In one West Virginia community, fighting on pandemic meant losing to another epidemic. Recently I was reading the Washington Post and a story of addiction, loss and connection during the pandemic struck me. The story read:
Rachel Lambert was alone when she learned how Jimmy Horton died, and the news came — as so many other things now did — over a screen. The world’s attention was on the coronavirus, but the Facebook post Lambert saw as she sprawled in bed on a Sunday night said her old high school friend had been claimed by a more familiar epidemic: He had overdosed.
Fear, anger, despair — she was seized by all the emotions that grip one recovering drug user who learns that another has relapsed. But all she managed to tap out on her phone was an expression of disbelief.
“How do you know Jimmy OD’d?” Lambert wrote to the Facebook post’s author.
It would be months before she understood more about what lay behind her friend’s relapse — and behind a record-breaking year of fatal drug overdoses, in West Virginia and across the country.
When Horton died on May 23, 2020, just 10 weeks had passed since America entered a state of emergency in response to covid-19. But Lambert was already beginning to grasp that a separate, less acknowledged emergency was unfolding in the hotbeds of the opioid crisis. And she would come to believe, alongside many others in her community, that efforts to protect people from one epidemic had put them in danger from another.
It’s a story we have heard and read about all too often during the past year and a half. So many families devastated by Covid, and so many more rushed by a relapse of another kind, addiction. When the pandemic hit, people were not only sheltering at home, separated from people, they were removed from their support systems and services. This article get to the heart of addiction treatment, the need for human connection.