Drug addiction remains a widespread, deadly problem in West Virginia, state lawmakers heard in a presentation filled with alarming, spine-chilling figures.

“I won’t bury the lead. The bottom line is that we have not made enough progress on this crisis. We’re nowhere near where we need to be, and our data related to other states and even our own expectations has fallen far short,” Jeremiah Samples, senior policy adviser for the West Virginia Legislature told members of the Joint Standing Committee on Health. 

His Monday afternoon presentation, while dark, was not without hope. Samples advised a reassessment of substance abuse disorder strategies and expenditures through an emphasis on what is happening to real people in communities.

He also expressed optimism about new West Virginia First Foundation, the nonprofit organization with access to millions of dollars in drug settlement money that can be aimed at recovery. And he pointed toward the work of the state Office of Drug Control Policy, established in 2017 and now budgeted for $2.3 million annually.

But Samples, a former deputy director for the state’s health and human resources agency, also took note of the billions of dollars in expenditures already dedicated to reducing drug problems and yet “we’ve led the nation since 2010 and every year since in fatal overdose deaths. In fact, we’ve seen exponential growth in that rate since that time.”

His presentation was filled with eye-popping statistics:

— An estimated 208,000 people in West Virginia used illicit drugs in the last month, according to a survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

— Overall, the age-adjusted drug overdose death in the United States quadrupled from 2002 to 2022.

— There were 107,941 drug overdose deaths in 2022.

— West Virginia experienced 1,335 known overdose deaths in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

— From 1999 to 2022, West Virginia’s overdose deaths increased 1,680%.

“We can’t sustain that, as a society,” Samples said. “It’s crippling to the state.”

West Virginia’s overdose death rate is 151% higher than the best state in the country, Samples said. It’s 85.6% higher than the national average. And 36.4% higher than the next worst state.

“It’s hard to be positive when you’re juxtaposing yourself against other states this way and seeing that you’re continuing to fall behind,” he said.

He said the effects are now multi-generational, with hundreds of millions of dollars in indirect costs in child welfare alone.

West Virginia leads the nation in neonatal abstinence syndrome,  caused when a baby experiences withdrawal from drug exposure in the womb before birth, he said, and the state leads the nation in in utero substance exposure. Only about 17,000 babies are born each year in West Virginia.

“And of those 17,000 births, we’re looking at about 2,500 babies every year that are exposed to drugs in the womb. So extrapolate that out over a decade or more and you start to see the demographic tsunami that is coming,” Samples said. “It’s a crisis.”

Samples noted that lawmakers have passed a series of policies intended to address many of these issues, and he said they could pass more — including some that he recommended.

“But it really doesn’t matter because the most important thing we need to do, in my opinion, is that we need to measure what matters so that we can then pivot and organically improve our response to this crisis,” Samples said.

“We need to measure every aspect of our substance abuse disorder policies and expenditures, and we need to tie it back to a core societal measure.”

He proposed measuring overdose deaths, in utero substance exposure, infectious disease rate of spread, child fatality or near fatality rate of drugs.

“These are really what people care about.”

He added, “Why am I even here today? It’s not because of some process issue. It’s because people are sick of what’s happening in their communities. They’re sick of their loved ones dying. They’re sick of people they know, struggling year after year. We need to start measuring and setting goals for ourselves and holding ourselves to those goals, then if we miss those marks then we need to explain why.”

The legislative committee also heard from Jonathan Board, executive director of the West Virginia First Foundation, which has more than $225 million on hand to put toward relief efforts for the effects of drug addiction.

“We know that we cannot just check boxes here or there,” Board told lawmakers. “In many respects we are walking through cemeteries every day, and we understand that each and every dollar we have is because of a loved one who has been lost or horribly affected by this public health crisis.”

And the committee heard from the new executive director of the Office of Drug Control Policy, Dr. Stephen Loyd, who was appearing on his first day on the job.

“West Virginia has been ground zero for the opioid crisis. It’s where it started; it’s where it’s continued today,” Loyd said. “And there have been a lot of really great people in this state that have worked hard, and for a lot of whatever reasons we are where we are.

“I think it would be a great thing if West Virginia showed the rest of the country how to get out of this crisis.”