Opioid Addiction Story Archives - Page 2 of 8 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. To Receive $1.5 Million In Suboxone Monopoly Settlement

West Virginia will receive close to $1.5 million from a nationwide settlement.

West Virginia will receive close to $1.5 million from a nationwide settlement with the maker of Suboxone, Indivio Inc.

Suboxone is a prescription medicine used to treat opioid addiction in adults.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey announced that 41 states and Washington, D.C. have settled with Indivior Inc. for a total of $102.5 million nationwide.

The lawsuit began in 2016 when a coalition of states filed a complaint against Indivior Inc., alleging the company used illegal tactics to preserve its drug monopoly.

The coalition argued the alleged unlawful conduct allowed Indivior time to switch the market to its brand name oral film (a film form that dissolves under the patient’s tongue) before generic manufacturers of the pill form were set to enter the market back in 2009.

“Companies should not resort to improper means to control the market, all the while hurting consumers,” Morrisey said. “Competition is the driving force in a free market economy, and those who resort to improper means will be held accountable to the full extent of the law.”

The agreement requires Indivior to pay a total of $102.5 million.

Indivior is also required to comply with negotiated injunctive terms that include disclosures to the states of all citizen petitions to the FDA, the introduction of new products, or if there is a change in corporate control, which will help the states ensure that Indivior refrains from engaging in the same kind of conduct alleged in the complaint.

Lawmakers Weigh Opioid Treatment Options

Legislators heard from board members of the private donation-funded opioid treatment center Lauren’s Wish during the first interim session this week.

Between March 2021 and March 2022, West Virginia reported 1,403 fentanyl overdoses. In 2021 alone, there were 1,253 opioid overdose deaths in West Virginia, 83 percent of which were fentanyl-related.

Ed Boyle, director of Facilities at Lauren’s Wish, said his organization’s board members, all of whom have been affected by the state’s opioid crisis, found a gap in the opioid overdose recovery process.

“Through this pain and recovery process, these six directors met over a year-long process of studying where as a society we seem to be failing the youth of this state and our communities,” Boyle said. “We came up with the idea of Lauren’s Wish Addiction Triage Center.”

When an individual overdoses and is taken to the emergency room, they are given Narcan and stabilized. Some hospitals have peer recovery coaches to set the person up with a bed in a treatment center, but that bed might not be available for a week or more. That leaves the hospital to discharge the patient back into the environment in which they overdosed.

Boyle said the board of directors at Lauren’s Wish termed the pattern, “treat and street.” To avoid this cycle, Lauren’s Wish Addiction Triage Center was opened as a 28-bed facility at Hazel’s House of Hope in Morgantown.

Dr. Kevin Blankenship is the Medical Services Director of Lauren’s Wish and founder of Jacob’s Ladder, another private patient-centered recovery program located in Aurora, West Virginia.

“We’ve got lots of beds available in West Virginia but most of those are 30-day programs, at best,” Blankenship said. “What I saw was missing was long-term treatment and that’s what Jacob’s Ladder is. Jacob’s Ladder is a six-month treatment program, that then transitions into another three to six months of sober living. The reason for that is because addiction takes time to heal from. Your brain can heal from this, but you’ve got to give it the right environment.”

Blankenship noted the same gap in treatment between an overdose treatment in an emergency room and treatment and recovery bed availability. He also said 28 days is not enough time to heal from opioid addiction.

“If you’re a doctor or a lawyer or an airline pilot, you’ll be entered into a program for two to five years for your addiction, right? For everybody else 30 days, you should be good,” Blankenship said. “They’re not good and we’re not planning for them after they’re done with their 28-day program. So the program itself is too short. There’s nowhere for them to go afterward.”

Programs like Lauren’s Wish and Jacob’s Ladder need to be duplicated throughout the state, Blankenship recommended to lawmakers.

“This is a necessary program,” Blankenship said. “You probably need four or five of these around our state, regionally located so that different ERs and hospital systems can take advantage of that. It’ll take a load off of our EMS system, it’ll take a load off of our ERs, the folks in there can take care of the heart attacks and the brain bleeds that are coming into the door, instead of devoting all their time to this.”

According to Boyle, Lauren’s Wish has had 152 clients go through their system and be placed in an aftercare or recovery process like a sobering center or medium or short-term rehabilitation stays.

Blankenship said the Jacob’s Ladder program has been in existence for seven years and has a success rate of 75 percent. He credits the program’s success to the time they give their patients to heal, noting the first two weeks of a 28-day stay would be spent in withdrawal.

