KENTUCKY’S
KING
don’t know that there is ever going to be enough treatment facilities,” she adds.
Lack of space isn’t the only
problem. After weeks of effort,
Langston and her team recently
secured one of her moms-to-be
a spot in a detox facility roughly
three hours away in Lexington.
Her detox lasted five days and
ended with the promise of outpatient counseling, the woman, 31,
told HuffPost.
She had been soothing her anxieties with illegal prescription drugs,
methadone and, on the rare occasion, she says, crystal meth. She
didn’t see a single therapist at detox. It took her 48 hours to relapse.
“I felt like I needed it,” she says.
“I had a panic attack as soon as
I got home. I’m a self-medicator.
That’s just where I go.” It’s been
more than a month and she’s still
waiting for the outpatient care.
Today, the drug testing and the
CenteringPregnancy program continue at Langston’s clinic. But the
funding from McConnell’s earmark dried up in 2009, and without it the on-site dental clinic had
to close.
Similarly, high blood pressure
and diabetes are huge problems
across the state. In the 2009 and
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
2010 federal budgets, McConnell earmarked close to $3 million
to fund heart health classes that
would educate residents in the
state’s rural areas about how to
eat better and exercise. Organized
by the University of Kentucky,
the class curriculum — with its
eat-your-vegetables philosophy —
would not have been out of place
at one of Michelle Obama’s Let’s
Move events.
Instead of getting kids interested in exercise, however, these
classes aimed to persuade adults
to stop eating only canned vegetables and to replace soda with
water. Debra Moser, a nurse and
professor with the University of
Kentucky who designed the project and participated in some of the
class work, recalls people saying
their parents had died from heart
attacks and they were just going
to die of one, too. Others said they
drank soda because coal mining
had contaminated their wells.
The program couldn’t address
the poisonous wells. But it could
at least highlight alternatives
in the Kroger aisles. Moser says
about 1,400 residents enrolled
in the classes; 60 percent didn’t
have a primary physician. For
those who stuck with it and continued to be monitored by health
care providers after the classes
ended, there were across-the-