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In West Virginia Child Custody Bill, Supporters See Help For Kids Of Divorce. Opponents See Red Flags For Victims Of Abuse

This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. For more stories from Mountain State Spotlight, visit www.mountainstatespotlight.org.

The West Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill that, if it becomes law, would give family court judges one highest priority in child custody cases: courts would have to assume, at the beginning of the case, that custody arrangements that allocate 50% of time with each parent are best.

Then, it would be up to the parents to show that other factors, including domestic violence or child abuse, should be considered.

Supporters of the bill say it’s meant to encourage good relationships with both parents — which would ultimately benefit kids. But advocates for children and for victims of domestic violence say it would institute a one-size-fits-all approach that puts parents’ desires over children’s needs.

If the bill becomes law, it could also reopen old cases, allowing thousands of non-custodial parents to go back to court and fight for custody. That could disrupt the lives of children used to their current custody agreements. Things they’ve taken for granted, like seeing a parent most days or seeing certain friends at school, could change, creating feelings of helplessness and instability.

Carol Smith, a counseling professor at Marshall University with expertise in childhood trauma, said the uncertainty could cause more confusion in children’s lives during an already chaotic time.

Young children may not have the words to express how confusing and traumatic divorce proceedings can be, Smith said.

“If you did interview a child, you would end up hearing things like, ‘well, this is really painful,’” she said. “‘And I just wish that my parents could get along, and it feels like it’s my fault.’”

Supporters say parents aren’t getting enough time with their kids

When deciding child custody arrangements, current state law directs family court judges to think about various parts of a child’s life that influence health and happiness, including who the child wants to live with, the need for meaningful contact with each parent, maintenance of close relationships with siblings and the child’s safety.

House Bill 2363 would remove the provision of state law that requires courts to consider who took care of the child over the previous 12 months when determining parenting plans. Instead, courts would have to assume 50/50 child custody agreements are best, unless parents could show other factors, like family violence, should be given higher priority. Proponents of the bill have argued this is fair, because if a parent is working outside the home and not directly caring for the child, providing income is still a form of care-taking.

The bill’s supporters, including lead sponsor Delegate Geoff Foster, R-Putnam, say that giving more parents 50/50 custodial time arrangements would benefit children, because it’s good for kids to have strong relationships with two loving parents.

Foster introduced a similar bill last year; the House passed it, but the Senate passed a drastically limited version and lawmakers ran out of time before they could reconcile the two different versions.

At the time, Foster said he sponsored the bill because of his personal experience. He said he was unable to see a sibling because of an unfair parenting arrangement between his father and stepmother.

“It’s really not about me,” Foster said of this year’s bill in an interview earlier this month. “[The bill] wouldn’t affect me at all. The real story is about the people that are right now being put out of their kid’s life to the detriment of the child.”

Foster said last year that the National Parents Organization, an organization that originally focused on fathers’ complaints about custody agreements and promotes “shared parenting,” had contacted him with interest in the bill, but he’d already started working on it before that.

“I’ve got people texting me, men — men and women alike — saying how the current law is really hurting their families and that’s why I’m trying to fix the situation,” he said.

Groups including Prevent Child Abuse WV, the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and the West Virginia Child Advocacy Network oppose the bill.

Foster said he was surprised to see the West Virginia Federation of Democratic Women come out in opposition as well.

“I don’t know where that came from,” he said. “I don’t know why this has become a partisan issue of trying to do what’s best for the child.”

A tool of abuse

The bill’s opponents argue at best, the bill is unnecessary: current law already allows courts to establish 50/50 custody arrangements if that’s what a judge thinks is best. They say a child’s needs should be put before parental preferences.

But at worst, they say the measure could be used by abusive parents and partners as a tool within the family court system.

Joyce Yedlosky, team coordinator for the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said domestic violence perpetrators don’t only target their victims. They also target systems like family courts, she said.

“Many victims of domestic violence don’t have evidence of the domestic violence, or they believe that they can navigate the custody arrangements in a way that keeps them and the children safe without having to raise the domestic violence [in court],” Yedlosky said. “When you raise the domestic violence in a court setting, you are challenging somebody that you are afraid of, and often that’s without an attorney.”

She said many instances of abuse go unreported, whether because of safety concerns, attorney advice, lack of resources, or unwillingness to embarrass the children or the abuser.

Similarly, Jim McKay of Prevent Child Abuse WV said often these issues aren’t reported to authorities.

“Setting such a high evidentiary standard to adjust child custody arrangements increases risks of harm for children,” he said.

These advocates worry that victims of domestic violence will stay in abusive relationships rather than try to show a judge that abuse occurred.

The bill ties judges’ hands, and every situation is different, Yedlosky said. Sometimes, alleging abuse can lead to more severe violence. Some families may be best served not bringing up abuse at that time. Some people who commit domestic violence may be able to learn not to be violent.

Another worry if the bill passes: perpetrators of domestic violence will use it as a way to bring their former spouses back to court as yet another form of abuse.

Looking to Kentucky

Foster brushed those concerns off as speculation.

“That’s a really large stretch of a hypothetical for one because, in Kentucky, when they passed this bill, domestic abuse cases actually dropped somewhere around 10%, so it would actually improve the situation.”

Kentucky’s law passed in 2018, and state government data shows that requests for protective orders requiring abusers to stay away from victims dropped by about 13% by 2020. But family court cases related to divorce, annulment or separation dropped by 10%, too.

