Jackson County needs more drug treatment. They’re spending opioid settlement cash on a shooting range

RIPLEY — When Brittany Camp was a teenager, she was prescribed opioid painkillers after giving birth and having dental surgery.

She didn’t know much about the pills. She just knew they made her feel good, and that she could get them all over the streets of West Virginia. She started taking them recreationally in the mid-2000s, and soon found out how addictive they could be.

“I didn’t really register the problem until I lost my children,” said Camp, now 38. “Before I knew it, I had lost them, my vehicle, my apartment.”

Camp and her older brother suffered from opioid addictions throughout the 2000s and 2010s. The siblings struggled to find reliable treatment or recovery centers near their mother’s home in Ripley. Moments of sobriety were quashed by frequent relapses.

During that time, Kelly DeWees, their mother, parented their kids. While taking turns welcoming seven grandchildren into her house, DeWees desperately tried to connect her adult kids with treatment.

“Opiates robbed me of my kids for almost two decades,” DeWees said.

In spite of these struggles, some hope eventually emerged. Over the last few years, Dewees’ children found their way to sobriety.

And DeWees learned the state was set to receive nearly $1 billion in opioid settlements, money paid by corporations that profited off West Virginians with addictions. After legal fees, around a quarter of the settlements are set to be sent directly to cities, counties and towns across the state over the next 12 years.

Local governments can spend this money in a variety of different ways, many of which focus on treating people with addiction and preventing more people from developing the disease.

But some, like Jackson County, are using their money for other projects. The county commission has already spent most of its $566,000 initial settlement payment on a training center for law enforcement officers, 911 operators and paramedics. Nearly $300,000 of the initial payment was earmarked to build a shooting range for the center.

None of the money the commission received last winter was used to improve Jackson County’s sparse treatment and recovery resources, which local health workers say desperately need more financial investment.

Commission President Dick Waybright said it’s crucial that first responders are properly trained in responding to overdoses.

He also said the only requests for funding that qualified for opioid settlement spending were from the training center and the Jackson County Quick Response Team, a group that is dedicated to responding to drug and alcohol emergencies. The team received $35,000 in opioid settlement funds from the commission.

“We know there’s more money coming,” Waybright said. Jackson County has $15,000 remaining from the first payment and is set to receive around $1 million distributed over the next 12 years .

Ross Mellinger, the county sheriff, said the training center has been in the works for years and will better prepare Jackson County first responders for drug crisis calls.

“You need to do it on two levels,” he said. “You need to do it on the front end, with law enforcement, first responders. And then you need to do it on the back end through your treatment facilities.”

While settlement dollars were earmarked for the shooting range, he said it was only because that was the next part of the project.

“You can’t pick and choose,” Mellinger said. “You got to have it all.”

He added that the shooting range would prepare his officers to execute search warrants in drug investigations, which he says happens frequently.

To DeWees, this round of Jackson County’s spending does little for people like her, her children and her grandchildren — family members whose lives were ravaged as pharmaceutical supply chain companies profited .

She doesn’t have a problem with some money being spent for law enforcement, but she wishes the commissioners had also looked to improve Jackson County’s treatment and recovery options.

Urgent problems go unaddressed

Over $500 million of the state’s opioid settlements will be controlled by the West Virginia First Foundation, a nonprofit created last year to distribute the funds.

But the organization has been slow to set up, only adopting a mission statement last month . So far, the only settlement dollars available to help West Virginia communities are from local payments like the one to Jackson County.

Joshua George, DeWees’ 42-year-old son, said there are plenty of ways the commission could’ve spent the over half-a-million-dollar payment to help people with addictions. When he was struggling with opioid use, he completed short-term detoxification programs 10-15 times.

The problem George faced after finishing these programs was finding local treatment and long-term recovery options. Most times he couldn’t and relapsed.

“Anybody whose seven days clean out of detox, if you threw them out on the street, they’re gonna go get high,” George said.

Eventually, he was able to get the treatment and recovery help he needed in neighboring Wood County, but he said these services remain sparse in Jackson County.

Last year, DeWees, George and his wife started a peer recovery group called Breath of Life, the type of service researchers say likely offers crucial support for people with addictions. Often, as many as 70 people attend their weekly meetings in a Ripley church.

