Drug Crisis: Political inaction kills West Virginians
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For well more than a decade, West Virginia has suffered under the weight of a substance abuse epidemic that is crippling individuals, families and whole communities. Politicians have made a great show of fighting it, yet the reality is we are as much in the grip of the monster as ever.
"The bottom-line thing is we have not made enough progress on this crisis," said Jeremiah Samples, a senior adviser to the Joint Committee on Government and Finance and a former deputy secretary for the former Department of Health and Human Resources. "We are nowhere near where we need to be, and our data relative to other states and even our own expectations has fallen far short. We need to reassess all of our SUD (substance use disorder) strategies and expenditures through the prism of what is impacting real people in our society."
He was reporting to the Joint Standing Committee on Health earlier this week.
The Mountain State has led the nation in overdose deaths since 2010. In 2022 the overdose death rate was a stunning 80.9 per 100,000 people. The national average is 32.4 per 100,000 people.
Samples put it mildly when he said "We can't sustain that as a society. It is crippling to the state."
We also can't sustain the "hundreds of millions and billions in expenditure and impact in the state" if, as Samples pointed out, all that spending has yielded no results. Certainly, it is not reversing the trend.
For a collection of lawmakers that swept into office on a tide of "eliminating fraud, waste and abuse," and "right-sizing" government, one would think it would be easy to heed Samples' warning that the state must do a better job of tracking expenditures and programs to find out what is actually working.
"The most important thing we need to do, in my opinion, is we need to measure what matters so we can then pivot and organically improve our response to this crisis," he said. "We need to measure every aspect of our substance use disorder policies and expenditures, and tie those back to a core societal measure."
But here perhaps more than in many other states, King Bureaucracy exists to serve (and enlarge) itself, even when hard data shows it is not accomplishing its mission. And politicians get a much bigger kick out of APPEARING to be part of the solution than actually being so.
Samples is right. We can't afford -- in more ways than one -- another minute of that kind of exploitation. It, truly, is killing us.