America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs

[Judi Lynn]

America's poorest towns

America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs

In the first of a series of dispatches from the US’s poorest communities, we visit Beattyville, Kentucky, blighted by a lack of jobs and addiction to painkillers

Chris McGreal in Beattyville, Kentucky
Thursday 12 November 2015 07.00 EST

Karen Jennings patted her heavily made up face, put on a sardonic smile and said she thought she looked good after all she’d been through.

“I was an alcoholic first. I got drunk and fell in the creek and broke my back. Then I got hooked on the painkillers,” the 59-year-old grandmother said.

Over the years, Jennings’ back healed but her addiction to powerful opioids remained. After the prescriptions dried up, she was drawn to the underground drug trade that defines eastern Kentucky today as coal, oil and timber once did.

Jennings spoke with startling frankness about her part in a plague gripping the isolated, fading towns dotting this part of Appalachia. Frontier communities steeped in the myth of self-reliance are now blighted by addiction to opioids – “hillbilly heroin” to those who use them. It’s a dependency bound up with economic despair and financed in part by the same welfare system that is staving off economic collapse across much of eastern Kentucky. It’s a crisis that crosses generations.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/12/beattyville-kentucky-and-americas-poorest-towns

[scscholar]

1. It's sad that doctors proscribe these drugs...

knowing people will get addicted to them. I guess they're just creating more business for themselves.

[JonathanRackham]

2. Reduced Coal

The areas where there is reduced coal mining is where the government should mandate solar panel plants be built. Or relocate former coal workers to areas where the plants are.

[hack89]

8. Solar plants don't employee a lot of people

And don't you think solar plants should be in areas that get a lot of sun year round?

[JonathanRackham]

9. Solar panel plants

This would be the manufacturing plants where panels are built.

BTW solar cells are more efficency at electrical production in colder climates. Efficency of the cells goes down as temp goes up. A Ying and Yang scenario. Solar cells also produce electricity on overcast days.

But in effect I was referring to the manufacturing facility as an alternate occupation for coal miners. Unless your name is Walter White.

In any event sorry about the confusion.

[different equation]

3. k and r

[rjsquirrel]

4. "Frontier communities" steeped in the what?

Brits are so romantic about the US.

THe coal towns in Appalachia are company towns steeped in 100+ years of dependency, addiction, and exploitation.

Frontier my ass.

[Nay]

6. Exactly. These towns were never 'frontier communities.' They were totally

dependent upon, and slaves to, the coal companies, who used them like donkeys. They were about as free as a donkey, too.

[rjsquirrel]

5. Also love how San Carlos, Arizona is an "outlier"

Native American poverty doesn't count. White poverty must be explained.

[Igel]

7. Am. Ind. poverty's been explained over and over.

But if you look at stats, we talk about the emerging _________ middle class and then focus on the average numbers. For Af-Am sub-pops, they're usually grim. Same for Am. Ind. sub-pops. And we have explanations galore. From what happened 200 years ago to some allele variation to isolation to culture to discrimination to lack of investment to underfunded health services to the need for more assistance to heaven knows what. If explanations for poverty made a group rich, Warren Buffett would be considered a piker who can't raise the stakes for playing with the big boys.

Latino sub-pops get broken down a bit differently because they're sort of embarrassing for some. But still we focus on averages and then on LEPs, the lowest couple of quintiles, and the "undocumented" (which can't be an adjective, because English doesn't let even the uneducated use adjectives as nouns, we're told when words like "illegals" are used). We used to focus on how sub-pops were faring in positive ways, but that would show a sense of optimism and forward thinking, so all we do now is get outraged about how the living haven't paid for injustices long past.

This kind of original-post/reaction-post pair falls in line with "attention is being taken away from my pet cause and that must stop."