it in the very counties where the epidemic is robbing people of their relationships, livelihoods and lives. In Appalachia, which has experienced high rates of drug, alcohol and suicide deaths, Hillary Clinton only won 21 of the 490 counties.
“The root of the addiction comes from the hopelessness that people feel in towns like Elyria,” said Grodell. “When you are in a state of hopelessness you reach for something that gives your relief, that helps you escape.”
Too often government programs and the political rhetoric that promotes them keep people trapped in that hopelessness, tethering them to the life of handouts and government dependency.
Taking on this crisis in a serious way is a heavy responsibility for Trump. One school of thought is that because of the way alcohol addiction cut his older brother’s life too short, Trump would have a deeper connection to it. Another is that he has some obligation to these voters, who helped catapult him to victory.
Either way, encouraging private industries to invest in people by funding or sponsoring faith-based initiatives — like Grodell’s Creation House — is likely the best place to start. If Trump can empower drug-ravaged communities to get back up on their feet, hope will find its way back to those who need it most.