There are few places in the country more afflicted by the fentanyl crisis than Cabell County, West Virginia.
The rural community situated along the Interstate 64 corridor between Charleston and county seat Huntington has a population of over 92,000 and was long home to one of the nation's highest overdose rates.
Simply put, everyone in Cabell County knows someone who has been affected by drugs connected to international drug cartels.
“This whole last decade has destroyed a generation, pretty much, just to a large degree. We've got tons and tons of great, grandparents raising kids because their parents have become addicted to opioids,” Cabell County Sheriff Chuck Zerkle told Federal Newswire. “It's changed the culture here in Huntington.”
Zerkle said there is no doubt more crimes occurring in the county with the influx of 10 million illegal aliens into the U.S. since the Biden Administration dropped border protections enacted by the Trump administration.
“You can't bring that many people into our country illegally, with their backgrounds and their intent without causing the problem,” Zerkle said. “I think it definitely causes a problem. You're dumping millions of people in here. They're probably bad people – they are bad. Some of them are probably decent people just looking for a change, but there's a lot of bad people that are coming here and I think they're staying here to some degree.”
He said the drug trade goes through Detroit via California but has its roots in Mexico, noting "it's all gang-related."
“I don't have to talk to my drug people to find out exactly where they think our fentanyl and heroin is coming from right now,” Zerkle said.
Zerkle said addiction issues in his county cause stress systems within the community.
“We suffer for the small amount of people that we have,” Zerkle said. “We've really been clobbered with this thing and it has a financial impact on the county's EMS (emergency management system) and everything. Just trying to deal with the overdose and then trying to get bailed out of jail bail and everything. We've arrested more people, incarcerated more people. It just puts more burden on the counties.”
He added that the small community has 80 rehabilitation clinics, which also has setbacks.
“A lot of these recovery homes, instead of trying to get them back where they came from or whatever, they just kind of put them out on the street and and they become transient, wandering the streets become another problem,” he said.
Cabell County’s overdose rate increased by nearly five-fold between 2001 and 2018 and at one point had twice as many overdoses as any other county in the state and was more than three times higher than the national overdose rate. While the overdose rate has leveled out, it is safe to say everyone in Cabell County has faced too many tragedies associated with drugs infiltrating the community.
Cabell County was once named a “community in crisis” by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health.
A study conducted by the school employed innovative population estimation techniques to determine the size and characteristics of the local population of people who inject drugs.
“Health officials in Cabell County now know the number of residents who use injection drugs, their demographics, the types of substances they use, their attempts to quit using drugs and access services, and other problems they face, such as homelessness and hunger,” the report reads.
Huntington itself was also recently singled out in a report by KFF Health News.
The report noted that the community, besieged by prescription opioids, then heroin and fentanyl, now faces what medical researchers are calling a "fourth wave" of overdoses driven by potent synthetic drugs like carfentanil and xylazine, also known as “tranq.”
In 2017 the community launched a Quick Response Team that has been credited for saving the lives of those experiencing an overdose and successfully getting them into rehabilitation programs.
