Drug crisis: Political inaction kills West Virginians | News, Sports, Jobs

For more than a decade, West Virginia has suffered under the brunt of a substance abuse epidemic that is crippling individuals, families and entire communities. Politicians have made a big deal of fighting it, but the reality is that we are more caught in the grip of the monster than ever before.

“The fundamental issue is that we have not made enough progress in this crisis,” said Jeremiah Samples, senior adviser to the Joint Committee on Government and Finance and former deputy secretary of the former Department of Health and Human Services. “We are nowhere near where we need to be, and our data relative to other states and even our own expectations are far below expectations. We need to re-evaluate all of our SUD strategies and spending through the lens of what is affecting real people in our society.”

Earlier this week, he submitted a report to the Joint Standing Committee on Health.

The Mountain State has led the nation in overdose deaths since 2010. In 2022, the overdose death rate was a staggering 80.9 per 100,000 people. The national average is 32.4 per 100,000 people.

Samples puts it mildly when he says: “We cannot sustain this as a society. It is detrimental to the State.”

We cannot sustain the “hundreds of millions and billions in spending and impact on the state” If, as Samples noted, all that spending hasn’t paid off, it’s certainly not reversing the trend.

For a group of legislators who came to power thanks to a wave of “eliminate fraud, waste and abuse,” and “right sizing” From a government standpoint, one would think it would be easy to heed Samples’ warning that the state needs to do a better job of tracking spending and programs to figure out what’s really working.

“The most important thing we need to do, in my opinion, is measure what matters so that we can then organically change and improve our response to this crisis.” said. “We need to measure every aspect of our substance use disorder policies and spending and link them to a central social measure.”

But here, perhaps more than in many other states, the bureaucracy exists to serve (and expand) itself, even when hard data shows it is not fulfilling its mission. And politicians enjoy pretending to be part of the solution far more than actually being that way.

Samples is right. In more ways than one, we cannot afford one more minute of this kind of exploitation. It is really killing us.