PLEASANTS VALLEY, W.Va. — Valley HealthCare System is addressing the state’s bed shortage for those with drug addictions thanks to a $3 million grant that will be used to expand its Alpha-Chemical Treatment (ACT) Unit.
The expansion, located beside the existing ACT Unit in Pleasants Valley, will consist of 72 beds — 36 for men and 36 for women — similar to the “New Beginnings” program the facility has operated since for over 30 years.
“The ACT unit right now is an male/female facility, and what we’re going to do is convert it to an all male program. We’ll have 12 short-term beds, 28-day, and then we’ll have 24 long-term, which we’ve never had the opportunity to have,” said Gerry Schmidt, the Chief Operating Officer for Valley Healthcare. “On the women’s side, New Beginnings, what we’ll do there is create a 12-bed, 28-day program and then further expand our long-term program that we’ve had for women up to 36 beds. It’s a huge expansion, and these will be all newly-built residential treatment facilities.”
That long-term component is vital for those struggling with drug dependency, Schmidt said.
“We have a lot of facilities in West Virginia for the initial treatment. It’s the longer term treatment (we need),” he said. “Research shows the longer you keep people in engaged in treatment, the better the chances of a successful recovery.”
Schmidt said we can expect to see this come to fruition within the next year.
“We’re in the developmental design stage right now, hoping to have a bid late spring and begin construction in the summer, and our hopes are to be in late this year or early 2019,” he said.
Even with this facility in the works, Schmidt said addiction treatment still has improvements to make, both in West Virginia and nationwide, in areas that continue to fall through the cracks.
“One of the things that’s really missing is on the adolescent side. We don’t have a significant amount of specialized treatment for adolescents,” he said. “We’re treating them at the other end of the spectrum, we’re treating them as adults. We need more specialized, even down to residential care for adolescents, and it’s just not there. It’s very, very limited. Not just in West Virginia but nationwide.”
While prevention can be effective among adolescents, it doesn’t address pre-teens and younger, Schmidt.
“Even with prevention, you still have population of young kids, as young as 8, 9, 10, that begin experimenting,” he said. “By the time their teenagers, in some cases, they’re already addicted.”
While opioids are one of the most popular current drugs of choice, Schmidt said these are not a new problem within our society. Starting with primarily alcohol and marijuana in the 1970s, later emerged heroin, LSD, cocaine and methamphetamines as well.
“The problem with opioids, what happened was, the explosion of pain medication that came from particularly one pharmaceutical company,” he said. “West Virginia, unfortunately, was one of the states that was targeted particularly the southern coalfields, and Kentucky and Ohio, and the explosion has been detrimental in a lot of ways.”
As pharmaceutical companies pushed their prescription, thus so did physicians.
In fact, Schmidt said an average of 60 painkillers are prescribed to a typical teenager after having their wisdom teeth extracted.
“Even if they take five or six of those, the rest of them end up in a medicine cabinet, and the chances of diversion is there,” he said.
With such situations occurring every day, Schmidt said most cases of an individual developing a drug addiction is purely coincidental.
“No one wakes up one day saying, ‘Considering my lot in life, I think I’ll become addicted to alcohol or opioids,’” he said. “Most of it is through coincidence, other than those who are looking for it diversion, but even some of the ones that are looking for medication through diversion are the ones that got started on it coincidentally through surgery or through an injury, and it caught up with them.”
Schmidt said even while a patient recovers from surgery in the hospital on a morphine pump or similar pain relief, the addiction can occur relatively quickly.
“This isn’t an indictment on our medical profession, but their treating symptomatically what they see and what they hear,” he said. “There are pain medications that are needed and are appropriate, but unfortunately we are a society that wants a quick response to any discomfort, so I think therein lies the other side of the problem.”