In JD Vance’s home state of Ohio, there’s an ongoing battle with opioid addiction | 2024 US election news

Middletown, Ohio – The speech was a chance for JD Vance to introduce himself to a national audience.

Vance was a senator from Ohio with only 18 months of experience in Congress when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump named him as his 2024 running mate.

It was a Monday in July when the announcement of Vance’s selection was made. That Wednesday, Vance was onstage at the Republican National Convention, preparing to address voters across the United States.

He decided to share some insight into his family’s history with opioid addiction.

“Our movement is about single mothers like mine who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up. I’m proud to say my mother is here tonight, 10 years clean and sober. I love you, Mom,” he said, as his mother, Bev Vance, blew him a kiss from the crowd.

The crowd erupted in chants of “JD’s mother! JD’s mother!” Since then, Vance has made addressing the opioid crisis a key part of his campaign appearances.

This month, rallied in Byron Center, Michigan, he outlined a vision in which he and Trump would close America’s borders to “stop the drugs.” A few days later, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he called for drug dealers to be given the death penalty.

But in Vance’s home state of Ohio, addiction experts and activists say they have yet to hear policy proposals in this year’s presidential election that would adequately address the complex nature of the opioid crisis.

Jackie Phillips Carter, the health commissioner for the city of Middletown, Vance’s hometown, said neither Democrats nor Republicans have offered viable solutions.

“There are so many obstacles and blockages,” she said, “that I don’t think anyone is taking it seriously to address the problem.”

Access barriers

When attorney Dennis Cauchon thinks about the obstacles to addressing the opioid crisis, he thinks of his colleague Dylan Stanley.

Cauchon is president of Harm Reduction Ohio, a drug policy nonprofit east of the state capital, Columbus. In 2018, he hired Stanley to lead community outreach.

She excelled in the role, and Cauchon credits her with saving countless lives.

“Dylan was one of our first and best distributors of naloxone,” Cauchon said, referring to the nasal spray used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.

Stanley herself struggled with addiction and relied on methadone to treat her opioid addiction.

To get the medication, however, she had to take a bus through Columbus: Only certified treatment programs are allowed to dispense the tightly regulated drug. And there was often a line out the door when she arrived.

Four years ago this month, Stanley died at age 30 of a suspected drug overdose, Cauchon said. She left behind a 2-year-old daughter, Ruby.

Cauchon said he respects Vance’s personal story, but he thinks the Republican’s tough proposals are unlikely to make a difference when it comes to helping people struggling with addiction, like Stanley.

“I don’t think he understands what needs to be done. A lot of people mean well, but they do the opposite of what is needed, because it is a complex problem,” Cauchon said.

“His policies — escalating the drug war and jailing and arresting — are doing the opposite. I don’t think that’s his intention, but I think that’s the result.”

A Chronicle of Decay

Since the mid-2010s, Ohio has had one of the highest rates of overdose deaths in the United States.

Although the death toll has dropped significantly in recent years, the state still has an average of 45.6 deaths per 100,000 residents, the 10th highest rate in the country.

The crisis has hit Vance’s hometown of Middletown particularly hard. In the five years from 2017 to 2022, Middletown’s Butler County saw one of the highest rates of overdose-related deaths in the state.

Vance chronicled the crisis in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. It painted a portrait of Middletown as a Rust Belt town in decline, full of shuttered stores and faded parks.

He also told the story of his mother’s struggle with heroin and OxyContin, a prescription opioid.

The book’s publication in 2016 brought Vance national fame, and that same year he founded Our Ohio Renewal, a nonprofit organization designed to “combater Ohio’s opioid epidemic.”

Vance explained that the organization focused on helping “the grandparents, uncles and aunts who cared for many children who were orphaned by the epidemic.”

It has even prompted state legislatures to support the “caregivers” who help family members stricken with opioid addiction.

But in 2021, Our Ohio Renewal closed, drawing criticism for employing an addiction specialist with ties to Purdue Pharma, a now-bankrupt pharmaceutical company accused of aggressively pushing highly addictive opioids like OxyContin on consumers.

And the experts who spoke to Al Jazeera questioned whether the nonprofit organization amounted to much.

“It really didn’t do anything. I deal with this every day all over the state, and we haven’t had any contact,” Cauchon said. “It didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt either.”

Feeding stereotypes?

However, some critics argue that Vance’s description of the region is actually harmful because it fuels stereotypes about the underlying causes of addiction.

In Hillbilly Elegy, for example, Vance attributes the situation in Middletown to a “culture in crisis.”

“You can walk through a city where 30 percent of the young men work less than 20 hours a week and not find anyone who is aware of his own laziness,” Vance writes.

Scotty Robertson, a Middletown pastor who grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, found Vance’s talk about his family’s addiction problems problematic for several reasons.

Robertson explained that this book allowed Vance to present himself as a model of success, while those around him were often portrayed as uneducated and drug addicted.

“I think the context in which the story is told actually reinforces the stereotype, given the way he uses the story to elevate himself,” he said.

Robertson believes Vance’s current political views reflect those stereotypes.

For example, Vance opposes the “housing first” policy, which would provide housing to people at risk of homelessness, fearing it would introduce “people with serious drug problems” into communities.

“It’s a political agenda that dehumanizes,” Robertson said. “If (his) story had been told so that Vance could get the right results, I think the story could have been used very well to humanize.”

Phillips Carter, Middletown’s health commissioner, also believes that part of the difficulty in addressing addiction is breaking down stereotypes about who is vulnerable. She wants the public to understand that those who struggle with addiction are just regular people.

“The biggest challenge now is always bringing the human component,” she said. “So often the biggest challenge is bringing the humanity and education that addiction is a disease.”

Turning the tide

There are also significant barriers to getting treatment for addiction and related conditions, Phillips Carter added.

“Mental health care is very hard to come by,” she explained. “There’s insurance. There’s bureaucracy. People can’t get into multiple programs. Sometimes women can’t get treatment that men can. Sometimes a family loses their children when (a parent) goes into treatment.”

But she and other experts believe there is reason to be hopeful. Overdose deaths in Ohio have fallen 34 percent so far in 2024, compared with the same period last year.

Nationally, the number of deaths fell in 2023 for the first time in five years. New federal regulations easing restrictions on methadone were also announced in April.

Ohio itself invests nearly $100 million annually in prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery.

Cauchon, president of Harm Reduction Ohio, is proud of the efforts of local and state leaders like Gov. Mike DeWine to reduce deaths, across party lines.

“Is the response all it could be?” Cauchon asked. “No, but it is much better than it was five or ten years ago.”