Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and graphic artist Joe Sacco, offers a glimpse into West Virginia's growing drug problems. From an excerpt:
A decade ago only about 5% of those seeking treatment in West Virginia needed help with opiate addiction. Today that number has ballooned to 26%. It recorded 91 overdose deaths in 2001. By 2008 that number had risen to 390. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in West Virginia, and the state leads the country in fatal drug overdoses. OxyContin — nicknamed "hillbilly heroin" — is king. At a drug market like the Pines it costs a dollar a milligram. And a couple of 60- or 80-milligram pills sold at the Pines is a significant boost to a family’s income.
Not far behind OxyContin is Suboxone, the brand name for a drug whose primary ingredient is buprenorphine, a semisynthetic opioid. Dealers, many of whom are based in Detroit, travel from clinic to clinic in Florida to stock up on the opiates and then sell them out of the backs of gleaming SUVs in West Virginia, usually around the first of the month, when the government checks arrive. Those who have legal prescriptions also sell the drugs for a profit. Pushers are often retirees. They can make a few hundred extra dollars a month on the sale of their medications. The temptation to peddle pills is hard to resist.
Dreher contemplates that other opiate of the masses, religion:
You may be a poor man living in a trailer in West Virginia, or a rich man living in a Manhattan penthouse, but sooner or later, you will meet suffering and death. It is the great equalizer. Some seek to escape their mortality, their finitude, through booze, drugs, sex, and suchlike. There are people who use religion as a kind of drug, getting high on spiritual fads and pious emotionalism as a way to avoid confronting themselves and their problems. Yet I believe Hedges is on to something when he says that among the poor he saw, those who have managed to survive and even to thrive were "almost always" those who found God. … Again, that doesn’t make God true, but it does make Him real.
The Dish 