Foster pointed out that judges may still consider domestic violence in these cases if the bill passes, and the legislation doesn’t change state domestic violence law.

But a key difference between Kentucky’s law and the one being considered in West Virginia is the ability to reopen old cases.

Foster supports this provision. He said he didn’t want to see children whose parents divorced in 2019 end up with less time with their parents whose divorce was in 2021.

“According to studies that I’ve looked at, when you look at it, it’s in the best interest of the child for them to have both parents involved in their life,” he said.

Last year, Foster and proponents of similar legislation cited a 2014 study in calling for 50/50 custody arrangements. While the study, conducted by research psychologist Richard Warshak, found that meaningful and balanced time was ideal, the study specifically stated that policymakers should avoid setting defaults that apply to everyone, like a 50/50 custody arrangement.

Advocates for children worry that reopening cases could unintentionally create more chaos in children’s lives.

Smith, the Marshall professor and counselor, said a divorce is traumatic and confusing as is. She compared it to a fire in the life of a child.

“The difference between a bad thing happening to a child and an adult is the child does not have the resources or the cognitive map to put the event in perspective. They don’t have the resources they need for coping,” she said. “It ends up having an outsized effect on how they think about the world and their place in the world.”

An adult might say, “OK, I have a driver’s license. I’ve got a car. I’ve got a credit card. I know how to go and make a hotel reservation. We can go stay in a hotel,’” she said.

“A child is just looking to the adults to provide protection and love to them. And if their house burns down, the child is like, ‘oh my gosh, the house burned down. There’s nothing worse in the world because my entire world was in that house.’”

David McMahon, a lawyer and a lobbyist who worked on divorce cases from 1975 to 2008, remembers when custody battles were even more overwhelming and upsetting for children.

Before changes to state law, McMahon wrote in a letter to lawmakers, he often saw parents use child custody requests as bargaining chips, leading to long and unpredictable custody battles.

McMahon worries parents who don’t even want custody will fight for it for “bargaining leverage,” when they’re really concerned about property distribution or money allocated for child support or alimony.

“The best predictor of future behavior,” he wrote in the letter, “is past behavior.”

Smith added that while courts may try to establish some order among the chaos, they can’t solve the root problems that put stress on families.

She noted that many children in West Virginia are already dealing with multiple stressors and traumatic experiences, including prejudice, poverty, housing hunger, lack of transportation, income loss and isolation due to the pandemic, and widespread addiction.

“Trauma begets trauma, and we see that in West Virginia, just generations of people who really, truly did not get what they needed growing up and then they turn around and parent, and they’re not really ready to be parents and their children don’t get what they need when they’re growing up and they turn around and parent,” and the cycle continues, she said.

One way to address the root causes, Smith said, would be to increase access to mental health care.

“The fact of the matter is, in the United States, there is no system for addiction or mental health care. There’s no system. It’s patchwork. It’s ad hoc. And if you’re lucky, you know someone who knows someone who might be able to get you a therapist, and then if you’re really lucky, you have all the things that you need in order to go get therapy, money, transportation, time.”

The consequences of this ad hoc system, she says, are showing up in family court.

Reach reporter Erin Beck at erinbeck@mountainstatespotlight.org

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s Companies Owe Millions More In Environmental Fines

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This story was co-published with Mountain State Spotlight, a new nonprofit newsroom covering West Virginia. For more stories from Mountain State Spotlight, visit www.mountainstatespotlight.org.

The federal government is seeking to collect nearly $3.2 million in fines from coal companies owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice after the firms violated the terms of a major water pollution settlement, according to documents filed Thursday in federal court.

U.S. Department of Justice attorneys said in their filing that Southern Coal Corp. and two related companies failed to renew required water pollution permits, leading to unauthorized discharges at three mining sites in Tennessee and one in Alabama. Those permits are required so regulators can limit the runoff of everything from mud to toxic metals from coal operations.

The companies’ actions triggered fines under the terms of a 2016 settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency. As part of the deal, the governor’s companies had agreed to resolve more than 23,000 water pollution violations by paying a $900,000 fine, spending millions of dollars on new pollution controls, and covering automatic penalty amounts — known as “stipulated penalties” — for any future violations.

The DOJ’s new court filing indicated Justice’s companies have so far paid nearly $2.9 million in stipulated penalties, but the firms have repeatedly failed to honor the other terms of the settlement, either delivering late or not at all on site improvements and fines, continuing what federal attorneys called a “long history” of environmental violations.

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment beyond the Thursday court filing.

Representatives for Justice’s companies and the governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The new court filing, in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, comes three months after another one of Justice’s companies reached a separate pollution settlement with environmental groups, which sued over excess discharges of selenium, a mining byproduct that can be toxic to fish, at a strip mine in southern West Virginia.

In that deal, Bluestone Coal Corp. paid a federal fine of $30,000 and contributed $270,000 to a conservation group, settling a case brought by the Sierra Club and other citizen groups. The maximum federal penalty for Bluestone Coal could have been nearly $170 million.

Justice, a billionaire listed by Forbes as the richest person in the state, owns a vast empire of businesses, including coal mines, resort hotels and agricultural interests, many of them regulated by the state agencies that report to him. While Justice’s adult children have day-to-day control over the family’s business operations, the governor has continued to guide the empire.

Last year, an investigation by ProPublica found that, over the last three decades, the governor’s companies have accumulated more than $140 million in judgments and settlements in cases brought by vendors and other businesses and government entities over unpaid bills. (The governor and his representatives say that his companies always eventually pay their bills.) Many of the cases involve Justice’s mining companies.