“There’s something to be said about time when you’re talking about healing the brain and that’s what addiction is, it’s a brain disorder that can be healed with time and the appropriate treatment,” Blankenship said.

Del. Heather Tully, R-Nicholas, asked Blankenship how Jacob’s Ladder is able to keep track of their patients years into their recovery in order to study the outcomes of this type of treatment.

Blankenship credited the strength of the alumni community of Jacob’s Ladder for a portion of their long-term success but also noted the organization has weekly and monthly contact with each person and is able to tell if they’ve relapsed or struggling.

“That doesn’t mean that none of them relapse,” Blankenship said. “The difference in a relapse from a graduate from Jacob’s Ladder, for instance, versus someone who had spent 28 days, is you find out about it immediately, as soon as they use they’ve picked up the phone, someone’s noticed something, they didn’t make a meeting, they didn’t make a commitment that they had. We know pretty early on. And it’s so much easier to deal with that type of a bump in the road, rather than a full-blown relapse, where you’re out six months, using again.”

Blankenship said the cycle of the 28-day treatment model is inefficient and costly.

“The unfortunate part about the 28-day [treatment], and I hate to even suggest this, but they’re incentivized to have folks relapsed and come back because they can just keep billing, you know, you can’t go for longer than 28 days,” Blankenship said. “But if you relapse next week, come back, I got four more weeks I can bill for. So they don’t really have the incentive to make sure that these folks are out there doing healthy things for the next 10 years, which is what our goal is.”

Del. Amy Summers, R-Taylor, referenced a presentation from an earlier meeting of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Health and Human Resources in which Cindy Beane, commissioner of the Bureau for Medical Services, testified to the implementation of Senate Bill 419 from the 2022 West Virginia Legislative session.

“It’s very difficult for a residential provider to basically track that person who is now not even in the county that they treated the person in a whole other county that might be across the state,” Beane said. “So it’s very difficult for the expectation of the bill for somebody to basically track somebody three years down the road.”

Senate Bill 419 directed the state Department of Health and Human Resources, through the Bureau for Medical Services, to establish a pilot project to evaluate the impact of certain post-substance use disorder residential treatments in West Virginia.

“We had a presentation yesterday through a committee where recovery treatment centers, as you say, are possibly incentivized to have people come back because that’s how they make money,” Summers said. “They think that it’s too difficult to be able to follow people because they say when they leave, they leave and they don’t have the technology to do it. It sounds like you make a phone call.”

Blankenship said the graduates of Jacob’s Ladder are like a family and schedule face-to-face time with one another to check in for coffee or lunch. Also, to enter into the program, the person has to be serious about their recovery. He also noted that 80 percent of people who go through a 28-day program will relapse within three months.

New Foundation Will Distribute Opioid Trial Settlement Funds

The newly formed West Virginia First Foundation will distribute settlement funds from lawsuits against opioid makers and distributors.

It will handle 72.5 percent of the state’s settlement funds, while 24.5 percent would go to local governments. The remaining 3 percent will be held by the state in escrow.

Senate Bill 674 legally recognizes the creation of the foundation, which was announced last month by Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill Wednesday.

“We can expand treatment, we can provide evidence-based substance use prevention through this foundation,” Morrisey said during a live stream of the bill’s signing. “We’ll actually help ensure that the laws in our state are better enforced.”

The foundation board will include eleven board members. The governor will appoint five, and six will be selected by local governments across designated regions. Each board member would serve a three year term.

All 55 counties and 221 of West Virginia’s 229 cities have signed the foundation’s Memorandum of Understanding, which also establishes the six regions to be represented in the foundation’s board. An executive director will also be named to run the foundation’s daily operations.

In January, Morrisey announced the state had settled for $83 million with the pharmacy store chain Walgreens. Walmart and CVS Pharmacy settled with West Virginia in September for a combined total of $147 million, and a similar settlement for $400 million was reached in August with the nation’s “big three” opioid distributors: AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson.

“We know that the opioid epidemic has been one of the great challenges of our time, we know that there’s been a lot of senseless death,” Morrisey said. “The bill being signed today marks a tremendous point in time in our effort to fight back against this terrible crisis.”

West Virginia is also set to take grocery store chain Kroger to trial in June.

Compassion Fatigue

Homelessness is not just an issue for big cities like San Francisco or New York City. Across America, communities large and small are struggling to provide shelter to people without housing. In Charleston, West Virginia, government and community approaches to help the unhoused have created more debate on an issue that is already divisive.

