MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Following Monday night’s opioid forum at University High School, First District Congressional candidate Ralph Baxter called the opioid epidemic the defining public health crisis of his lifetime.
“We’re not putting nearly enough resources to the opioid crisis,” he said Tuesday on Morgantown AM. “The challenge of this dwarfs the resources we’re putting to it. That’s why the opioids are winning, and everybody in West Virginia is losing.”
Baxter said public officials need to treat the opioid crisis the same way they’d treat a traditional war.
“Right now, with opioids, we have the crisis of a lifetime,” he said. “And we’ve got to treat this in that way. We wouldn’t worry about a budget crisis if we were at war. We wouldn’t worry about a budget crisis if we had other kinds of challenges in front of us. And we have this: the number of people who die every day in West Virginia is shocking.”
It’s estimated 64,000 people died in October across the United States as a result of drug overdoses — many of which were connected to opioids.
Baxter also spoke about the impact opioids have on the public health of West Virginia’s work force.
“All of these issues go together,” he said. “People are pursuing the educational horizons they are pursuing, in part because of the jobs they see are here or not here, what they require, what the opportunities are. Our young people are staying or leaving the state in part based on whether there are jobs here or not here.”
He also said he is pro-natural gas, suggesting it’s continued growth would help diversify the state’s economy and help improve the state’s fight against the opioid epidemic.
“This is a great opportunity for us to continue to diversify our economy,” he said. “We have one of these things that sometimes happens. That is positive. Suddenly, we’ve got Saudi Arabia under the ground in West Virginia. We have all this oil and gas.”
Medical cannabis has been described by some experts as a potential “exit drug” for those addicted to opioids. Baxter also threw his support behind Charleston’s decision to legalize medical cannabinoids.
“We’ve already made a step to medical marijuana in West Virginia,” Baxter said. “Other states have demonstrated that this can have a very positive effect — a positive effect that outweighs any of the things we worry about.”