It’s a sign, George said, that the county needs more places for recovery.

“You got people who are really trying,” he said. “And there’s no resources to really help.”

In March, DeWees asked the Jackson County Commission to fund Breath of Life. The commissioners said no, citing that the organization was still in the process of applying for its business and nonprofit certifications.

DeWees said Breath of Life could have made good use out of the county’s opioid settlement funds, possibly using it to transport people who don’t have cars or drivers’ licenses to meetings.

George added that the money could have been used to create services that don’t yet exist in the county.

For example, Jessica Haynes runs the 14-bed women’s sober living home Hope House Ministries in Ravenswood. But there’s no men’s counterpart in Jackson County.

Both the state and the federal government have found recovery residences , low-cost sober housing for people managing substance use disorders, are important for people managing addictions.

“We outreach to men and women, but we can only house women,” Haynes said. “Absolutely would love to see a men’s house.”

A speedy application process

On a ridge overlooking downtown Ripley, semi trucks carrying bulldozers and building materials drive in and out of the new Walter Smittle III Regional Responder Training Center. The construction is being funded in part by the county’s opioid settlement monies.

County officials have defended the commission spending much of its first allotment of opioid settlement money on the facility and accompanying shooting range. Mellinger, the sheriff, said treatment and recovery investments should be coming from the West Virginia First Foundation, where most of the state’s opioid settlement money will be.

“The remaining percentage is set for the county, for them to distribute on projects how they see fit to battle the opioid epidemic,” he said.

Waybright, the commission president, said other qualified groups could have asked for money.

He said it should have been widely known that Jackson County would receive a share of the settlement, and the local newspaper outlined how to apply for funds. The notice in the paper came only after the county had set aside nearly $300,000 for the shooting range and just two weeks before announcing another $223,000 to buy the building and land for the training facility.

Even Jackson County groups that received opioid settlement funds said the process wasn’t straightforward. Troy Bain, the co-director of the county’s quick response team, said his agency requested $35,000 before it knew how much the first settlement payment would be.

Had there been a way to amend the request once it became clear how much the county received, Bain said he would have asked the commissioners for enough money to have full-time quick response employees. Currently, county EMS workers do the job in addition to their other responsibilities.

Bain, who is also the county emergency services director, said the training center has been useful for department instruction sessions.

“We’ve had two or three of those up there already,” he said.

But he also stressed that filling the gaps in treatment and recovery centers is crucial to curbing the overdose crisis in Jackson County.

“It’s not going away on its own,” he said.

‘It just didn’t really seem fair’

West Virginia’s addiction crisis has plagued JoLeigh George’s entire life. The 17-year-old is the second daughter of Camp, the woman who developed an opioid addiction after dental surgery and giving birth.

When JoLeigh was a young child, her grandmother, DeWees, took custody of her away from Camp. JoLeigh remembers feeling devastated when child protective services removed her sisters.

“It just didn’t really seem fair,” she said while sitting in the church basement where her family hosts recovery meetings. “Everybody else had normal families, and my family just felt so disoriented.”

At the time, she didn’t know how companies built their business models on supplying addictive drugs to people like her mom.

“It hurts knowing that it wasn’t her fault,” JoLeigh said.

Unlike much of her early childhood, today there’s a lot that gives JoLeigh hope. Still living with her grandmother, she’s set to graduate from Ripley High School next year. She’s excited about trying to find the right college to pursue becoming a zoologist.

Her mother Camp is pursuing a nursing degree at Bluefield State University and made the Dean’s list last year. JoLeigh is proud of her mom and her uncle for rebuilding their lives.

But the family wants justice for what the companies took from them. JoLeigh thinks some of Jackson County’s first opioid settlement check could have been used for mental health services for the children, like her and her sisters, who’ve suffered throughout the epidemic.

She doesn’t think the commissioners spending most of the money on a training facilty’s shooting range is what her family deserves. Not after all the hardship she, her sisters, her uncle, her mom and her grandmother have experienced.

“We do need more help.”

Jackson County needs more drug treatment. They’re spending opioid settlement cash on a shooting range appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight , West Virginia's civic newsroom.