Last spring, about two dozen of those mining companies reached a deal with the DOJ to pay more than $5 million in delinquent mine safety penalties, some of them dating back more than five years.

The 2016 water pollution settlement at issue in this week’s filing was announced just weeks before that year’s general election, in which Justice, then a Democrat, won the governor’s race. Last year, Justice, now a Republican, was reelected to another four-year term.

On Thursday, the federal government asked U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad to order Justice’s companies to stop the unpermitted discharges and to pay the outstanding fines. Attorneys said they have been seeking compliance since September 2020.

As part of the 2016 settlement, the federal government took the unusual step of requiring Justice’s companies to put up $4.5 million, in the form of a bank line of credit, that the DOJ could access so it could pay to have mine cleanup work done if the governor’s companies failed to complete it. In December 2020, with promised work at mine sites in Tennessee unfinished, the U.S. withdrew $1.5 million from that account.

A lawyer for the companies objected to the amount of the government’s withdrawal and asked that the matter be taken up through a dispute resolution process spelled out in the settlement.

Reach reporter Ken Ward Jr. at kenwardjr@mountainstatespotlight.org

West Virginians Die Of Diabetes At The Highest Rate In The U.S. A Bill Seeks To Make Treatment More Accessible

This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. For more stories from Mountain State Spotlight, visit www.mountainstatespotlight.org.

When Maggie Reider’s first-grade son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2008, her first thought was “is this a death sentence?”

“My only knowledge [of the disease] was what happened in ‘Steel Magnolias,’” said Reider, referring to the movie that features a diabetic Julia Roberts who dies from kidney failure not long after giving birth to her first child. “I worried things weren’t going to end well.”

Then, Reider became more familiar with the disease, which occurs when a person’s body doesn’t produce insulin. It can cause serious organ damage if left untreated, but the Morgantown native learned that with proper management, her son could live a healthy life.

But that management would come with a hefty price tag.

The cost of treating diabetes has made local and national headlines over the past few years, as the price of insulin — used by diabetics to regulate blood sugar — has surged and insurance coverage hasn’t kept up. According to the Health Care Cost Institute, the cost of routine care for a person with Type 1 diabetes was around $18,000 a year in 2016. Prices have gone up since then.

In West Virginia, a state with both the highest diabetes mortality rate in the country and one of the highest percentages of residents living below the poverty line, medicine and equipment required to best treat the disease is inaccessible for many.

Lawmakers are once again considering a bill to lower the expenses for essential diabetic equipment. The bill — introduced with bipartisan support in the House of Delegates — has yet to be assigned to a committee agenda, which is typically the first sign it has a chance of passage.

Technology upgrades

Diabetes management used to just involve finger pricks and test-strips to check blood sugar throughout the day. But as technology has advanced, it’s evolved into sensors, pumps and monitors, which automate the process and provide a more consistent and accurate reading in real time. Studies have shown that these newer methods improve health outcomes, but the equipment is expensive and only available to those who can afford it.

“When we were on simple syringes with insulin vials, it was pricey. But as my son grew older and the technology got better, things became really expensive,” Reider said. “It all adds up. But it’s life-saving, so you make it work.”

For Reider’s family, “making it work” meant picking up a second job.

A widow and single mother when her son was diagnosed, Reider said her schoolteacher salary wasn’t enough to cover the costs of treatment. So, she took a job as a waitress on the side.

When her son, Roxy Vasil, turned 16, he got a job at a funeral home. The money he earned helped pay for sensors for his continuous glucose monitor, which he wears on his arm. It provides continuous monitoring and automatically notifies him when he needs insulin. Before, it was a guessing game — he’d draw blood from his finger periodically throughout the day.

Last year, the West Virginia Legislature passed a bill that capped the copays for insulin at $100 for a 30-day supply in response to the rising cost. Lawmakers who supported the legislation say it was a good first step, but insulin is just one of the many tools needed to manage diabetes.

Now, a house bill with bipartisan sponsorship seeks to go a step further. Sponsored by Del. Matthew Rohrbach, R-Cabell, and co-sponsored by Del. Barbara Fleischauer, D-Monongalia, House Bill 2708 would lower the $100 insulin cap to $25, and in addition to insulin, would apply the same cap to pharmaceutical supplies and equipment, too.
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Roxy Vasil uses a Freestyle Libre 14 Day Sensor to monitor monitor his blood sugar levels and keep healthy. It’s one of the technologies that a new house bill wants to make more affordable for diabetic West Virginians.

Rohrbach, a physician who serves as vice chairman of the House Health and Human Resources Committee, did not return requests for comment. But during a panel discussion in early February, Rohrbach said the bill would improve West Virginia’s health, economy and wellbeing.

“We’ve really advanced [in technology used to treat diabetes],” Rohrbach said. “But unfortunately, a lot of people don’t have access because of costs.”

And when preventive treatment is inaccessible, more people get sick and die.

“The long-term consequences of diabetes — the organ damage, the heart attacks, the strokes — we can prevent with better diabetic control,” Rohrbach said.

Those consequences are disproportionately borne by Black West Virginians. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, diabetes is the fourth leading cause of death for the state’s Black residents. Nationally, non-Hispanic Black people were twice as likely to die from diabetes as non-Hispanic white people, according to data from 2018.

“What this bill is really an attempt to do is to make it easier for individuals to get access to these lifesaving medications and technologies and limit the effects down the road,” Rohrbach said.