Homelessness has been on the rise since 2016, and the pandemic only exacerbated an acute shortage of resources to help people living on the streets. Now, many communities are struggling to provide support as some homeless people turn away from emergency shelters and remain in outdoor encampments.

In Charleston, West Virginia, the city’s opioid response program also now focuses on homelessness. “Tent cities” have been a focus at the state legislature as debate continues over how best to help people living on the street.

At the same time, some people say they’re more afraid of people living on the street than in the past. Providing sustained care for homeless people continues to elude and divide even well-meaning and determined communities.

This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council and the CRC Foundation.

Subscribe to Us & Them on Apple Podcasts, NPR One, RadioPublic, Spotify, Stitcher and beyond.

*Us & Them* host Trey Kay met Randy Lantz while Lantz sheltered on the steps of First Presbyterian Church in Charleston on a cold night in January 2023. Lantz said he’s been homeless since 2016. He said he’s from Atlanta, Georgia and has been in prison three times. Lantz said he found his way “back into the world” after his first two prison terms. But this time, he said, he cannot.

*Credit: Julie Blackwood*

Rev. William Myers became First Presbyterian Church’s new head minister in August 2021. It wasn’t long before he became aware of the church’s transient guests who slept on the building’s front steps. Rev. Myers allowed them to camp there overnight. But he wanted to set limits, knowing children in the church’s preschool program used that entrance every morning and afternoon.

He established some ground rules for those sheltering on the steps. But this did not resolve the concerns of community members in and outside First Presby. In his first days in Charleston, Rev. Myers was quickly immersed in the debate over how best to help people living on the street.

*Credit Trey Kay/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

(Click here to view Rev. Myer’s sermon about caring for homeless people.)

Ashley Switzer was born and raised in Charleston. She is a school teacher. Ashley and her husband have raised five children in West Virginia’s capitol city. Her grandson attends a preschool that’s located near First Presbyterian Church and St. John’s Episcopal Church, which houses Manna Meal, a soup kitchen that’s been serving meals to homeless people for more than four decades.

“There was a group of parents from this school right here who actually called for a meeting with the mayor of our town because of instances with homeless or criminal vagrants on school property, near school property, banging on parents’ car doors, children in the back screaming,” she said, standing outside the preschool playground where her grandson plays. “There have been children playing on this actual playground where homeless people will threaten them. My grandson has witnessed someone walking down this very sidewalk with no pants.”

*Credit: Ashley Switzer*

Barbara DiPietro is the senior director of policy for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. She oversees the group’s federal advocacy and policy analysis. “It’s not compassion in our public policies when we consistently choose not to fund housing, not to raise wages, to allow people to not get health care,” DiPietro said. “Homelessness isn’t an accident. These are conscious public policy choices.”

*Credit: National Institute for Medical Respite Care*

Taryn Wherry is director of the City of Charleston’s CARE program, or Coordinated Addiction Response Effort. The CARE program began under Charleston’s current mayor, Amy Goodwin.

“We take a very hands-on, boots on the ground approach every day,” Wherry said. “We’re in the streets, we’re on the [river] banks or in abandoned properties. We’re talking to people and meeting them where they’re at.”

Wherry said CARE staff know firsthand what it is like to be out on the streets, struggling with drug or alcohol addiction.

“We have individuals who have lived and learned experience in all fields, people who are in long-term recovery who have been in active addiction,” she said.

*Credit: Trey Kay/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

(Click here to hear Mayor Goodwin on meeting the needs of Charleston’s homeless population.)

(Click here to view former Charleston Mayor Danny Jones announcing his order to dismantle a homeless encampment known as “Tent City.”)

Sommer Short is a peer support worker with Covenant House, which is one of the nonprofit service organizations that works with Charleston’s CARE team. When Sommer was 21, she was injured in a car accident and was prescribed opioids. Over the next five years, she transitioned to heroin use. She said she eventually left home and became homeless.

Short is sober now and works to help unhoused people who are living the way she used to live. She said many of the homeless people she meets are living with substance use disorder. She said they feel like “her people.”

“Though I may be in a position where I’m three years sober today, I am comfortable going out there and trying to help someone the same way that someone helped me,” she said.

*Credit: Trey Kay/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

One way Short tries to help is by offering food and “hygiene bags” to homeless people camping in and around Charleston. She keeps the supplies in the trunk of her car.

