Crushing up pain pills and spitting out lives in West Virginia coal country

[Hydraulix989]

There's also been a lot of problems with heroin abuse in my hometown in rural Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, a steel town outside of Pittsburgh.

I am not sure what the solution is, but the War on Drugs approach of criminalization needs to be replaced with rehabilitation. I've seen my friends' and high school classmates' lives get ruined by opioids (and these are good people with tremendous potential whose environment failed them), and I don't think throwing them behind bars is a solution.

[oofabz]

I'm not sure you can rehabilitate opiate addicts. Very few of them ever stop using for good.

I think the best solution for the addicts would be lifetime prescriptions for buprenorphine (Suboxone). But then how do you prevent others from abusing the now abundant buprenorphine?

[vinceguidry]

The real problem is lack of economic opportunity. What is rehabilitation if there aren't any jobs to hold down?

[pstuart]

The solution is to legalize cannabis. Lot's of potential for pain management, as well as to let people get high on something much safer.

[foltz]

Oxyana has some poignant footage of the problem. Even in the short trailer.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/oxyana/69045041

[mattmanser]

I've grown increasingly leery of any story that relies on the anecdotes of three or four people/couples. I thought they'd died out in recent years because of how easily journalists could abuse the format.

This story relies on the anecdotes of one couple. Who apparently got convicted of taking down the county's phone lines. If they're real, they're very much an extreme.

Rather than reinforcing the narrative his entire story relies on them and I now distrust everything else he's said.

[joe5150]

Stealing copper from phone and power lines isn't "extreme" at all. It happens with some regularity.