Heroin and earthquakes

I grew up in the unincorporated community of Scott Depot, West Virginia, about halfway between Huntington and Charleston.  When I was there at Christmas, I went in the Sheetz gas station that was built after we got our own I-64 exit.  I opened the door to the bathroom stall on the right, looked down, and saw an empty Arnold Palmer can with the bottom sliced off.  The bottom of the can lay next to it with a burned circle and some brownish residue in the middle.  A trace of the same residue was on top of the toilet paper dispenser.  So I went in the other stall.  While I was there, a boy of maybe five or six walked into the one I had just left.  I could see the can on the floor and didn't take my eyes off it until he stepped out.

Scott Depot was an easy and safe place to grow up. My kindergarten class took walking field trips.  Scott Teays Elementary was one of the best schools in the state; that's not what I heard on this trip back.  The playground, a hundred feet from the main road through town, wasn't fenced; it is now.  My friends and I slept outside in tents at least one night every summer.  We prowled around neighbors' yards clothed in all black while playing spotlight.  We walked and biked through the "worst" neighborhoods in town unsupervised and unconcerned.  So did my future wife and her girlfriends, at thirteen.  The most serious danger to us was definitely us.

Heroin was some exotic scourge like Ebola that we only learned about in health class.  None of us ever imagined encountering it half a mile down the road.  The most substance abuse we ever saw was the Mountain Dew bottles full of tobacco spit skittering around the school bus floor--at least until the day, not long before I left for OU, that kids on our street saw something taken from a neighbor's crawl space and cash left in its place.

Scott Depot is only on the fringe of the crisis.  It's still a safe place on the whole.  Heroin turning up there is like debris falling miles from a tornado:  You might be okay for the moment, but someplace nearby is being ravaged.  There are plenty of articles about the painkiller and heroin epidemics around the Appalachian coalfields.  I'm not going to copy and paste them all.  The one that prompted this post is here:

Major Drug Roundup near Oceana Leads to 49 Arrests

You might brush off that headline.  Drug crackdowns happen across the United States every day.  But Wyoming County had a population of 22,598 in 2014.  All of those arrested were dealers, not merely users, and sold to undercover officers.  They weren't selling weed; they were selling things that kill.  And they were all busted between 7 a.m. and noon on Wednesday.

0.22 percent of Wyoming County was arrested for dealing painkillers and heroin in five hours.

Suppose each dealer has 10 regular customers.  Suppose this sweep nabbed half the pushers in the county.  Then 4.4 percent of the county would be using; with an average household size of 2.45 people, the expected number of Wyoming County doors on which you'd need to knock to find an addict would be 10.

I have no idea how this can be fixed.  Though nobody can accuse President Obama and his EPA of helping the situation, coal jobs were vanishing anyway.  Appalachia doesn't have a drug crisis because coal is going away.  It has a drug crisis because coal going away doesn't leave much.  Forbes ranks West Virginia as the worst state in which to do business, primarily because it has the lowest college attainment rate and is the only state steadily losing population, but also because of its bottom-ranked regulatory environment.  (Apparently the state government imposes a heavier regulatory burden on businesses than any other, but still couldn't keep one from spilling a whole tank of chemicals directly into the capital city's water supply.)  It's easy to say, "Finish college and elect better leaders."  Getting it done is clearly a different matter.  The state has spent an incomprehensible sum on the in-state Promise scholarship.  Voters got frustrated with Democrats and gave the state legislature to Republicans.  It hasn't been very long, but so far, no dice.

I shouldn't have been so surprised.  It just makes me sad.  On a hill that sits back from Teays Valley Road, there's a subdivision where I hung out with a kindergarten friend who'd be the best man in my wedding.  Between that and the roadway, there's an assisted living home where my grandma lived for years.  Across a little field from that, there's a local hardware store that put my name on its marquee when I went to the spelling bee.  And right on the other side of Teays Valley Road, the day after Christmas, somebody walked into the gas station, slipped a can of tea and lemonade under his jacket, went into the bathroom, drained the can, cut off the bottom, placed some heroin in the center, held a lighter under the metal until the drug melted, sucked it up with a syringe, and jabbed it into a vein.  He stumbled out alive, this time.  Maybe we passed in the store.  I walked in.  So did that boy, whose childhood West Virginia has darker corners than mine ever did.

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Oil and gas are to Oklahoma what coal once was to West Virginia.  The night after the Wyoming County drug sweep, a series of ~4.0 earthquakes occurred in northwestern Oklahoma.  Minor, mostly imperceptible quakes jumped off the charts here right around the time injection wells for waste water from fracking became widespread.  The correlation or amazing coincidence, depending on whom you ask, is a point of bitter contention among academics, energy companies, and residents.

I'll take the earthquakes.