Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  Joe and I are sitting in the Tug River Health Clinic in Gary with a registered nurse who does not want her name used. The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check”—payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI—a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival.

  “They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. “They will insist to us they are crazy. They will tell us, ‘I know I’m not right.’ People here are very resigned. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.”

  The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers OxyContin, fentanyl—eighty times stronger than morphine—Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result. A decade ago only about five percent of those seeking treatment in West Virginia needed help with opiate addiction. Today that number has ballooned to twenty-six percent. It recorded ninety-one overdose deaths in 2001. By 2008 that number had risen to three hundred and ninety. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in West Virginia, and the state leads the country in fatal drug overdoses.36 OxyContin—nicknamed “hillbilly heroin”—is king. At a drug market like the Pines it costs a dollar a milligram. And a couple of 60- or 80-milligram pills sold at the Pines is a significant boost to a family’s income. Not far behind OxyContin is Suboxone, the brand name for a drug whose primary ingredient is buprenorphine, a semisynthetic opioid. Dealers, many of whom are based in Detroit, travel from clinic to clinic in Florida to stock up on the opiates and then sell them out of the backs of gleaming SUVs in West Virginia, usually around the first of the month, when the government checks arrive. Those who have legal prescriptions also sell the drugs for a profit. Pushers are often retirees. They can make a few hundred extra dollars a month on the sale of their medications. The temptation to peddle pills is hard to resist.

  We meet Vance Leach, forty-two, with his housemates, Wayne Hovack, forty, and Neil Heizer, thirty-one, in Gary. The men scratch out a meager existence, mostly from disability checks. They pool their resources to pay for food, electricity, water, and heat. In towns like Gary, communal living is common.

  When he graduated from the consolidated high school in Welch in 1987, Leach drifted. He went to Florida and worked for the railroad. He returned home and worked in convenience stores. He held a job for eleven years for Turner Vision, a company that took orders for satellite dishes. He lost the job when the company was sold. He worked at Welch Community Hospital for six months and then as an assistant manager of the McDowell 3, the Welch movie theater. His struggle with drugs, which he acknowledges but does not want to discuss in detail, led to his losing his position at the theater. He is preparing to start a course to become licensed as a Methodist minister and serves the two local United Methodist churches, neither of which muster more than about a half dozen congregants on a Sunday. The twenty theology classes, which cost $300 a class, are held on weekends in Ripley, about four hours from Gary.

  Leach is seated in his small living room with Hovack, who bought the house when his home was destroyed by flooding, and Heizer. Hovack was given $40,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Authority to relocate. Heizer tells us how he almost lost his life from an overdose a few weeks before.

  The three men are the sons and grandsons of coal miners. None of them worked in the mines.

  “My dad worked with his dad,” Heizer says, nodding towards Leach. “My grandfather died in the coal mines in 1965. He had a massive heart attack. Forty-nine years old.”

  “It was good growin’ up in McDowell County twenty-plus years ago,” Leach says.

  “Except for when the mines would go on strike,” adds Hovack. “That was rough. I can remember that.”

  “Welch used to be a boomin’ place,” Vance says. “When you went to Welch you really thought you went somewhere.”

  “Used to be about three thee-ay-ters in Welch many, many years ago,” Leach says.

  “All them stores,” says Hovack. “I can remember my mom goin’ to take me to Penny’s and Collins. An’ H&M. But when the U.S. Steel cleaning plant went out, that was it for this county.”

  “I went to school here in Gary, and when the plant closed down I was ’bout twelve or thirteen and my friends in school would say, ‘My dad and mom, we’re movin’ ’cause they have to go look for work,” Hovack says.

  “You seen a lot of people depressed after that, wonderin’ how they were gonna make it, how they were gonna pay their bills, how they were gonna live, how they were gonna pay their mortgage,” says Leach. “It was devastating. A lot of people didn’t have a good education, so there wasn’t anything else to turn to. The coal mines was all they ever knew. My dad, he didn’t finish high school. He quit in his senior year, went right into the mine.”

  Heizer speaks in the slowed cadence of someone who puts a lot of medication into his body. He recently lost his car after crashing it into a fence. His life with his two roommates is sedentary. The three men each have a television in their bedrooms and two more they share, including the big-screen television that, along with an electric piano for Hovack, were bought with Heizer’s first disability check. The men spent the $20,000 from the check in a few days.

