The dark side of rural decline - West Virginia's drug epidemic

West Virginia - mountain mama's drug den

I'm often cynical about moral panics around drugs and drug use as they tend to exaggerate or make use of tragic anecdotes to fuel the idea that it has reached epidemic proportions. I do, however, think the problem in parts of West Virginia is genuinely shocking:

Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia, once had a population of more than 100,000 people, but that number has reduced to some 48,000, and almost one-quarter of these, some 12,000 citizens, have either latent or active substance-use disorders.

Here we see the trend of rural depopulation combined with a widely reported and discussed US problem with opiates. As with other rural and small town places where the reason for there being a population - agriculture, mining, forestry - has ended, those with any get up and go have got up and left. What's remains are the old, the poor and the sick (including some who tick all of these boxes) - and, for reasons ranging from broken families and poor education to the lack of jobs and ill health, what we've got is a drugs problem:

Beyond the numbing accountancy, though, the epidemic has done little to impress itself onto the wider American culture. So far, OxyContin has produced no Hogarth, no Coleridge, no De Quincey, no Easy Rider or Drugstore Cowboy, no Junkie or The Long Weekend. There is no country music equivalent of Bowie’s Berlin period, or not one with any wattage. There is some book-length journalism, a sliver of fiction, some recovery-themed Christian hip-hop and, perhaps by analogy, the zombie-themed television series The Walking Dead. Then a blank. The destruction of much of working-class America by opiates and opioids has happened silently. There seems almost nothing creative to say about it, or no way to say it.

To be fair this might not be so true of country music as a survey by Addictions.com shows country is now the genre most likely to reference drugs in its lyrics:

Out of eight categories, country leads the way with 1.6 mentions per song on average, followed closely by jazz and pop music. Hip-hop actually falls in the last place at less than 1.3 mentions behind folk, challenging the assumption that all rappers are lyrical drug peddlers.

And some of those lyrics - even back in 1980 - speak directly to that rural decline and how getting out, for all the homesickness, is the only option for most folk:

When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street
And I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed
But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news
When I was eighteen Lord I hit the road
But it really doesn't matter how far I go

There's a magic about rural places, a sort of ache in our hearts to return to a better, clearer, less crazed world. A world where waiting - dreckly as the Cornish say - is a reminder that that's how good things come. But the truth is that this life isn't real, it's the worst sort of bucolic myth because it means that the pain in rural places is ignored - as Steve Knightley wrote in his song 'Country Life':

My old man is eighty four
His generation won the war
He left the farm forever when
They only kept on one in ten
Landed gentry county snobs
Where were you when they lost their jobs
No-one marched or subsidised
To save a country way of life

It's not straightforward - not everyone trapped in rural or small town poverty turns into a junkie or a drunk - but if you take away the means of making a living from a community then there's a big chance it's going to fall apart. Mostly this is about people leaving (and, as J D Vance described in 'Hillbilly Elegy', taking their dysfunction with them) but the literally left behind see that old working class certainty gone with any work being poorly paid, temporary and wholly without the prospect of that good American - or British, or Italian - life they were promised.

The worst part of all this, whether it's in West Virginia, the Welsh valleys or Sardinia, is that the problems of these places are literally 'out of sight, out of mind'. No-one goes there because there's no reason to do so, nobody sees the collapse of community and the decline of rural life. In the USA, the election of Donald Trump, supposedly on the back of votes from the 'left behind' in places like West Virginia, at least pointed the attention of city dwelling folk to these communities. I've a feeling though that, just as we see everywhere else, grand folk will swan into town write some reports and swish away leaving behind a bit of regeneration cash that will tart up some buildings and fund some social sticking plaster for a year or two.

I guess there's a race on between the despair of drugs or hard drink and the hope of education, social support and an economy that works. Right now the dark side is a long way ahead mostly because there's really no purpose to a place that has no jobs and no prospect of jobs. When we did a master plan for Airedale, the bit of West Yorkshire that runs north-west from Bradford up to Skipton, one of the comments was that the towns looked inwards to their industrial history not up onto the hills to see the salvation of being a beautiful place. Maybe the long term for deep rural places lies in rediscovering the wild and forgetting about digging coal, felling pines or growing corn?

In the meantime, we (that is rich city dwelling folk) have a bit of a duty to pay more attention to these places, as much attention as we give to the problem places in the city. If we don't their pain will continue and so will the anger of many who live there - an anger directed at their city-living lords and masters.

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