The devastating personal toll of West Virginia’s opioid crisis

PETERSBURG, W.Va. — I haven’t come to talk about the opioid crisis. But our conversation, as with most of my conversations here, eventually turns to drugs, and the devastating toll they’ve taken on this community.

I’m sitting on the couch in Charlie Combs’ living room in Cabins, just outside Petersburg, West Virginia. On the table beside me is a Bible, and on the wall in front of me are pictures of Combs’ family, including his two sons, Brent and Ryan.

An artist’s rendering of Brent, looking stolid in a cowboy hat, strikes me as very well done. “Yeah,” says his father, a retired forest ranger and water resource inspector, “but they didn’t get the eyes quite right.”

I’ve come primarily to talk about President Trump, who in the 2016 election won the votes of 88 percent of Grant County voters, a higher share than in any of West Virginia’s other 54 counties.

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