  “I became disabled back in late 2006,” Heizer tells us. “I had degenerative disc disease and I hurt my back. I was workin’ at this convenience store. They knew that I had a back injury, but yet they had me come in on extra shifts and unload the truck. Now I’ve got four discs jus’ layin’ on top of each other, no cushion between them. For three years I lived here without an income, and my dad helped support me, and then last November I finally was awarded my disability.”

  Vance Leach, Neil Heizer, and Wayne Hovack at home in Gary, West Virginia.

  Heizer, who is gay, saw his drug addiction spiral out of control four years ago after his boyfriend committed suicide. He tells us he has been struggling with his weight—he weighs three hundred and twenty-four pounds—as well as diabetes, gout, and kidney stones. These diseases are common in southern West Virginia and have contributed to a steady rise in mortality rates over the past three decades.

  OxyContin takes a a few hours to kick in when swallowed. If the pills are crushed, mixed with water, and injected with a syringe, the effect is immediate. Heizer says that after the drug companies began releasing pills with a rubbery consistency, they could not be ground down. Heizer heated the newer pills in a microwave and snorted them—leading to his recent overdose. It took place at his mother’s house. He went into renal failure. He stopped breathing. His kidneys shut down. He was Medevac’d to a hospital in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, where he stayed for four days.

  “I was just sittin’ around watching TV and started aspiratin’,” Heizer says flatly. “The medication was goin’ into my lungs. You gurgle with every breath. You are drownin’, basically. I remember walkin’ down my mom’s steps and gettin’ in the ambulance. I remember at Welch, they put me on the respirator and then transferred me. After they put me on the respirator, I stopped breathing on my own. And then I remember in Charleston wakin’ up an’ they had my hands restrained so I wouldn’t pull the tubes out. I had a real close call.”

  The men sit in front of their flat-screen television and chat about friends, classmates, and relatives who died of overdoses. Hovack talks about a niece in her early twenties, the mother of two small children. She recently died of a drug over
dose. He tells us about a high-school classmate, an addict living in a shack we can see from the window. The shack has no electricity or running water. The men, who rarely leave the house, mention the high bails being set for selling drugs, with some reaching $50,000 to $80,000. They joke about elderly grandmothers being hauled off to prison for drug dealing.

  “I’ve seen a lot of busts in the county over the last few years, and a lot of the people that have been arrested are elderly people that are sellin’ their medication just to live,” Vance says. “When I was workin’ at the hospital I seen ODs all the time. Young people were comin’ in. It’s bad. The depression and the pain. I guess some people that hang and live in this area, they just have to turn to somethin’.”

  “Since the drug problem is so bad you see the crime rate as well,” Leach says. “People breakin’ into homes, stealin’ whatever they can to sell or pawn, just to keep up with their drug habit.”

  Heizer, seven weeks later, dies of a drug overdose, sitting on the living room couch in front of the big-screen television.

  Prisons are supposed to be the new growth industry. West Virginia has six large federal prisons and thirteen state prisons.37 Welch has two of the state prisons, one of which, Stevens Correctional Facility, is located in the former Welch city hospital. Another federal prison is under construction on the rubble left behind from a strip-mining operation. The McDowell County Correctional Center occupies the old courthouse in the center of Welch. Prisons are touted by state officials as bonanzas for the unemployed and underemployed. But prison operators complain that local applicants often cannot pass the proficiency exams or the drug tests. For these reasons, most of the jobs go to people who do not live in the county.38

  Outside the post office in the town of Sylvester in Boone County, where the Elk Run Coal Company plant has its operations on the edge of town, we meet Harry White, an eighty-year-old retired miner and Korean War veteran. He is wearing a blue baseball cap and a West Virginia University sweatshirt. Like everyone else in the town, he lives in clouds of noxious coal dust.

  “You can’t even sit outside,” he says.

  He runs his index finger along the sill of the post office window. It is black with coal dust. He has little time for “scabs,” the nonunionized miners that have taken over the work in the mining industry. He believes that a spate of recent mine disasters happened because the unions have been broken and the mining companies are no longer forced to comply with minimal safety standards. His father was a miner and died of black lung disease in 1946.

  “He worked that night and came home and died at 3:33 in the morning,” he says. “He ran the cut machine that cut the coal. He died on March 3. We buried him on March 5. I started working in the mines on March 7.”

  White, however, has little time for the environmental activists who come from outside the state to protest mountaintop removal. The activists, often dressed in baggy cotton clothes and not given much to bathing, are a public-relations gift to the coal companies, which tag them and their local supporters as “tree huggers.”

  “If I was runnin’ things I would put them on a ship, send them out to sea, and sink ’em,” White says of the activists. “They don’t belong here. They never worked a day in their life. They draw a lot of benefits, Social Security, anything they want. They are lazy.”

  Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders, and armed battles with hired-gun thugs and state militias. Unions created the middle class. They opened up our democracy. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies, and at times even U.S. Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush organized workers. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887.39 Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pennsylvania.40 Railroad workers were murdered in the nationwide Pullman strike of 1894.41 Coal miners were massacred at Ludlow, Colorado,42 in 1914 and at Matewan, West Virginia,43 in 1920.

  The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies, and the Morgans—the Goldman Sachs and Walmart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits, and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—arrested at one point in the West Virginia coalfields for reading the Declaration of Independence to a crowd of miners—United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis, and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies, as well as Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.

  “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle . . .” Frederick Douglass said. “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”44

  Sylvester is one of the few towns in this region that was not built and run by the coal companies. The residents kept out the coal camps and land companies. They built their own homes. They owned their own property. The area has long had a streak of fierce independence. When employees of the Webb Coal Mining Company at Ferndale, Local 1057 went on strike in 1922, company strikebreakers evicted the families of the miners and their furniture from company houses, the usual practice coal companies used against strikers. The miners set up a tent city in what is now Sylvester. They lived in this tent community for eighteen months, which included a harsh winter. A letter from Nellie Susan Miller in the 1996 Sylvester Dog Patch Reunion booklet reads: “Grandpa William Brinigar was among those trying to unionize the mines. His family was put out of their house (on Cabin Creek) and my Dad was born in a tent town of unionizers in Sylvester.”

  We are sitting with Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller, both in their eighties, at the dining room table of Miller’s home in Sylvester. Each has grown children who moved away years ago.

  Through the back window we can see, on the ridge above the house, the Elk Run coal processing plant. The large white dome dominates the gray landscape. The Massey Energy Coal Company uses nonunionized labor and has presided over a series of deadly mine disasters due to its poor safety record. In 1981, Massey, operating through a subsidiary company named Elk Run Mining, opened an underground mine four hundred feet from the town. Elk Run asked the DEP for a permit to put in a coal processing plant on the bluff above the town. The women, along with most of the town, knew that because the winds nearly always blow west to east, the coal dust would saturate the community.45

  “In nineteen and ninety-six, the permit came out for that,” Canterberry says. “It takes a lot of water to operate a preparation plant, ’cause all that coal has to be washed. That’s what goes into your slurry impoundments. We have an impoundment beyond this hill here that has two billion gallons of slurry in it. It’s nothing but black toxic waste. It has over sixty chemicals in it.”

  “And if the impoundment broke,” I ask, “where would the slurry go?”

  “It could break two or three different ways,” Canterberry says. “If it broke from the face of it, because the face of it comes this way, it would come out and hit the river there. But there’s a mountain in front, so it would
n’t go on, it would hit it and it would split. Now you look around here and you see there’s no escape routes outta here.”

  “We have three up this valley that are like loaded guns,” she continues. “These hills are like honeycombs. They were mined in the early 1900s. They were mined in the ’20s. They were mined again in the ’40s. They were mined in the ’60s. When they’re minin’ coal, you’re supposed to, by law, leave so much coal to secure the mountain, you know, that it will hold up. But they don’t do that, they’ll go just as far as they can. And they could break through anywhere. There’s a lot of weak spots in these mountains.”

  The women organized a petition against the permit. It was signed by seventy-five percent of the town. A hearing was held at the local elementary school on November 3, 1996. The room was packed with angry townspeople. But the DEP ignored them. The coal processing plant was built. Huge belt lines to transport the coal were installed. Mounds of coal heaped up around the plant.46

  “They started the plant, April of nineteen and ninety-seven, and within a month, we were literally covered with coal dust,” Canterberry says.

  The processing plant was worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, spewing black grit and dust. Huge eighteen-wheeler trucks, up to thirty-five thousand of them a year, roared through the town with loads of coal. Houses, lawn furniture, cars, grass, and clotheslines were coated in the grit. No one would sit outside. Backyard cookouts and barbecues ended.47

  “We didn’t even want to walk down the street because it blew in our face,” Canterberry says.

  The town filed complaint after complaint for two years. The complaints were ignored. The residents watched in horror as a massive slurry impoundment grew to the size of a small lake above the town. Should it break its banks, the impoundment would wipe out Sylvester in a matter of minutes. By April 2000, Elk Run, confronted with the evidence and complaints of the townspeople in a hearing before the DEP, agreed to install a screen to help contain the dust. A system to sprinkle the coal with water was installed, although residents say it is rarely used due to the cost.48