There are a number of reasons that I decided to run for the House of Delegates in central Virginia this year, one of which was because I'm an emergency department nurse- so my colleagues I'm on the front lines of fighting the opioid crisis in our country.
So I'm sure you can imagine my reaction when I saw this headline pop across my newsfeed today: White House plans to effectively kill Office of National Drug Control Policy, currently the lead agency fighting the opioids crisis.
These people don't get it. They just don't f****** get it. Because, not only are they doing that- but apparently now, via the AHCA, opioid addiction is now considered a pre-existing condition.
I have to tell you- which will unfortunately result in me demonstrating my naivety- if there one issue I thought at the VERY LEAST, the Trump Administration would actually do something productive to tackle this crisis, if even minimally, it was this one. Bring back coal jobs, mitigate the impacts places like Elkton in my district, or Southside, Tazewell, etc faced from the double whammy of NAFTA and the Foreclosure Crisis within a decade and a half of each other? Nah. I knew that was all talk on his part.
The opioid crisis, though? I held out hope that we'd be actually able to make some headway on that. Because hope is about all we’ve got left in emergency services for getting help to fight it. So, all evidence to the contrary, I hoped.
Mea friggin’ culpa.
This isn't a joke. Not even close. We need to go all-in, right the hell now, to save an entire generation of people that are in danger of disappearing from our society entirely.
I get it- it's real easy to ignore the problems when you don't have to deal with them, and aren't in danger of ever being held accountable for them because you drew your district's own lines. They've no incentive to do anything productive, really- most opioid addicts don't vote, and emergency services folks like me, my colleagues in EMS, Fire, and law enforcement are great for political props, but that's about it.
That's why I'm standing up to run. I got sick and tired of doing chest compressions on a nineteen year-old little girl who was just sure her friends would call 911 in time for her to get some narcan- and then coming home to find a self-congratulatory mailer from some self-righteous politician bragging about what a great job they did addressing the opioid crisis.
I'm sick and tired of my colleagues and I having to deal with what we call the "status dramaticus", because most of those stories don't involve folks dying. D'you know why I don't wear a stethoscope around my neck any longer? Because it makes a handy place to grab for a violent or agitated patient- and I promise you, if they're violent or agitated because of drugs, it ain't marijuana causing it.
I'm tired of me, our docs, and our EMS providers being screamed and cursed at, spat at, by drug seekers- and then watch my docs being hit by hospital administrators because we're not meeting our "patient satisfaction" numbers (which, if you didn't know, is well correlated with narcotics prescriptions- the more narcs you prescribe, the higher your satisfaction scores go), egged on by a pharmaceutical industry only too complicit with how profound the opioid crisis is now.
But I can’t do it alone. I need your help, today. My opponent, a friend of the Trump family- that’s not an exaggeration, he was invited to spend election eve with Ivanka- has a warchest of $600k, and since I decided not to take money from conglomerates like energy giant Dominion, I ain’t gonna be able to make that up in a hurry.
I’ve got to rely on folks like you, here on the ground, who are out there- who understand this is a fricking CRISIS, and needs to be treated as such, from the local level all the way up to Washington, DC. Ten bucks today helps get an ER Nurse sent to the General Assembly building in Richmond.
Thank you.