The bill hasn’t been placed on the agenda of the House Health and Human Resources Committee, which means that no testimony for or against the legislation has been heard. But last year, private insurance companies and the state Office of the Insurance Commissioner opposed the bill. They expressed concerns that the capped co-pays would impact the market. The Office of the Insurance Commissioner did not respond to questions about whether there’s been an impact on the market from last year’s legislation.

Fleischauer says similar legislation has already been passed in other states. She said HB 2708 is modeled after legislation passed in Connecticut last year.

“Connecticut has one of the lowest mortality rates for diabetes in the country, and they passed this legislation,” Fleischauer said. “If they can take this step to save lives, we can, too.”

Reider and Vasil both said the legislation would make a huge difference for families like theirs.

“Diabetes doesn’t discriminate. It impacts Democrats and Republicans alike, so I hope lawmakers can come together and pass this for West Virginians,” Reider said.

Vasil, who’s now a freshman in college, said having access to the higher-tech equipment has changed how he’s able to manage the disease.

“I’ve lost weight, my [sugar levels] have improved, and I’m more motivated to keep healthy because of my CGM,” Vasil said. “I think every diabetic should be able to access one.”

The deadline for the bill to pass the House of Delegates — and head to the Senate — is March 31.

Reach reporter Lauren Peace at laurenpeace@mountainstatespotlight.org

Morgantown Shows How Syringe Exchanges Save Lives. A Bill Before The West Virginia Legislature Would Outlaw Them

This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. For more stories from Mountain State Spotlight, visit mountainstatespotlight.org or sign up for their newsletter.

Sasha Crist stood in the waiting room of the Milan Puskar Health Right clinic in downtown Morgantown during a quick drop-in visit on a February afternoon. She was there to pick up safe injection supplies. No more than five minutes after she entered through the clinic’s glass door, she was sitting in a room with a social worker, firing off a list of needs.

Narcan. Needles — a box of shorts and a box of longs. Condoms and cookers, the aluminum spoons used for mixing and heating drugs.

“Do you need a sharps disposal container?” the social worker asked.

“Yes ma’am,” Crist answered. “I’ll take one of those, too.”

Crist has been getting needles from this syringe access program on-and-off since it first began operating in 2015. Having struggled with a substance use disorder for more than a decade, she used to visit it for her own safe injection supplies. But now, Crist is in recovery and was back at the program to pick up supplies for friends.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Crist told the social worker while sitting in a chair in one of the clinic’s private rooms. “I’m in recovery because of you guys. I’ll be two years clean in May. But I do have friends who are still struggling and I’m doing this for them.”

“Having the option of being able to get help… that says something in itself,” Sasha Crist said.

Full-service harm reduction programs — often called needle exchanges — exist primarily to prevent the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and hepatitis C among people who inject drugs. They provide clean needles to people who are struggling so that dirty needles aren’t shared or reused. Decades of research shows that these programs work to prevent the spread of disease and increase access to treatment for people living with substance use disorders.

The science is uncontroversial among experts. But for public officials in many places in West Virginia, providing clean needles to people who are struggling with substance use disorders has remained a point of contention. It’s been a subject of debate, for example, in both Huntington and Logan County.

This has played out especially publicly in Charleston recently, as the capital city faces an HIV outbreak that top U.S. health officials say is the most concerning in the United States. Experts say that increasing access to clean needles for people who inject drugs will be vital to combatting further spread.

But now, in the midst of that outbreak, a state senator last week introduced a bill that would effectively outlaw syringe service programs in West Virginia, even in communities where they’re already operating with local support.

Laura Jones, who leads one of the longest-running harm reduction programs in the state, explains the role that these programs play.

A quick glance around the country, but also around West Virginia, provides plenty of evidence that full-service syringe access programs can, and do, exist without the increase of crime, syringe litter or the much-feared community demise that politicians against needle exchanges continue to preach.

Take the program in Morgantown, just 150 miles north of Charleston.

“People are always worried about syringe litter,” said Laura Jones, executive director of the Milan Puskar Health Right clinic in downtown Morgantown, which operates one of the oldest syringe access programs in the state. “The thought of syringes being around where someone might get stuck is very scary. But the reality is that syringe access programs collect many used syringes, and that there would still be syringe litter in the community if this program didn’t exist.”

Laura Jones is the executive director of the Milan Puskar Health Right clinic.

When the program first started, Jones said that there was some skepticism about the role syringe services would play in the broader community. But with the support of local leadership, the program persisted and is now a vital provider of health care services to some of the area’s most vulnerable residents.

And Jones said that it’s important to remember that the needles, although incredibly important, are only part of a harm reduction program’s offerings.

Beyond preventing the spread of infectious disease, needle exchanges also help lower overdose death rates by providing access to overdose reversal medications to the people who need it most. And research shows that in communities with programs like the one in Morgantown, not only does disease go down but the number of people accessing treatment typically increases.

That’s because harm reduction programs provide isolated people who are struggling with a point of connection and compassion. They meet people where they are and provide non-judgmental care and wrap-around services like wound treatment, disease testing and vaccinations. When a person is ready, and if they choose it, these programs can provide people with referrals to treatment, too.

Sasha Crist talks about what led her to recovery.

Sasha Crist is a testament to that. After more than a decade of drug use that started with pain pills as a teenager and escalated to injecting heroin just a few years later, she entered a treatment program and got clean. She said she was referred by the harm reduction program in Morgantown in 2019 — three years after she first stepped through the clinic’s doors.

