What I Saw Today: The Drug War in West Virginia

First, to say it's a "War" may be an overstatement. Frankly at this point, the drug sellers are slaughtering West Virginians and there isn't much opposition which is slowing that.

Okay, for what I saw:

First today, I saw a newspaper headline which said the new Drug Czar for the state is retiring after about four months on the job.

Second, I saw that the mayor of Huntington has decided NOT to run for the Congressional seat which includes this county and city. He said the drug problem was the reason.

Third, I saw a man being resuscitated in the parking lot of a Taco Bell (near the Route 60 Walmart) and then Sheriff's Dept. police coming to search the car and its occupants. I don't know if any were arrested.

I also read that aside from murders, we now have more drug overdose deaths than (pretty much) anywhere in the nation. Keep in mind that this is a poor state and yet the drug dealers have found it to be profitable to sell here. That means they're not making a huge profit margin or they would go somewhere else.

What can be done to turn this around? Well, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are doing NOTHING. Yep. When they said to potential voters in 2016, "What have you got to lose?" they meant, "Vote for Trump and watch what happens when you lose everything. He promised to revive the coal industry and that is an impossibility when technological advances simply replace it with better energy sources at cheaper prices. That change has happened and there are no new coal-burning power plants being built in America. Wind and solar power are cheaper and battery technologies are coming every day and will soon be sufficient for any of our needs.

This means that with no coal industry in West Virginia there will be no good-paying jobs and the "way of life" the Republicans have been promising West Virginians they would protect (from Liberal Democrats of course) is still going to be as dead as a dodo very soon.

What I haven't yet seen is a solution to the drug problem aside from making it more profitable for the drug dealers to sell elsewhere and push them off onto other people. Apparently that has happened to bring them to us and it could happen to entice them to leave us. No other big solution has been suggested that I've heard.

Personally, I think that legalizing marijuana would help people to find an outlet for their frustrations without resorting to harder drugs. That might be wishful thinking, but it's a cheap thing to try. Other "War on Drugs" techniques involving billions of dollars and militarization of the police haven't kept drugs from WV. Why should we believe that doubling-down on that strategy would do more than bankrupt us?