West Virginia Legislature should be taking action on actual public health issues

The West Virginia Capitol in Charleston, W.Va. (West Virginia Legislative Photography)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its newest report on alcohol-related deaths in the United States last week, and it’s not good news. Alcohol deaths in 2020 and 2021 climbed 30% compared to deaths in the years 2016 and 2017, meaning 178,000 people died each year. As the New York Times points out , that’s almost 500 deaths per day attributed to excessive drinking.

In West Virginia, we lost nearly 2,500 people to alcohol-related deaths in that two-year span. For comparison, nearly 2,900 people in the state died of drug overdoses in the same timeframe, giving us the highest overdose death rate in the nation.

Luckily the problem solvers in the Legislature have spent this session addressing these two public health crises and the other leading causes of death for West Virginians.

The push in Senate Bill 861 to add more red tape to the unemployment system and to reduce the total weekly benefits that an unemployed person gets will make a person who’s distraught about losing their primary source of income simultaneously too busy and too cash-strapped to afford to buy drugs or alcohol. Clever.

Requiring every school classroom to hang “In God We Trust” (which yes could theoretically be about any God, but come on) and allowing teachers to talk about creationism, collectively known as the “Putting Christian God in Schools” bills, will directly address the drug overdose crisis, according to lawmakers.

As Amelia Knisely wrote earlier this week, “while voicing support of the legislation, Del. Scot Heckert, R-Wood, said that the bill could result in more students being interested in science or ‘simply [keep] them from getting involved in drugs, playing on the computer all the time or eating Tide Pods.’”

Mission accomplished.

And of course, banning books from libraries, locking up librarians and museum curators, and restricting universities from having diversity offices will tackle another leading cause of death in the state: exposure to the realities of life and DEI.

I’ve run out of ways to try and make light of what Del. Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, accurately called the “slowest and dumbest legislative session.” Most of the action that has happened in this legislative session has been spent on things that won’t meaningfully improve West Virginians’ lives. While the legislature spends time on divisive cultural issues, the very real problems facing West Virginians take a backseat… where they could be exposed to secondhand smoke.

When there are attempts to try and fix a problem, such as intentionally exposing children to cigarette smoke, there’s pushback from people like Sen. Mike Azinger, R-Wood, who believes parents have the sovereign, God-given right to poison their kids. West Virginia has one of the highest rates of lung cancer in the country.

They’re not just doing little to improve public health, in some ways the Legislature is actively trying to attack public health policy in West Virginia. Other states actually look to West Virginia as an example for a strong vaccination policy. The 57 members of the House who voted to weaken vaccination requirements would prefer that not to be the case.

There was a chance the bill wouldn’t pass in the Senate — until Wednesday afternoon, when Health Committee Chair Sen. Maroney suggested he’s a chair in name only and the pressures that be forced him to put the bill on the agenda, despite his pledge as a doctor to “do no harm.”  Hippocrates would be proud.

Maybe I’m wrong, and the Republican supermajority did a poll this year that asked West Virginians what problems they want solved, how they think their lives could be improved, and what they want the Legislature to focus on. Somehow I doubt wasting days arguing about putting “In God We Trust” in schools would be a frequent answer.

Look, I get it. Solving difficult problems is, well, difficult. It takes intelligence, courage, compassion, hindsight and foresight, the ability to find common ground, and a lot of other things that I fear the majority of our state lawmakers don’t have.

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