A Tragedy in Appalachia: Oxycontin and Opportunities or more simply: “The story of my Brother”

 
Editor’s note: The following are excerpts from a longer story by Tinia Creamer, reprinted here with permission.
SHOALS, WV — This could be your brother, your sister, your mother. . . I have relayed various tragic details of this life of mine over the years. . .  All I have written before tells a story that has resolved. A triumph.
This story is ongoing. Nothing in this world has broken me, left me destroyed and devastated like addiction.
Wait, please know, I am the furthest thing from an addict. . .yet I’ve felt it so close, I might as well be one.
I have lost a father, 2 brothers, a sister and a grandfather in my short 34 years . . . to fires and exhaustion.
Addiction, though. I cannot even face it.
I said goodbye to my Daddy two years after my sisters and brothers. I have had miscarriages and have had a baby born so prematurely, he was unable to breathe on his own. I moved beyond molestation and rape.
But addiction. . . It gives me little peace, no rest. No hope. For 15 years. . . It is a Death simply dragged out year after year . . .  In Appalachia. And elsewhere.
My brother was born two years after me. He was beautiful, even as a little child. . .  When my brother’s story became too sad, I ignored it. . . but I cannot forget it now.
West Virginia’s hopelessness grabbed him. . . It began with something that led to Oxycontin, as it did for everyone in Lincoln County back then. Oxycontin eventually became impossible to acquire, so Opana and FENTANYL took their place. Methadone, Meth eventually turned to Heroin.
Most addicts tell me they want to die.  Folks like to talk about choice. What choice? Do you believe these people said one day, “I want to be an addict when I grow up?”  My brother’s body is covered in track marks. I’ve found him scratching in corners unable to speak, 60 lbs. too thin for his 6’2” frame. . .and yet he was unable to say, “ENOUGH!” Addiction is tangled in an extreme lack of hope and no confidence in one’s self at the roots.
Stop talking to me about choice when more than half of our population in some areas have become lost to Oxycontin then Meth and now Heroin. Stop telling me about choice when 1/2 of our babies are addicted in NICU. Let’s talk about . . .  letting humans become guinea pigs and cash cows for Big Pharma.  Yesterday, 27 people overdosed in Huntington, WV. . . and the “Let them die” and “Their Choice” posts flooded my news feed. . .
The horror of what is taking place  . . .  is beyond the scope of words or vision.
Someone TALK. Say something.  Do something of value. Get it right. Their lives matter. How about that?
Addicts’ Lives Matter. Black Ones. Young Ones. White Ones.
The Hopeless culture here must end.
Someone must scream about it until the ceiling is shattered, until it stops. . .until we drag these human beings back from the brink and give them a vision. . .
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Proverbs 29:18