By Mary Meehan
Ohio Valley Resource
Sitting on top of the Bible on Pastor Brad Epperson’s desk at the Clay City First Church of God is a list of goals for his small congregation written in a looping cursive hand.
“Our community ought to see the love of God in us, not just by our understanding of a compassionate Gospel, but our public acts of love,” is near the top.
Epperson was born and raised in Powell County in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.
It is one of nearly 100 counties in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia designated at high risk for HIV infection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 10 counties the CDC identified as highest risk are all in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia. Powell County ranks 15th in the nation. Wolfe County, next door, ranks a sad number one.
That means Epperson and his community are at the epicenter of the heroin-related public health crisis that is ravaging rural America. And addressing that threat would force Epperson and many others in this religious, conservative community to take a hard look at themselves and their deeply held convictions.
Epperson moved away for a more than a decade to tend a church in Tennessee. When he came to Clay City a few years ago he didn’t recognize the place. The impact of drug addiction was everywhere. At the Clay City First Church of God, the first brick building in town after exiting the Mountain Parkway, he conducted too many funerals for people way too young.
Epperson, who is also a school bus driver, saw the pain in the lives of the kids he carries. One boy excitedly told him that both his parents were going to be out of jail at the same time for Christmas. No child, Epperson said, should have that kind of life.
Epperson said he struggles with how to help addicts without appearing to condone drug abuse. He sees addiction as a disease with a moral underpinning. First, there is the collateral damage. Cancer patients don’t steal from Mammaw to pay for chemo. Diabetics don’t infect their spouses.
Second, he said, addicts make the choice to take in that first drug.
Still, he knew something had to change.
Others in his community were having their own struggles.
Six months ago, Mandy Watson, a nurse at the Powell County Board of Health, couldn’t imagine a needle exchange program in her hometown.
“When it first started I actually called several of my friends and told them, ‘Pray that this will not happen here,’” she said.
But then Watson saw the projected devastation if her small community had an HIV outbreak. She listened to the statistics about how infection rates could be lessened. She said she couldn’t cure the addict, but she could help someone to be just a little bit safer. That could help stop the spread to innocents in the community such as a spouse unaware of needle use, or kids at a playground where users stash dirty syringes.
She had to do something.
“We are all very close, we all know each other here,” she said, “and the thought of knowing that Hep C and HIV outbreaks could happen very easily here, it scared me for not only my child but my friends’ children. Almost anybody you ask has some kind family member who does use or some type of trouble with addiction.”
Physician Assistant Troy Brooks is on the Powell County Board of Health. He, like Watson, was against needle exchanges. He said it seemed like a way to let addicts keep using their drug of choice without consequence. (READ MORE)
Based at WEKU, Richmond, KY, Mary Meehan covers health for the ReSource. Reporter Alexandra Kanik contributed to this story.
