WVU Professor John Temple.
Partners
in Recovery
SAMANTHA CART
TRACY A. TOLER PHOTOGRAPHY
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Young Guns honors
program, West Virginia Executive (WVE) hosted the first-ever
Young Guns All-Class Reunion on November 15, 2019. As
part of the festivities, a daytime event was held at the Embassy
Suites by Hilton in Charleston to bring together past and present
Young Guns and other West Virginia professionals to discuss
solutions to one of the state’s most pressing issues: addiction.
Attendees were invited to hear John Temple, a tenured profes-
sor at West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media and
author of “American Pain,” speak about the opioid epidemic
and engage in a question and answer and brainstorming session
on how West Virginians and the businesses they own and work
for can make a difference in the lives of those suffering from
substance use disorder.
When Temple started his research for “American Pain,” a book
about the rise and fall of the largest pill mill in the U.S., the
political and health care landscapes were completely different.
The more he read about overdose deaths and the number of
pills being prescribed for pain management, the more he wondered
why this story wasn’t on the front page of every newspaper in
the country. Today, this epidemic does command print space
and airtime from every major news outlet in the region, par-
ticularly in West Virginia where 49.6 out of every 100,000
people died of a drug overdose in 2017.
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WEST VIRGINIA EXECUTIVE
“Now we know what the issue is,” says Temple. “The new
question is, what do we do about it?”
West Virginia’s health care institutions are attempting to
answer this question with a variety of prevention, recovery
and treatment programs and initiatives.
Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) has hired peer
recovery specialists who are all in recovery themselves, and
it provides stigma education, treatment education and early
intervention education for its staff. It also offers medication-
assisted treatment (MAT) for patients admitted for other med-
ical reasons with the goal of assisting them into treatment
once discharged.
“We are working with a diversion team to help identify
staff with substance use disorder and allowing them to enter
recovery over losing their jobs,” says Lahoma Wilson, APRN,
FNP-C, an opioid treatment navigator at CAMC who spoke
at the Young Guns event.
Similarly, Davis Health System in Elkins, WV, supports
local coalitions with food, funds and volunteers and provides
a building to house the local harm reduction program.
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution or quick fix to
the state’s drug epidemic, programs like these are steps toward
healing hurting families, strengthening the local workforce
and building healthier communities.