CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — If communication is one of the keys to finding a solution to the state’s opioid crisis, residents in Harrison County were able to take a big step forward courtesy of an open forum hosted by the Harrison County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
“We know what the problem is,” Mateen Abdul-Aziz, a Clarksburg native and member of the NAACP, said Thursday evening. “The problem is we have heroin being distributed. We have users. We have the pill mills.”
Abdul-Aziz was one of several who spoke briefly Thursday night in a meeting attended by local drug task force members, law enforcement at the local and county level, members of the Harrison County Prosecutor’s Office, assorted first responders, and–most importantly–ordinary citizens.
“Like most people, I have several family members who battle heroin addiction,” Abdul-Aziz said.
And, Abdul-Aziz said, he’s not alone. He believes most people don’t need to look very hard to find someone in their life struggling with the issue of opioid addiction.
“It’s personal,” he said. “I have multiple friends who have either lost a loved one to an overdose and death or battle it right now. That’s why I say it affects all of us either indirectly or directly.”
West Virginia’s struggle with opioid addiction has been highlighted for the last several years, including high-profile overdoses in Huntington, settled lawsuits over pharmaceutical companies pumping too many pills into the state, the highest per capita overdose death rate in the nation for the past several years, and an influx of new, more dangerous batches of heroin.
“We have enough complaints,” Abdul-Aziz said. “We have enough complaints about the problem. Let’s bring answers and solutions. When we start talking about solutions, we start moving forward. We can’t continue to talk about why we have this problem. We know why we have it. Let’s talk about how we’re going to get out of the problem.”
That was the idea Thursday–creating an open line of communication between citizens, drug prevention advocates, and law enforcement.
“How do we solve it?” Abdul-Aziz said. “One way that we solve it is that we have a good relationship or communication between law enforcement and citizens.”
He doesn’t mean this as just lip service, though. Abdul-Aziz said he recognizes that not everybody is ready for treatment.
“It’s just the way it is,” he said. “Some people have to be locked up. People always say, ‘Well, you can’t arrest your way out of this.’ Well, you can’t. But you have to lock some people up, and you have to help for those who are ready for help–cause you can’t help everybody.”
Ready: that’s a key word in the addiction process.
“A lot of people say it’s hard to get treatment,” Abdul-Aziz said. “When you have somebody who is ready to get treatment, you need to get them in right then and there. A lot of times, it’s not that easy.”
According to the most recent available data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), West Virginia’s overdose death rate rose 16.9 per cent from 2014 to 2015–faster than all but ten states in the nation.
In a year where more than 33,000 people died from opioid overdoses, West Virginia led the way again with the highest rate of overdose death per 100,000 citizens. It’s believed more than 90 percent of those overdoses were related to opioids.
During the 2016 gubernatorial campaign, both Governor-elect Jim Justice and former Senate President Bill Cole made statements offering varying degrees of support for increased treatment options. Abdul-Aziz said that promise needs keeping–and for one very good reason.
“Addicts are in recovery for the rest of their life,” he said. “It’s an every day process. It’s a day-by-day process.”
The National Institute of Health estimates more than 2 million people are addicted to opioids in the United States. Regardless of what portion of that number resides in the Mountain State, Abdul-Aziz said Harrison County can’t wait any longer for solutions.
Those solutions, he believes, start right at home.
“What are you doing to help the problem? You’re not doing anything besides complaining. Complaining is just another complaint. We have enough complaints about the problem. Let’s bring answers and solutions.”