The UK GUARDIAN is beginning a series of special reports about the poorest places in the United States.. they begin in the state of Kentucky, a coal town named Beattysville, that they label America’s poorest white town.. abandoned by coal and swallowed by drugs. That headline gave me the interest needed to go forward–interest because the place I was born and raised, the coal region of Pennsylvania, has also seen the same insanity.. poverty rising and drug abuse gaining..
From the UK GUARDIAN, a few noteworthy points.. the article by reporter Chris McGreal begins:
Karen Jennings patted her heavily made up face, put on a sardonic smile and said she thought she looked good after all she’d been through.
“I was an alcoholic first. I got drunk and fell in the creek and broke my back. Then I got hooked on the painkillers,” the 59-year-old grandmother said.
Over the years, Jennings’ back healed but her addiction to powerful opioids remained. After the prescriptions dried up, she was drawn to the underground drug trade that defines eastern Kentucky today as coal, oil and timber once did.
Jennings spoke with startling frankness about her part in a plague gripping the isolated, fading towns dotting this part of Appalachia. Frontier communities steeped in the myth of self-reliance are now blighted by addiction to opioids – “hillbilly heroin” to those who use them. It’s a dependency bound up with economic despair and financed in part by the same welfare system that is staving off economic collapse across much of eastern Kentucky. It’s a crisis that crosses generations.
More from the same woman who was profiled for the article:
It was at the local food bank that Jennings spilled out her story.
“There are lots of ways of getting drugs. The elderly sell their prescriptions to make up money to buy food. There are doctors and pharmacies that just want to make money out of it,” she said. “I was the manager of a fast food place. I used to buy from the customers. People could come in for a hamburger and do a drug transaction with me and no one would ever notice.”
Even as Jennings related the toll of drug abuse – the part it played in destroying at least some of her five marriages, the overdose that nearly cost her life and the letter she wrote to her doctor begging for the help that finally wrenched her off the pills – she spoke as if one step removed from the experience.
On the death of coal:
People in eastern Kentucky still call it “coal country”, even though the decline continued largely unabated and the number of jobs in the industry fell with the passing of each presidency. There were 31,000 under Bill Clinton but fewer than 14,000 by the time George W Bush left power.
The number of people employed in mining in eastern Kentucky has fallen by half since Barack Obama came to power, although the long history of decline has been conveniently set aside in the clamour to blame the current president. The more cautious critics say Obama is anti-coal because of his environment policies. But a no less popular view in the region is that it is part of president Obama’s war on white people.
The employer:
The largest employer in the county is now the school system. There are five times as many healthcare workers in eastern Kentucky as miners. “Coal country” is today little more than a cultural identity.
The office of Ed Courier’s Sturgeon Mining Company is on the high street. Its few remaining mines involve people digging coal out of hillsides. “I’ve been in the coal business since ’78 and the last five years I’ve been trying to get out of the coal business. There’s no future for it here,” he said
The story goes on.. and on..
Read it
You may be from a town next profiled by the UK media.. you may be a part of the great unraveling of American society.. the “Great society” turning into the land of the addiction…..
It’s now. It’s real.
And you cannot deny it..
Now we just have to wonder if anything will actually fix it.