“In the bag, we have a Ziploc bag, which contains the toilet paper and their socks and some ointment. Then, we have some baby wipes. And inside, we also have a bottle of water, a hairbrush, a comb, a little travel pack for their toothpaste and a brush, a razor, shaving cream,” she said. Short also has food gift cards and Narcan nasal spray, which can be used to reverse a drug overdose.

*Credit: Trey Kay/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

As Short walked toward a homeless encampment, she passed under a highway overpass. Someone had written “HOPE” in yellow spray paint on the concrete wall.

“Hold On Pain Ends,” Short said, describing what the word meant to her. “You always gotta have hope. Pain ends eventually. But you got to work for it as well.”

*Credit: Trey Kay/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Veteran Law Enforcement Officers Now Included In Alzheimer’s Awareness Training Bill

On Alzheimer’s Awareness Day at the West Virginia Legislature, the organization’s program director Terresa Morris said that more than half of those with the brain disorder affecting memory and behavior will – at one time or another – wander.

About 40,000 West Virginians live with some degree of Alzheimer’s dementia, according to the West Virginia chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. There has been concern that recent legislation focused on law enforcement interacting with those suffering with Alzheimer’s did not go far enough.

Senate Bill 570 was signed into law in 2022. The measure required all new law enforcement and correction officers to undergo specialized training in how to identify and communicate with those living with dementia. Morris said that training proved as an eye opener for new recruits.

“When we talk about stories of people in the past that have had situations like this, I think it’s something that our new officers don’t always think about,” Morris said. “They just know that’s not what they’re taught, per se, so currently, we’re doing that through training at the State Academy for all the new officers.”

That law made Alzheimer’s awareness training voluntary for law enforcement and correction officers already on the force. However, few veterans stepped up to take the training.

Currently proposed Senate Bill 208 mandates that all law enforcement officers, new and old, take Alzheimer’s awareness training.

Morris said with stories of first responder confusion over intoxication vs. dementia still coming to light, across the board training becomes a community help as well.

“This is something fairly new,” Morris said. “We’re just at the point where we have increased awareness of dementia and Alzheimer’s and someone that maybe has been in the force five, 10, 20 years – they need this training, they need to know what they could potentially be dealt with or what they could be working with.”

The training also includes understanding the risks associated with Alzheimer’s, including elder abuse and exploitation.

With Alzheimer’s activists in attendance, the Senate suspended rules Thursday and passed Senate Bill 526, which would incorporate early detection, diagnosis and education efforts regarding dementia on its public health platforms. That bill now goes to the House of Delegates for consideration.

Local, State And Federal Stakeholders Discuss Severity Of Opioid Addiction Crisis

Dr. Rahul Gupta, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the former West Virginia state health officer, was joined by Gayle Manchin Thursday during a second day of roundtable discussions about the severity of the opioid and addiction crisis in West Virginia.

Local business, faith, health and law enforcement leaders offered up their individual wish lists to stem addiction and substance use disorder (SUD).

Most conveyed their concern about the need for follow up services to help people reentering the community following addition treatment. One of the most pressing needs included transportation.

Sen. Joe Manchin’s wife Gayle filled in for her husband who was absent for reasons related to surgery. The federal Co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), she talked about $15 million invested in 49 INSPIRE projects to support a continuum of care, including rehab and recovery programs, as well as business and community collaborative efforts.

Manchin talked of her husband’s efforts to secure funding for abuse and addiction and recognized Gupta for spearheading efforts to fight the drug epidemic.

“Doctor Gupta, thank you; for being most importantly, who you are. And that is a caring, passionate, caring individual that understands Appalachia, understands rural America, but like me you are impartial and you are serving our country at a very critical time” she said.

Gupta announced $12.4 million has been awarded in grants for 99 new community coalitions across the country as part of the Drug-Free Communities (DFC) Support Program. Three are in West Virginia. The additional $375,000 in funding from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) will be used to mobilize communities to prevent and combat youth substance use. The money will be divided between The Martinsburg Initiative, Jefferson Berkeley Alliance, and Logan County Prevention Coalition.

“This is a syndemic which means there are so many other problems related to this, we have to look at this more holistically,” he said.

Earlier this week U.S. Sens Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito announced four grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to support first responders and address substance use disorder treatment, prevention, and mental health needs.

Dr. Matthew Christenson, director of West Virginia’s Office of Drug Control Policy, also said recent CDC numbers show West Virginia is one of only six states that has shown a 4 percent decrease in 12 month addiction numbers since the peak of the overdose crisis during the pandemic. The national average is 9 percent.