6. Read Demon Copperhead.

They’re calling it the “great Appalachian novel.” Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead tells the story of Damon Fields, a teenage boy born to a single mother in a trailer park in the mountains of Virginia. Nicknamed Demon Copperhead because of his "copper-wire hair and some version of attitude," the boy comes of age in an impoverished, fractured family. The narrative, simultaneously funny and heartbreaking, is a modern reimagining of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield—but with the opioid crisis at its core.

 

And that’s why this book matters for Jessamine County, which sits right on the edge of Appalachia. Opioids are here, and they’re ravaging our community. In fact, Jessamine ranks fifth in a state that suffers over 2,000 deaths a year. At the height of the crisis in the late 2010s, the county made the news with nine overdoses in a single 24-hour period. Medics were called to Walmart, Kroger, and several schools.

 

After another spike in 2023, a Jessamine County Health Department worker warned locals what to look for. “If somebody’s slumped over, if they’re falling, you’ll see a blueish tint to their skin or their lips, especially the nail beds,” said O’Nan Traylor. “They can get grey looking, they can have a gurgle, we call that the death rattle.” She recommends that everyone, regardless if they use drugs or not, carry Narcan with them at all times. If you spray it in the nose of an overdosing person, it could save their life.

 

Opioids include compounds extracted from poppy plants. More commonly, they are synthetic compounds that interact with opioid receptors in the brain. Used for the treatment of pain, they include morphine, fentanyl, tramadol, and oxycodone.

 

Appalachia was the primary target of Purdue Pharma when the corporation began marketing OxyContin in the 1990s. On any given day, eight to ten drug sales representatives were operating in West Virginia. Wrote one journalist, they “descended like locusts.” They came bearing free meals and trips for doctors—and coupons that patients could redeem at a local pharmacy. By 2000, doctors in Appalachia were prescribing the drug at five to six times the national rate. Many patients suffered from “miner’s syndrome,” an affliction characterized by workplace injuries and emotional trauma. It resolved their "shaking," "trembling," "fidgeting," and "pacing."

 

According to this article, “OxyContin was a different kind of pill. It could be lethal because it contained very high doses of oxycodone. The contents of the OxyContin pill were meant to be released slowly, but some users pulverized the pill to snort or inject, thereby ingesting the contents quickly and creating significant risk of addiction. Even when taken orally as directed, each pill (despite being promoted as a slow-release medication) discharged a burst of active ingredient within the first hour. This is how OxyContin converted many people who engaged in low levels of substance abuse into full-blown addicts.”

 

Opioid pills are less of a problem now. But they were a gateway to other highly lethal products: fentanyl-laced heroin, methamphetamine, and counterfeit fentanyl. The death rate for opioid overdoses in Appalachian counties has been 72 percent higher than that of non-Appalachian counties. And drug use has other cascading effects on crime rate and family stability. Jessamine County Jailer Jon Sallee says that around 80 percent of his inmates are there on drug-related charges. (See this terrific article by Daniel Williams: https://danielkwilliams.substack.com/p/crime-and-drugs-a-tale-of-two-cities.)

 

In 2024 the Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman filed suit in Jessamine County Circuit Court against Express Scripts for its role in the opioid crisis. One of the complaints is that the corporation “colluded with Purdue Pharma and other opioid manufacturers in deceptive marketing to increase sales of the highly-addictive drugs.” Additionally, the attorney general complained that Express Scripts “dispensed opioids through mail order pharmacies without effective controls in violation of Kentucky and federal law.” The case is ongoing.

 

Back to the best narrator of this crisis: Barbara Kingsolver. Her father Wendell resided in Nicholasville until his death in 2024. He lived in the Churchill Crossing neighborhood, just behind Dan’s Discount Jewelry & Pawn Shop, so you very well may have sat by the famous author at Giovanni’s Pizza—or walked past her in Walgreens while buying ChapStick—when she was in town for a visit. Check out Wendell Kingsolver’s fascinating obituary.

 

I also recommend that you listen to Kingsolver’s podcast interview with Ezra Klein. The conversation about America’s rural-urban divide between the city-dwelling Klein and the farm-steading Kingsolver is terrific. It’ll give you a deeper compassion for Appalachia, which has been victimized for over a century by extractive industries like timber and coal—and now pharmaceutical companies extracting profit from Appalachian bodies.