“If I didn’t have this program, I’d be dead,” Crist said. “Ultimately it was my own strength that led me to recovery. But this program and the people here gave me the tools I needed to get there.”

‘Inclusive community’

When Jones and her team of medical professionals and social workers set out to open a harm reduction program in August of 2015, they did so with little financial support.

The free and charitable clinic had been operating in central Morgantown for more than 30 years, providing medical and dental services to the uninsured and those who needed care that wasn’t covered by their insurance plans.

As the overdose crisis devastated communities across the state, Jones and her staff became more aware of the prevalence of disease among the people who relied on their clinic, and they set out to open what would become one of West Virginia’s first syringe access programs.

Laura Jones talks about launching Morgantown’s harm reduction program in 2015.

“In the first year we had over 300 people,” Jones said. “It’s grown from there.”

The harm reduction program run by Jones and her team is needs-based. That means that in order to receive clean needles, the people who rely on the program are encouraged, but not required, to return syringes. It’s the model that’s endorsed as best-practice by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The program is also low-barrier. While some programs require a valid ID, a physical examination or time with a recovery coach in order for participants to receive safe injection supplies, the program in Morgantown does not. Rather, there is an intake process that is encouraged but remains optional.

With the participant’s permission, volunteers — often people in recovery, themselves — ask questions about housing and medical needs, family planning, “the whole nine yards,” Jones said. That happens alongside questions like “what supplies can I get you today?” and “do you need any Narcan?”

It’s quick, casual, private and judgment-free. For the most part, people are more than willing to partake.

If a person wants to stay and talk with a recovery coach, the option is there. If they need additional medical care, the option is there. If they want to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis C or HIV, the option is there.

And if they just want to come in, get the supplies that they need and leave without further interaction, that’s fine, too. They’re handed a bag of supplies with a smile and as quickly as five minutes later, they’re on their way.

The program gets results. While there have been HIV outbreaks in both Cabell and Kanawha counties in recent years that rival case numbers in metropolitan centers more than 20 times their size, Monongalia County, where Morgantown’s program operates, averages fewer than five new HIV cases linked to injection drug use a year. It is one of the least vulnerable counties in the state to the spread of rapid hepatitis C.

Despite distributing the most syringes in the state annually for the last five years, the program has received little pushback from the community. Businesses in the county remain open and unscathed — leaders in Charleston have suggested the distribution of syringes would be devastating to downtown — and some local businesses even offer their support.

Laura Jones explains reason why needs-based programs are best-practice.

On a Wednesday night in February, a worker from a local bakery stopped by the Morgantown clinic with a bag full of rinsed and emptied plastic bottles — those which used to hold laundry and dish detergent — that could be used as syringe disposal containers.

“We heard you guys needed plastic containers so I wanted to bring these by,” said the woman from the bakery. “We saved what we had. Hope it helps!”

“This is awesome,” said the nurse who answered the door. There had been a back-order on syringe disposal containers; the clinic’s staff posted a call-out on Facebook looking for alternatives that could be used in their place. The call was answered.

In addition to help from Morgantown businesses, medical and pharmacy students volunteer to help with syringe distribution and medical care. Local churches have rallied behind the program, too, volunteering and donating snacks and clothes for participants. Just last month, a downtown church was vandalized in the night. Instead of asking for help to repair the damaged building, the congregation asked for donations to be sent to the needle exchange.

Jones said that she’s thankful for the community support. It was essential for the program’s success, and it’s one key difference between Morgantown and Charleston, right now.

But Jones said that gaining that support begins with local leadership.

“We, in Morgantown, have a huge sign as you roll into town that says this is an inclusive community,” Jones said. “And if we really mean that, it means including people that you’re frustrated with, or afraid of, or concerned with their behavior.”

A syringe access program participant speaks briefly with a social worker about safe injection supplies during a harm reduction clinic at the Milan Puskar Health Right.

After the program launched back in 2015, Jones and her team spent a lot of time educating local leaders. They spoke with the city council, with local business people, and explained the science behind their program and why it was necessary. The leaders listened.

The program also had the support of the city police chief, as well as the county health department.

“County health departments are required by law to protect the public, prevent disease and promote public health,” said Dr. Lee Smith, who has served as executive director of the Monongalia County Health Department since 2015.

Smith said that if officials follow those mandates that are obligated by law, supporting syringe access programs is the obvious and ethical decision.

Although the health department does not run or oversee the syringe access program operated by Milan Puskar Health Right, Smith said the program works alongside the health department’s Quick Response Team to help combat the opioid epidemic by offering compassion and support to residents who are struggling.

And while syringe litter has yet to ravage the city, overdose deaths are lower because people who are struggling have access to lifesaving services. Jones said because the program was embraced in Monongalia County, she and her team were able to focus on expanding services to other counties in the region, too.

Through mobile distribution, the syringe access program now provides safe injection supplies and medical care to West Virginians living in Preston and Upshur counties. When they first introduced the services to those communities, Jones said there was some initial pushback, but that settled down.

“We persisted and the health departments [in those counties] persisted with us,” Jones said.

‘When I’m ready’

In a presentation given by the CDC to Kanawha County’s HIV task force, members of city council, members of the Kanawha-Charleston Board of Health, and Charleston Mayor Amy Goodwin last week, the agency highlighted the need for the quick implementation of needs-based syringe access programs — like the one in Morgantown — in order to contain the HIV outbreak in West Virginia’s capital city.

