Unvarnished Look at Addiction in WV

[togor]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...a-opioids.html

Came across it the other day. Easy to judge, hard to feel compassion, but they're people too, who can hopefully find their way back. The hard one for me is that every day, people are shooting up for the first time. If that could be stopped.

[dryheat]

I guess they never watched Reefer Madness as a kid. Say what you want, I did and I swore as a sixth grader, I'd never mess with that stuff.

[m1ashooter]

Living in the Appalachian Mountain region historically has been a hard scrabble life. These pictures are very very sad. These young people could be any of ours.

[bdm]

Very sad Look what Governor Cuomo of New York is doing can't make this crap up from what i hear its official

https://www.amny.com/news/marijuana-legalization-new-york-1.23933469

[S.A. Boggs]

Living in the Appalachian Mountain region historically has been a hard scrabble life. These pictures are very very sad. These young people could be any of ours.

This is part of my A.O. and this whole area has one major ingredient missing for 150 years and that is HOPE! Started with moonshine/illegal stills and just got worse. Our minerals/timber was sourced out for a pittance leaving bare hills and poisoned streams. There is a stream here in the county called Sunday Creek, it flows yellow from tainted ground water and this flows into the Ohio. As a kid growing up by the Ohio River it was heavily polluted as was the air. The river has been cleaned and the air improved, the downside is now a rust belt with very few jobs. There has to be a way of industry with limited pollution if any at all.
Sam

[barretcreek]

Very sad Look what Governor Cuomo of New York is doing can't make this crap up from what i hear its official

https://www.amny.com/news/marijuana-...ork-1.23933469

The only good side to that is maybe some of the pot heads will move back and become his problem. Rec. mj is a false god.

[Sandpebble]

This is part of my A.O. and this whole area has one major ingredient missing for 150 years and that is HOPE! Started with moonshine/illegal stills and just got worse. Our minerals/timber was sourced out for a pittance leaving bare hills and poisoned streams. There is a stream here in the county called Sunday Creek, it flows yellow from tainted ground water and this flows into the Ohio. As a kid growing up by the Ohio River it was heavily polluted as was the air. The river has been cleaned and the air improved, the downside is now a rust belt with very few jobs. There has to be a way of industry with limited pollution if any at all.
Sam

In particular Sam... your statement .... "There has to be a way of industry with limited pollution if any at all." ... caught my eye

you see.... the elimination of industrial produced pollution requires the unfortunate .... regulations . Otherwiswe unregulated industry don't give a fook .

Now we've all been pleased with the brag of lately eliminated 100s of thousands of pages of regulations .... but here is what that has gotten me here in Florida...
..
We've eliminated regs to allow the local sugar industry to controll it's own clean water requirements { thank you previous Gov. Scott }

results have been that do to the resulting red tide I have not been able to fish local beaches or purchase sea food for more than a year now .

Eliminate regs and save jobs they say ....come to Florida, take a hard look and tell me how many "American" sugar cane cutting jobs the elimination of regulations have saved

[blackhawknj]

If any politician says a tax will bring in X amount of revenue you that at best it will bring in X-25% and the problems it creates will cost X+50 %.
Bill Bradley said it best-"I don't want them poisoning another generation another generation."
I also note the implication that it will create opportunities for small entrepreneurs and somehow sinister "Big Corporations" will be kept out.
If people want to do stupid and foolish things, as long as they're willing to accept the consequences....

[dogtag]

It's sad, but it's a self inflicted misery. Why people resort to
these drugs in the first place as the horrors they cause have
been well known for more than a hundred years. It's not
as though the effects of using these addicting drugs is a
mystery, so why the hell do people start ? Do they think
they will be immune when no one else is ?

[Vern Humphrey]

It's sad, but it's a self inflicted misery. Why people resort to
these drugs in the first place as the horrors they cause have
been well known for more than a hundred years. It's not
as though the effects of using these addicting drugs is a
mystery, so why the hell do people start ? Do they think
they will be immune when no one else is ?

I can't speak for West Virginia, but when I ran for Congress I spent a lot of time in the Delta (the Mississippi River bottom in Arkansas.) There are counties there with over 50% adult illiteracy -- people with skills and ambition leave, those without either are left behind. How can such people get out of the situation they're in? Well, there's one way they can get out of it for a little while -- with drugs.

[dogtag]

I can't speak for West Virginia, but when I ran for Congress I spent a lot of time in the Delta (the Mississippi River bottom in Arkansas.) There are counties there with over 50% adult illiteracy -- people with skills and ambition leave, those without either are left behind. How can such people get out of the situation they're in? Well, there's one way they can get out of it for a little while -- with drugs.

Sounds like those worthless types slaughtering alligators.

[JOHN COOK]

Sounds like those worthless types slaughtering alligators.

dogtag, go down to Louisiana in the Bayou and call them worthless types.. You just might not come home....

john

[lyman]

dogtag, go down to Louisiana in the Bayou and call them worthless types.. You just might not come home....

john

or go down to Southern Va where my kin is from,

drugs are a problem there as well, and as Vern mentioned, mostly due to illiteracy.

jobs were once there, now, not as much so, most closed (goodyear, furniture, and fabrics) and moved elsewhere, some others moved in but not as many,

this is not really a new thing, it's been happening a long long time,
just seems the drugs have gotten 'worse' in potency the last 20 yrs,

when I was a kid, I had a couple cousins and an uncle that were mixed up in the stuff, but it was mostly pot (a lot grown locally) and a few pills,

the hard stuff they are using now as a big city thing, since the country folks could not afford it

[Vern Humphrey]

This is one of the consequences of raising the minimum wage -- all those low skill jobs were priced out of the market.

[dogtag]

dogtag, go down to Louisiana in the Bayou and call them worthless types.. You just might not come home....

john

Only if they have a bigger gun than I have.
From the looks of them on the TV show, I doubt they could add to 11
without removing their socks.