From the Opinion page today in the NYT’s: their children.
Introduction by Barbara Kingsolver the author of “Demon Copperhead.”
Most of us know how this plague arrived in Appalachia. Pharmaceutical companies studied the metrics and pointed to my corner of the map as a gold mine. Where work injuries are common and medical is stretched far too thin, where centuries of extractive industries have taken out timber and coal and left behind broken infrastructure and folks of limited means, these companies found one more lucrative thing to harvest: our pain.
Most of us know about the lawsuits against Big Pharma that forced changes in how painkillers are marketed and prescribed. Please do not think this means justice has been served. If you came to visit me, I could walk you down our country roads and point out all the houses where grandparents are raising little ones whose parents are incarcerated, sick or dead of addiction. The road to recovery here will be longer than m6 lifetime. Of all the stories I heard when I sat down to listen, the hardest to bear was this one: “It started when I was in my mothers womb.”
Over the last year, Times Opinion has been visiting the Appalachian town of Clarksburg, W. Va., and talking to a local pediatrician, Brian Policano, from there, about the enduring crisis in his hometown. Opioid abuse has devastated many of the people he grew up with. Now his practice is filled with their children and grandchildren. In West Virginia between 2020 and 2022, nearly one in eight babies was born exposed to drugs.
Drugs change the sound of babies’ cries. “It’s a cry that you very quickly learn is a cry of pain,” says Dr. Policano. Many of the babies showing signs of withdrawal will be taken from their drug-addicted parents. These children grow up with much higher rates of behavioral problems, ADHD, anxiety, depression and other psychiatric issues.
When babies are withdrawing from Suboxone at eight days old or a 15-day-old baby experiencing withdrawal cry and are inconsolable.
Clarksburg used to be a great place to grow up. In the last 40 years storefronts have emptied, and drug use has invited crime in. “I’m not sure people realize how whole families became victims of this thing and that these kids are suffering,” says Dr. Policano.
West Virginia has the highest rate in the country of children not living with a parent, at 8 percent. One of the hardest parts of Dr. Policano’s job is walking into a room and telling a new mother that she is going to lose her child.
Grandparents often step in to care for young children. The community had an especially tough time with Covid-19 because so many primary caregivers were older and more susceptible to getting sick.