“We’re seeing a decline in the progress that we have made since the 1990s in HIV diagnoses linked to injection drug use,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the head of HIV prevention for the CDC. “This is a rapidly increasing outbreak. [There is] a need for enhanced urgency.”

Daskalakis said the work of syringe access programs in response to the crisis comes in two forms. The first is making sure clean and sterile syringes are widely available. The second is providing increased access to testing for HIV and hepatitis C, and connecting people who are positive with medications that help suppress the diseases.

If lawmakers pass Senate Bill 334, programs following CDC recommendations would become illegal and could face thousands of dollars of fines. That, according to experts, would be devastating to communities across West Virginia and beyond.

“This matters to the whole country, not just West Virginia,” wrote Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of epidemiology at Yale University’s School of Public Health, in response to the bill. “We have to be serious about ending epidemics, not perpetuating them with bad policies… What a disaster.”

Gonsalves, who is a world-leading expert in HIV prevention and has received a MacArthur “genius grant” for his work, has called for the bill’s retraction.

The bill was introduced by Sen. Eric Tarr (R-Putnam), who did not return a request for comment.

But while debate in the Capitol continues, back in Morgantown, the Milan Puskar Health Right continues to serve as an example of the good that can happen when communities make public health decisions driven by experts rather than fear.

It was through that process in Morgantown that Sasha Crist’s journey to recovery began.

A reflection of Sasha Crist as she stands in the lobby of the syringe access program in Morgantown. Crist, who is a person in recovery, was referred to treatment by the program in 2019.

Crist had visited the syringe access program in Morgantown periodically since it opened in 2015. But circumstances in her life kept her from using it routinely, and as a result, she still ended up sharing and reusing needles from time to time.

“I was in a really dark place,” Crist said. “Drugs fade you. You don’t understand it until you’ve been there, but I’ve been to the point of using toilet water [to help inject] before. That’s not something I would ever do in my right mind.”

At some point she contracted hep C. Initially, she didn’t show symptoms of infection. But when Crist stopped by the clinic in 2019, her leg was two times the size that it should have been.

She wasn’t at the clinic that day to seek medical care; she was there to pick up some Narcan and a bag of clean syringes so she wouldn’t have to reuse needles when she injected heroin later on. But when a nurse recognized the swelling — the result of a blood clot brought on by infection — she helped Crist get to Ruby Memorial Hospital.

“In May of 2019, I was dying,” Sasha Crist said.

There, she got treatment for endocarditis, an infection of the heart’s lining caused by bacteria entering the bloodstream and not uncommon among people who share or reuse needles when injecting drugs. She also got treatment for the hep C. The doctor told her he was glad that she had made it there; if she hadn’t, she would have died.

“My family had just lost my mom not even two years prior. I didn’t want to put my family through another death,” Crist said. “I got the drugs out of my system and I was like, wow, I don’t want to go back to that. I want this for me now.”

Crist completed a six-week recovery program and she’ll be two years clean this May. She said if it hadn’t been for the harm reduction program offering clean needles, she wouldn’t have ever made it to a clinic or been connected with care.

“It took me almost 15 years of using before I was ready for help,” Crist said. “It’s up to the user when they want to quit, but having the option of being able to get help like what Health Right offers, that’s something in itself.”

“It’s sad that there are places in West Virginia that closed down needle exchanges,” Sasha Crist said.

On the February day that Crist came back to the program to pick up safe injection supplies for her friends that still use, she couldn’t help but smile as she chatted with the worker who helped her get supplies.

“It’s crazy. I used to come in here and I was usually high,” said Crist, her choppy blonde hair falling over her right eye. She was sitting in one of the private rooms.

The worker smiled.

“At the end of the day it’s my strength, but you guys led me to it,” Crist said.

“That’s what we’re here for, hon,” the worker replied.

She handed Crist a white paper bag. Simple and full of life-saving supplies.

For 20 Years, Purdue Pharma Has Kept OxyContin Records Sealed In A W.Va. Courthouse. Now, There’s A Push To Open Them.

In three weeks, a West Virginia judge will take up a request to unseal court documents that include details about OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s deceptive sales practices.

This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. For more stories from Mountain State Spotlight, visit www.mountainstatespotlight.org.

The contents of the entire court file have remained secret for two decades.

Now, HBO, The Washington Post and a documentary film production company are asking Putnam County Circuit Judge Philip Stowers to unseal court records from a 2001 class-action lawsuit that accused Purdue Pharma of failing to supervise the use of the prescription painkiller OxyContin. The lawsuit was settled in 2007, but the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Near the start of the litigation, the two sides agreed to a “protective order” that would allow Purdue Pharma to keep the court records under wraps.

HBO, the Post and PK Films — represented by West Virginia University law professor Pat McGinley and Charleston attorney Chris Smith — argued that “the public interest in disclosure of Purdue’s aggressive and unlawful opioid marketing practices substantially outweighs continuing secrecy.”

“Concealment of its unlawful practices allowed Purdue’s profits to soar to billions of dollars, while the opioid epidemic took thousands of American lives and addicted hundreds of thousands,” McGinley told the judge in the motion.

McGinley previously worked with the Charleston Gazette-Mail, HD Media and a Washington Post lawyer to force disclosure of a massive database of pain pill shipments to pharmacies across America.

Stowers has scheduled a hearing for Jan. 29.

The 2001 lawsuit alleged Purdue “encouraged widespread use of OxyContin for off-label uses and doses, while misleading [patients] about the safety and effectiveness of the drug,” according to a summary of the case after it briefly was transferred to federal court.

