Everybody’s fault
CANTON, Ohio—Despite his gaunt frame and sunken eyes, he walks with a distinct swagger down Tuscarawas Street. His eyes dart back and forth; he is clearly agitated as he heads toward a McDonald’s parking lot, the same McDonald’s where police tried to revive Christopher J. Burris from a drug overdose with two doses of naloxone last September. It took two more doses from paramedics to save him.
Burris overdosed on the potent opioid carfentanil, which is 100 times more powerful than heroin and used to sedate elephants. Eventually he was sentenced by a Stark County judge to the maximum 12 months in prison for drug possession.
For most of the past century in America, urban blacks seemed to disproportionally fill prison cells, more than rural or suburban whites. But that trend has begun to reverse in the past decade, according to a 2016 New York Times analysis of the National Corrections Reporting Program.
The Times reported that rural white Americans are going to prison more often and for longer sentences than urban blacks. Much of that coincides with the opioid epidemic that is crippling all of rural America.
Part of that is due to how rural law enforcement officers and judges view who should go to prison, and for how long.
John Lane, the police chief in East Liverpool, Ohio, has seen one of his own officers overdose on drug residue that clung to his uniform after he arrested a suspect. He is all for drug users going to prison for a very long time.
“My job is to keep the bad guys off of the streets,” he said. “I wish we could find more money for drug treatment. Bigger cities have those resources to fight addiction outside of jail and prison, and we don’t.”
In larger cities, Lane explains, a bad actor caught with small quantities of drugs can be sent to a drug-treatment program, but such programs aren’t as readily available in cash-strapped counties. It’s no one’s fault, and it is everyone’s fault. It is as simple as that.
If rural America continues to diminish, all of America will diminish, because the countryside is as much a part of America’s identity as New York City’s skyscrapers and Silicon Valley’s sprawling technology campuses. Rural America’s deeply rooted cultural traditions, religiosity, music and history of storytelling, and its belief in the nobility of hard work that includes getting your hands dirty, all make up who we are in this country.
So how do we save rural America? Subsidies from Washington aren’t the answer—they just neutralize that rugged, self-reliant, innovative rural spirit.
A broader economic solution would be to provide incentives that attract entrepreneurs back to invest in their former hometowns.
For decades, in an effort to right past wrongs and injustices for urban dwellers, our political class has ignored our sprawling rural population. That ignorance led to rural Americans becoming a cultural joke: They’re slow and uneducated; they live in the past; their time has come and gone.
Our politics has been just as ignorant: To many Democrats rural Americans are just bitter and deplorable; to many Republicans they are just votes to be lulled by religion or false job-creation promises.
We cannot continue to allow poverty, drug abuse, decaying towns and economic collapse to be an acceptable part of rural America. We need to care more and innovate more, and we need to pay attention, or we will lose the people and the culture that have been the backbone and the fabric of everything our nation has done well since its very beginning.