U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., speaks at the West Virginia Opioid Summit in Dunbar, W.Va. on Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. (Office of Shelley Moore Capito photo)
Experts on addiction and recovery met in Dunbar on Friday with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., for several panel discussions focusing on where West Virginia stands in the ongoing drug and overdose epidemic.
In attendance at the summit were local and state lawmakers, representatives for nonprofit organizations working in recovery and addiction spheres, members of law enforcement and health officials, among others. Capito moderated three panels — one on recovery, another on research and prevention and the last on law enforcement.
Most of the presentations and discussions at Friday’s summit were general overviews of how the addiction epidemic touches different parts of West Virginia and ways some organizations have tried to respond. Presenters shared personal experiences that motivate their work as well as barriers to care and crucial gaps in funding and resources that make that work more difficult.
On the panel for recovery, panelists said one of the largest challenges to supporting people with substance use disorder continues to be stigma.
“Stigma is still one of the bigger [challenges] we face and no one really wants to talk about it,” said Michael Cole, the founder of Lauren’s Wish, a Morgantown nonprofit that helps connect people with substance use disorders to treatment and recovery programs.
As stigma prevails, said Amy Saunders, the managing director for the Marshall University Center of Excellence and Recovery, more barriers to care are built through policies that limit what services are available for people with substance use disorder to ensure they can make it into recovery safely.
“We still need to expand harm reduction, we need to look at those policies [in West Virginia],” Saunders said. “There’s been a lot of great work, yes, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Tim Czaja, the Berkeley County Community Corrections Coordinator and a board member for the West Virginia First Foundation, said one of the largest barriers to keeping people out of active addiction is money. When someone goes without housing, is unable to find transportation to keep a job or is unable to afford treatment they need, it’s more difficult to keep them sober, Czaja said.
“There are a variety of different barriers that folks in recovery face, and most [interventions] require money,” Czaja said. “People in early recovery don’t have $1,400 dollars they can drop to get into a place … we have access to some funds, but there’s always more need.”
In Berkeley County, some county employees and community members have joined together to form the Friends of Recovery, a nonprofit that raises money to meet the day-to-day needs of people who are transitioning out of facilities and back into communities.
Czaja, who is in long term recovery from addiction, said there are small costs that often hold people back when they are trying to maintain their recovery, especially for those in the early phases. The money raised can help individuals not fall behind on their utility bills, pay for car repairs that allow them to travel to work or buy equipment like steel-toed boots that are needed for certain kinds of jobs. Those are expenses that often can’t be covered by other grant programs — whether from governments or private organizations — but are integral to helping people maintain and thrive in their sobriety.
“These are things that can get people back to using [drugs],” Czaja said. “ We can use this money and assist in a variety of needs like that and it’s pretty awesome.”
Friday’s summit was a truncated version of a similar meeting Capito held in Martinsburg in 2015, not long after she was first elected to the Senate.
“I thought we really haven’t done a wrap up to see where we’ve come and what still needs to be done. [Doing this] every 10 years is too long. Obviously we’ve been incrementally learning about this in the past several years but [it’s changed] a lot, we’ve passed a lot of legislation,” Capito said. “So we decided to do it in a more condensed kind of forum here … I thought it was really useful, but there’s still so many unanswered questions, I guess.”
Capito is preparing to enter her 11th year as a senator, where she will hold the fourth highest leadership position in the GOP-controlled Senate. As well as being the new chair of the Republican Policy Committee, she will also chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee, which is responsible for dispersing funds from the National Institutes of Health to localities.
Those dollars represent crucial funding for organizations across the country that are struggling to respond to the ongoing drug and overdose epidemic. Capito has been a member of the committee for two years now and said, since starting there, she’s made it her goal to ensure the needs of West Virginia are acknowledged when government agencies are proposing funding.
“I obviously have a great relationship with the NIH. I’m impacting their budget. I’ve been able to do that for things I care about, [and] this is one of them — more drug treatment money and drug response money,” Capito said. “… You can’t do everything for everybody all the time, right? But I think once we started highlighting this issue and looking at the statistics for West Virginia and realizing we’re number one in the absolutely wrong category, then you can see this is where a lot of this outgrowth [in funding] has come over the last 10 years.”
For Capito, the conversations on Friday weren’t a surprise. She knows well the toll that addiction takes on West Virginians and the challenges they in particular face when it comes to seeking treatment and recovering from the illness of substance use disorder. Despite that knowledge, she said, it’s never easy to confront the losses that families are experiencing every day because of the epidemic.
“The human tragedy of it, it literally breaks my heart every time,” Capito said. “It’s just so sad.”
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