CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Volunteers are once again partnering up to hand out lifesaving medication with the power to stop opioid overdoses in their tracks, and this time, all 13 Appalachian states came together for the initiative.
Thursday was not only Save a Life Day for National Recovery Month, where drug prevention and recovery organizations gather at different locations to distribute free overdose-reversing Naloxone, but for the first time ever, it was Appalachian-wide Save a Life Day.
Over 300 free Naloxone distribution sites were expected to be set up throughout West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi and all of the other states in the Appalachian region for the event.
A total of 14 different sites were set up throughout the Kanawha Valley alone. One of those sites was Risen City Church on Charleston’s West Side.
Risen City location site leader Jennie Hill told MetroNews that while they had already gotten a few getting trained in administering Naloxone Thursday, they expected a lot more people to show up throughout the day.
“What I really want to see is people coming together, supporting each other, and getting this Naloxone out into the community allows people who use drugs the ability to stay alive until they can find recovery,” said Hill.
Naloxone is also known as Narcan, and it’s a medication that blocks the effects of opioids and temporarily reverses an overdose.
Since SOAR, or Solution Oriented Addiction Response began organizing Save a Life Days every September, many other organizations joined in to get involved.
Hill said just at their site location alone on Thursday was West Virginia Alliance of Recovery Residences, Recovery Point Charleston, Ayuda Medical Alert Company and UniCare were all there to help hand out the medication and train people on how to use it.
Hill is an executive director of Laotong Yoga in Charleston and they provide recovery-based yoga in prisons and recovery centers. She believes those in charge aren’t supporting people who are addicted to opioids so it’s up to community members to step up and lend a hand.
“We have three times the death rate of any other state in the nation, which means per capita more of our people are dying and it’s not just double, it’s three times any other state because we have failed policy,” said Hill.
Hill said the ongoing opioid epidemic is a problem which West Virginia and the Appalachian region have been struggling to pull out for decades now after Purdue Pharmaceutical was the first to kick-start a long line of corporations coming in bringing highly-addictive prescription pills to the people.
She said the company launched a marketing campaign in the 90s claiming that oxycontin was not addictive despite it being one of the most addictive substances ever approved by the FDA, and soon after the whole region was blanketed by the drug.
“They took an addictive substance and pushed it on our population of people because they were blue-collar workers and they would get injured in coal mines and things like that,” she said. “We have more addiction here and more people dying from addiction than probably anywhere else on the planet”
Tiffany Hollane was one of the West Side residents coming out to receive Naloxone Thursday after facing the deaths of four of her family members from opioid overdose. She said she had lost her father, a cousin, and both of her brothers.
Hollane said when it comes to saving someone’s life it shouldn’t matter what choices they have made to get them to that point, they are a human being regardless, and that supporting the use of Naloxone is simply having compassion for others.
“I think people need to learn how to use it and the stigma behind it needs to be taken away, it’s not because someone is dirty or because they’re an addict, people need to quit looking at that and look at the person,” she said.
Hill said people have been very supportive of the distribution effort and the stigma behind it has gradually started to lessen as people begin to see its value in saving the lives of others.
“There is stigma I would say especially in the Southern Coal Fields, in the Southern coal counties, and for a long time the establishment didn’t want days like this to happen, but we have sites in all 55 counties now, we have peer recovery support specialists, people in recovery themselves helping other people get into recovery, we have them in all the counties in the state now,” Hill said.
She said there are also quick response teams in the state now where a group, typically an EMT, a clergy member, and a peer recovery specialist go to someone who has overdosed and show them comfort, reassure them that their life matters, and help them find treatment options.
Save a Life Day started in West Virginia in 2020 with just two counties, all 55 of them joined the initiative last year. SOAR is working with 150 counties total across the 13 states for the effort.
This year’s program theme was “Partnering with People with Lived Experience.”