Editor’s note: The People’s Tribune interviewed Matthew Kerner who is running for the West Virginia House of Delegates in the 45th District.
People’s Tribune: Matthew, tell us about your campaign.
Matthew Kerner: The two issues I see facing West Virginia are poverty and substance abuse, and oftentimes they are related. My motivation for running for office came through my work. I run an organization called Opportunity House, Inc. It is a recovery community organization. We provide housing for people in recovery from substance abuse, and provide recovery supports for anybody in our community without charge. Through that work I saw an enormous number of bad political decisions. We waste a lot of money doing things that have been demonstrated to be relatively ineffective like sending people to 28-day treatment programs and then sending them right back to the same environment they came from, knowing there’s a very low success rate. We are treating a chronic disease with an acute care model by not addressing the underlying issues so it will reoccur. Something in our society makes us not want to do something good for those we don’t think deserve it, those people become marginalized and disenfranchised, and dehumanized.
PT: What are the causes of addiction?
MK: Here in WV and across Appalachia, mental health, depression, and similar issues are driven by hopelessness and helplessness. When I moved here in the 80s, people joked that it didn’t matter if there was a boom or bust in the rest of country, things were already bad here. Over time we develop an attitude that you are predestined to live life in poverty and nothing good will ever come your way. Opioids just happen to be the drug de jure—could be anything that creates a sense of euphoria, that will also kill emotional pain.
Big Pharma has allowed this problem to grow. That’s another big motivation for me to run for office. I’m looking at a whole corrupt system. The problem is there’s no monitoring of how many pills are coming into the state. It’s by design. We have so many legislators funded by big Pharma and encouraged to look the other way. Recently, eight million pills were shipped to a little town in WV with a population of 450 people; another, 21 million pills went to another small town with a population of about 2,000. That’s about 100,000 pills per person over a couple year period. If those pills had been entered into the existing data base, we would have known immediately that they were here instead of waiting years. By then, people die, become addicted, families destroyed, grandparents forced to become parents again.
About 80% of our prison population is there for drug related charges. They arrest someone that bought enough drugs to share drugs with friends and they end up with a drug trafficking charge, but they’re really not a drug trafficker. Those guys go to prison and corporate executives who know exactly what they are doing by shipping the pills here just pay a fine. Cardinal Health settled a lawsuit for $20 million [for not controlling the supply of opiates that fed drug addiction]; it’s a $130 billion company so $20 million is just a cost of doing business. Until that changes, nothing much else will. Don Blankenship is another example of how it’s not a Democrat or Republican thing but really about a corporate funded politician versus someone who gets elected to office to serve the people. When the explosion happened and 29 coal miners died, we had no state law to adequately prosecute him. Politicians funded by the extraction industries had made sure that in the event this happened, there wouldn’t be any avenue to prosecute.
PT: What do you think about the major parties?
MK: I’m not crazy about either Party. I know people I went to high school with who would have made better presidential candidates than Trump and Clinton. The county I live in has always been red. The only time the county voted for a Democratic president since 1912 was in 1964 when they voted for LBJ. After the 2016 election, I changed my voter registration because I was disgusted with what the DNC did during the primary to defeat Bernie Sanders. I have always thought the two parties are different sides of the same coin.
