In JD Vance Country, an Addiction Scourge That Won’t Go Away

POMEROY, Ohio — Sitting in a KFC restaurant in the former coal-mining town of Pomeroy, Ohio, a few hours before JD Vance addressed the Republican National Convention, Curtis Ramsey, 18, recalled the first time he heard the Ohio senator’s name.

It was last month, he said, in the Washington office of another Ohio Republican, Rep. Jim Jordan.

Ramsey, who had never been to a big city or flown on an airplane before, was in the capital with two filmmakers seeking to draw attention to a new documentary, “Inheritance.” The film features Ramsey and examines the plight of drug-ravaged Appalachian communities like his own.

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When the filmmakers, Matt Moyer and his wife, Amy Toensing, explained to Jordan what their documentary was about, the congress member broke into a smile. “Sounds like the story of the next vice president of the United States!” Jordan said.

Recalling this encounter, Ramsey bit into his chicken sandwich and considered the supernova trajectory of the “Hillbilly Elegy” author against his own precarious life.

“He was lucky,” Ramsey said of Vance, an Ohioan who spent time in his early years 165 miles southwest of Pomeroy in Jackson, Kentucky. “He got out.”

Central to Vance’s narrative as Donald Trump’s 39-year-old running mate is that he broke free from the grinding poverty of Appalachian roots and his mother’s drug addictions to become a corporal in the Marines, a Yale Law School graduate, a bestselling author and finally a political phenomenon.

In his acceptance speech, Vance vowed, “I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”

The statement is unassailable if measured by Vance’s public allusions to his upbringing. When the standard is addressing the complexities of drug-addicted families like Ramsey’s, his devotion is more complicated.

Experts in the addiction field, both in Ohio and nationally, say that healing the wounds of drug-dependent communities is an expensive, unglamorous endeavor. The most notable champion for this issue in Congress, they say, is Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican who represents the district in Kentucky where Vance spent his childhood. Rogers has steered millions of dollars to related programs back home and has also established the Rx and Illicit Drug Summit, an annual national gathering to explore the opioid epidemic.

Vance’s leadership has been comparatively modest thus far.

“It was a big moment for people who were in recovery having his mother stand up during the convention and be saluted,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University who served on the board of a nonprofit, now shut down, that Vance set up in 2016 to explore social challenges in Ohio. “But that’s not the same thing as a comprehensive approach to the addiction crisis.”

In 2017, a year after the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a political memoir, Vance told conservative journalist Megyn Kelly, “The things that I care most about are the opioid crisis, about solving some of the issues that I write about in the book.”

Years later in a campaign ad, the Senate candidate echoed that sentiment, saying, “This issue is personal. I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across the border.”

But in Vance’s 19 months in the Senate, his talk and actions have been more pitched to partisan politics than to the tragic complexities he experienced firsthand. He has not introduced legislation targeted to drug-afflicted communities. Instead, he has frequently cited the spread of fentanyl as a data point in criticizing the Biden administration for failing to secure the border and curb China’s malign influence.

Vance was a sponsor of a Republican bill to reclassify fentanyl as a Schedule I controlled substance. He was also an early sponsor of a bill to tax remittances out of the U.S. to foreign countries with the aim of curbing drug trafficking. Both bills have been stuck in committees for the past year.

Another bipartisan bill on which he was a sponsor, to combat fentanyl trafficking, was signed into law by President Joe Biden in April.

Experts in the field say they are waiting for more from Vance. “I haven’t seen a lot of what he’s done on this, to be honest,” said Marcia Lee Taylor, the former CEO of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and currently an advisory council member of National Fentanyl Awareness Day.

“I do give Sen. Vance credit for talking about the issue in a personal way,” she added. “And I would hope that someone who’s had a front-row seat to this complicated problem would recognize that addressing only the supply side of the addiction crisis isn’t sufficient.”

Beyond the legislation, there is little mention of addiction on Vance’s Senate website: Only a handful of his 248 statements to the media refer to drugs. One highlights his appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last year to discuss fentanyl trafficking, and a second describes his questioning of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent at a Senate hearing about China’s role in the drug trade. A third recounts his visit to a new addiction treatment center.

That visit was in October to the town of Xenia, Ohio, to tour the Emerge Recovery and Trade Initiative, which received startup funding from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan. The center offers not only treatment but also vocational pathways of the sort that eluded Vance’s mother during her addiction struggles.

Emerge’s director of philanthropy, Elaine Bonner, said in an interview that the encounter was a positive one and that she would welcome more help from Vance. She said she was unaware if he had offered to steer more federal funds to the program. “I’m hoping he can come back one day,” she said.

Ohio stakeholders in the addiction crisis interviewed for this article have tempered their expectations about their native son’s dedication to the matter. “I remain hopeful about Mr. Vance,” said Robin Harris, who leads an Ohio agency, the Gallia-Jackson-Meigs Board of Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services, that provides treatment services to struggling communities.

Harris added that she had met Vance only once, after a panel discussion shortly after the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy.” She recalled approaching him and asking what he envisioned as an effective method of drug prevention.

“And he said, ‘How would I know?’” she said.

Vance’s spokesperson, William Martin, did not respond to a request for comment about the encounter.

But in an earlier statement, he characterized Vance’s dedication to the issue as a high priority. “Whether it’s working with treatment centers in Ohio to help addicts get clean or fighting to stop the flow of deadly drugs across the wide-open southern border,” Martin said, “Sen. Vance has spent years working on this issue, and he won’t stop until the job is done.”

Ramsey, who now lives in a trailer with friends near Pomeroy, said he would like to find his own path out of Vance’s former world.

“The pursuit of happiness isn’t even possible here,” he said. Ticking off the steps with his fingers, he added, “It’s the pursuit of survival. Then you just live. And after that, maybe there’s happiness.”

The documentary “Inheritance” amply documents this: The filmmakers followed Ramsey’s family over an 11-year period, during which two of the principal characters died of drug overdoses. “My entire family, every single one of them, has been an addict at some point in their lives,” Ramsey said.

He aspires to be more than just a member of his family. Finding the first steppingstone has not been easy. He dropped out of high school, to the disappointment of teachers and local social workers who have seen promise in him and hoped to help him rise above his grim circumstances.

“Kids like him are superhero-strong,” said Angela Lariviere, an advocate for at-risk youth in Ohio who got to know Ramsey after seeing him in “Inheritance.”

“But the trauma he’s experienced is hard for people to appreciate,” she said. “They say, ‘Curtis, why can’t you stay in school? Why can’t you get a job and meet these goals?’”

Meigs County, in which Pomeroy sits, is a Republican stronghold. Trump won 76% of the vote in the 2020 election. Nearly all of Ramsey’s family members are enthusiastic supporters of the former president.

An uncle of Ramsey, Johnny Lee Stumbo, said in an interview that he was cheered by the addition of Vance to the Republican ticket. “He’s kind of like a hometown hero,” said Stumbo, adding that he anticipated a Trump administration would stem the tide of illegal immigration. He did not see it as the White House’s duty to address the impact of drugs on communities like his.

“I was an addict for years, just like the rest of them in my family,” he said. “But I don’t think politics has anything to do with your habits. Drugs is a personal choice.”

Ramsey does not see things quite that way. “I mean, everyone knows what the problems here are,” he said after finishing off his chicken sandwich. “But what I don’t get is: If everyone knows, how can there still be a problem?”

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