Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Ohio County Loses Its Young To Painkillers' Grip, in the NYT.  It takes a look at Scioto County, whose county seat, Portsmouth, lost its steel and shoemaking industries in the '70's and '80's.  From the article:

Nearly 1 in 10 babies born last year in this Appalachian county tested positive for drugs. In January, police caught several junior high school students, including a seventh grader, with painkillers. Stepping Stone House, a residential rehabilitation clinic for women, takes patients as young as 18.
In Ohio, fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the last decade, and by 2007 had surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, according to the Department of Health.
The problem is so severe that Gov. John R. Kasich announced $36 million in new spending on it this month, an unusual step in this era of budget austerity. And on Tuesday, the Obama administration announced plans to fight prescription drug addiction nationally, noting that it was now killing more people than crack cocaine in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined.
The pattern playing out here bears an eerie resemblance to some blighted cities of the 1980s: a generation of young people who were raised by their grandparents because their parents were addicts, and now they are addicts themselves.

Kasich has been pushing this issue pretty hard, which seems to be a lot more constructive than many of his other policies.  But then again, the overall drug war has been pretty destructive, so things might not get better here.  It really is a sad deal.  I read a really dark set of short stories called Knockemstiff a couple of years ago, which was generally set near Chillicothe, in Ross County, but dealt with painkiller addiction, amongst other problems and perversions.  It was extremely depressing.  Southeastern Ohio faces a lot of difficult challenges, I hate to see drugs making things worse.  According to the article, now things are getting violent.  Good luck to Governor Kasich and the local lawmakers.