The opioid manufacturer also allegedly enlisted doctors and others “to mislead [patients] to purchase and take the drug, while withholding information about its dangers, particularly its addictiveness,” the summary stated.

West Virginia has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation, and overdoses have spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.

HBO and the Post are seeking documents, videos and audio recordings that Purdue Pharma has kept under seal in the Putnam case from beginning to end.

In 2019, Purdue filed for bankruptcy in New York, just days after agreeing to a tentative settlement with states, counties, cities and towns that had filed lawsuits against the drugmaker.

In November, a federal judge approved an $8.3 billion settlement proposal. The agreement, which hasn’t been finalized, mandates Purdue can no longer operate as a privately-owned profit-making business.

Later that month, the company pleaded guilty to three felonies, admitting it sold OxyContin to health care providers, while knowing the powerful — and potentially deadly — painkiller was being diverted to drug abusers. Members of the wealthy Sackler family, owners of Purdue, agreed to pay a $250 million fine to the federal government and divest from the company. The Sacklers haven’t faced criminal charges.

McGinley argued that Purdue Pharma’s secrecy deal in Putnam County is meaningless because the company pleaded guilty to criminal charges and the firm is being shut down and restructured as a “public benefit trust” that would use any profits to provide free or low-cost opioid addiction treatment and overdose-reversing drugs.

In recent years, judges have unsealed court records that Purdue had fought to shield from the public.

In 2016, a McDowell County judge opened court documents in a lawsuit that former West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw had filed against Purdue Pharma some 15 years earlier. The company agreed to pay the state $10 million to settle the case in 2004. A Boston-based media outlet had asked the judge to release the files.

Despite opposition by Purdue, judges in Massachusetts and Kentucky also have unsealed court records that the opioid manufacturer had tried to keep hidden.

“These court-sanctioned protective orders shielded Purdue’s unlawful conduct, allowing it to continue marketing its opioid medications for almost 20 years,” McGinley wrote in the Dec. 17 motion. “The records…Purdue designated long ago as confidential competitive business records have no current or future relevance.”

In a statement emailed to Mountain State Spotlight, Purdue Pharma said it has already made available in bankruptcy court “tens of millions of documents, including thousands of privileged documents relating to its shareholders, further displaying the company’s cooperation and transparency in these proceedings.”

The company added: “We continue to act with this extraordinary level of transparency because our ultimate goal is to achieve a global settlement that would deliver more than $10 billion in value, including 100% of Purdue’s assets, to address the opioid crisis. Our proposed settlement structure would provide needed funds, as well as millions of doses of lifesaving opioid addiction treatment and overdose reversal medicines, to states, local communities and tribes to help abate the opioid crisis.”

Trails, Textbooks And Towers: Here Are The ‘Broadband’ Expenses W.Va. Gov. Justice Charged To The CARES Act

Barely any of the money, earmarked for pandemic relief, will actually connect homes and businesses to the internet

This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. For more stories from Mountain State Spotlight, visit www.mountainstatespotlight.org.

For Gov. Jim Justice, the announcement was the easy part. In September, he promised to spend $50 million of the state’s federal coronavirus response fund to bring internet to underserved areas of West Virginia.

He held multiple press conferences to flesh out his goal of “covering up West Virginia in broadband,” and even floated a way to do it: give companies $1,000 for every household they hook up.

Making that happen by the end-of-the-year deadline, however, proved much harder.

By December, Justice admitted he would only spend around $33 million. And documents obtained by Mountain State Spotlight show that almost none of that money will actually go to the governor’s stated goal: delivering better internet to homes and businesses as the pandemic forces West Virginians to adapt to working and learning from home.

Instead, among other things, the money will go to new school textbooks and a resurfaced wilderness trail.

Only one grant — the sole one publicly announced by the governor — went to internet service. Justice gave that $2.3 million grant to a newly-formed nonprofit, run by a state senator, that promises to build 11 miles of fiber around Huntington. The rest, amounting to the vast majority of the money, was allocated to three different state agencies for purposes barely related, if at all, to the governor’s goal.

Back in September, at the press conference announcing the $50 million fund, the governor sketched out where he planned to spend it. He showed a map of West Virginia, which included red areas that supposedly already had internet, and blue areas, where the Federal Communications Commission planned to install broadband using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal incentives.

And then there were white areas – covered by neither.

In these places — and many others across the state — new necessities of modern life, from telemedicine to Zoom, are impossible because there’s no decent internet. This is at least partly because, for the past decade, West Virginia has been reliant on Frontier Communications, a bankrupt telecommunications company with an appalling track record, to serve rural areas of the state. But it’s also the fault of West Virginia leaders, who have failed to provide substantial state funding to address the problem.

“We want to target those areas,” Justice said.

Here’s where the money actually went:

Tunnel Number 10 along the North Bend Rail Trail. Photo: Mike Tewkesbury via Flickr.

Trail remediation

Mountain State Spotlight obtained the original requests for CARES Act funding submitted to the governor. Four were categorized as broadband-related, each with Justice’s signature of approval. They totaled just over $32 million.

The strangest was the one from the Department of Natural Resources, requesting $1.4 million to rebuild a 72-mile trail through the wilderness outside Parkersburg.

To justify the use of CARES Act funding, the department’s director, Stephen McDaniel, argued that the North Bend Rail Trail’s “proximity” to a new interstate fiber-optic telecommunications cable required its “remediation.”

