Panel Discusses Opioid Crisis In Wv

By Jake Zuckerman A panel of experts and addicts offered their takes Wednesday on where West Virginia is amid the national opioid epidemic and where it might be going. In a forum hosted jointly between the Charleston Gazette-Mail and the Huffington Post, Dr. Michael Brumage, executive director and health officer of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department; Andrea Darr, director of the West Virginia Center for Children's Justice; Lois Vance, addiction care coordinator at Kanawha City Health Center; and Brandi Gunnoe and Amanda Dietz, both recovering addicts, answered questions about their own professional and personal experiences with drug addiction in West Virginia. From the beginning, all members of the panel agreed the situation will worsen before it improves. “We are nowhere near out of the woods, and in fact, it's going to get worse before it gets better,” said Brumage, who was also recently named an assistant dean at the West Virginia University School of Public Health. As a by-product of the snowballing problem, all the panelists said state and county resources are being depleted, closing a door on those seeking help. “This epidemic is huge, and we just don't have enough foster homes for these kids,” Darr said, adding that some children's services workers have been sheltering children themselves when their departments are out of resources. “This epidemic is so big, it has just overwhelmed Child Protective Services, just overwhelmed it,” Darr said. Dietz, who has been sober since 2008, said some of these problems build on one another.