Save A Life Day was organized by SOAR across all 55 counties in West Virginia. Corbin Parker takes boxes of Naloxone and Fentanyl test strips. Stacy Kranitz
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The numbers are now frighteningly familiar: Last year more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses, bringing the total death toll to more than 1 million since the invention of OxyContin in 1996. By 2030 another million people are projected to die. Americans are more likely to die of an accidental drug overdose—especially when it involves fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin and surreptitiously laced into other drugs—than in a car accident.
But cars would kill 15,000 more people a year were it not for seatbelts. Seatbelts, helmet laws, and air bags are harm reduction strategies. They reduce the negative consequences of risky behavior.
For decades, drug policy experts have recommended that we embrace the seatbelts of drug use: overdose-reversing medicine like naloxone, kits that make it easy to test drugs for fentanyl, and clean needles that reduce the spread of deadly diseases associated with intravenous drug use, like HIV and hepatitis C. Joe Biden is the first president to embrace harm reduction as an essential part of the nation’s drug policy. As part of the American Rescue Plan, he put $30 million to “support community-based overdose prevention programs, syringe services programs, and other harm reduction services.” In May the Department of Health and Human Services promised $1.5 billion for state and local initiatives, including harm reduction, to combat addiction.
Yet the promotion of anything other than complete abstinence has always been a hot-button issue. Many people worry that giving out needles will coddle people struggling with substance misuse or even lead to addiction (despite evidence it does not). Others fear that such programs will bring crime to their neighborhoods. Harm reduction became a flashpoint in the ’90s, when, scared that Democrats would get tagged for being soft on crime, Bill Clinton declined to overturn a ban on syringe exchange funding, a decision he later said he regretted.
Against this backdrop, photographer Stacy Kranitz and I visited hard-hit communities in Central Appalachia to document three different efforts—a nonprofit health fair, a medical clinic, and a scrappy DIY project—to save lives and change minds. We hoped to capture “the humanity and the generosity of spirit” that Feinberg says we all need to really understand the opioid crisis.
“I hate to be corny,” says Jeff, “but love and connection definitely helps.” On a Tuesday evening in June, Jeff, a longtime heroin user, has joined a few dozen other Charleston residents at a Presbyterian church for the monthly mutual aid meeting held by Solutions Oriented Addiction Response. (Jeff’s name and the names of other people who use drugs have been changed.)
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