But Zayo, the Colorado telecommunications company that was installing the fiber, had already promised to fix any damage done by the heavy equipment it had brought in to do the job.

They “have to put it back the way it was, or better,” trail superintendent Paul Elliott told the Parkersburg News and Sentinel back in September.

According to a spokeswoman for the company, they did. “Zayo restored the trail to its current condition and even made some minor fixes,” Rebecca Whalen wrote in an email.

But the trail is still closed due to damage. It is unclear why the state is now footing the bill to fix it, and why it’s using funds earmarked for the coronavirus response to do so.

“I would love to talk to you about that, but I cannot,” Elliott said, sounding genuinely apologetic, when reached by Mountain State Spotlight over the phone.

A spokesman for the department offered little clarification.

“As you are aware, this project provides an opportunity to expand much needed high-speed internet services to rural parts of West Virginia,” Andy Malinoski wrote in an emailed statement.

Textbooks for virtual learners

Another $8 million is going to the West Virginia Department of Education to fill a hole in its budget produced by the expansion of the state’s virtual school program. The free program expanded ten-fold this year as students — primarily in more populated counties — opted to forgo the classroom entirely during the pandemic.

Classifying this as a broadband-related expense is odd, since kids who voluntarily enrolled in the state’s virtual school program are nearly certain to already have reliable internet access.

In some counties, they even had to sign a contract asserting such before they could apply.

And now they will get the benefit of millions in federal coronavirus relief funds, to be spent on the teachers, textbooks and curriculums that are necessary for them to learn safely while at home.

Students in rural areas of the state where the internet is unreliable or nonexistent will not.

In some counties, including Mineral and Summers, not a single kid signed up to the state’s program, according to data released by the state’s Department of Education in November.

Barely 1% of students in Roane County ended up in the program. The superintendent, Richard Duncan, explained one reason why.

“People hear ‘virtual school’ here, and they just gloss over: well, we can’t do that — we live in Roane County, we don’t have … [a] high speed internet connection” he said.

The “inequities” caused by the state’s poor internet caught state superintendent Clayton Burch by surprise, he told West Virginia Public Broadcasting in July.

“We just didn’t know how wide the gap was when it comes to broadband,” he said.

Although the governor categorized Burch’s $8 million funding request as broadband-related, the money will do nothing to close that gap.

Upgraded public safety radio

Another $20.5 million was allocated to the Department of Homeland Security, for upgrades to the state’s public safety radio network.

It is designed specifically for first responders and can be accessed only by government agencies.

“The bandwidth… needs to be upgraded… to carry the additional amount of communication the pandemic has caused,” reads the justification for the expenditure submitted to the governor by Jeff Sandy, head of the state’s Department of Homeland Security.

But if the network is overloaded, no one seems to have noticed.

After a reporter reached out to the network’s coordinator at the Division of Emergency Management, a spokesman issued a statement.

“There has been no significant effect on the State Interoperable Radio Network resulting from the pandemic response,” wrote Lawrence Messina, referring to SIRN, the public safety communications network.

Other inconsistencies in Sandy’s justification to the governor raise further questions about the necessity of the expenditures.

He claims that “much of the equipment” in the network “is at end of life, with limited to no additional parts available.” This issue is so pressing, he wrote, that it could lead to “loss of life.”

In that same paragraph he claims that the money will be used to install over 51 microwave repeaters that the department has kept “in storage” — and then requests to purchase 61 more.

Sandy also claims the upgrade will increase “network capacity” to 1 gigabit per second while acknowledging that, under normal use, the network transports a similar amount of data, in addition to standard voice service, over an entire day.

The no-bid contract to build and install the new microwave equipment will go to Texas-based Aviat Networks.

That name might sound familiar. Both SIRN and Aviat have a scandal-ridden history in West Virginia involving the misuse of federal funds earmarked for broadband expansion.

In 2010, the state used $33 million of federal stimulus funds to upgrade SIRN with equipment purchased from Aviat. Auditors later found that officials circumvented state purchasing laws.

At the time, state officials promised it would help bring internet to hard-to-reach hollows in West Virginia. Many of the towers are located in rural areas that are underserved — or not served at all — by Frontier.

To do that, Gale Given, the state’s Chief Technology Officer at the time, said that up to a third of the network’s bandwidth would be devoted to commercial use.

That didn’t happen.

“No,” Messina replied when asked if SIRN was currently used for any commercial purposes.

‘Make it happen’

Other states are trying something different.

At least six states have created new broadband infrastructure grant programs using the CARES Act money, according to an analysis by Pew Charitable Trusts. Mississippi is giving away $75 million to rural utility cooperatives.

West Virginia has its own cooperatives, including Hardy Telecommunications, which has been remarkably successful at bringing high-speed internet to rural communities. The company recently was denied subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission to expand its network in the state — the co-op was likely outbid by Frontier.

Other ideas have been thrown around inside the governor’s mansion.

In early October, a small group of government officials and telecommunications executives met there to brainstorm ways to spend the $50 million.

Various ideas were presented, including building out the state’s internet backbone and rewiring SIRN to service homes and businesses in rural communities.

At the end, a source familiar with the meeting, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Justice was receptive.

He turned to Bray Cary, a former broadcast media executive who earns minimum wage as an advisor to the governor.

Make it happen, Justice told him.

Why it hasn’t is unclear. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment

Reach reporter Lucas Manfield at lucasmanfield@mountainstatespotlight.org