America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs
In the first of a series of dispatches from the US’s poorest communities, we visit Beattyville, Kentucky, blighted by a lack of jobs and addiction to painkillers
One of the abandoned houses along Crystal Creek, Beattyville. Photograph: David Coyle for the Guardian
1- Alex Dezanett lives in a tent pitched in a horse trailer in Beattyville. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
2-Trailers in Beattyville. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
3-Deputy Sheriff David Stamper on patrol in Beattyville. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
4-An abandoned railroad coal-loading station, Beattyville. Photograph: David Coyle/Team Coyle for the Guardian
Karen Jennings patted her heavily made up face, put on a sardonic smile and said she thought she looked good after all she’d been through.
“I was an alcoholic first. I got drunk and fell in the creek and broke my back. Then I got hooked on the painkillers,” the 59-year-old grandmother said.
Over the years, Jennings’ back healed but her addiction to powerful opioids remained. After the prescriptions dried up, she was drawn to the underground drug trade that defines eastern Kentucky today as coal, oil and timber once did.
Jennings spoke with startling frankness about her part in a plague gripping the isolated, fading towns dotting this part of Appalachia. Frontier communities steeped in the myth of self-reliance are now blighted by addiction to opioids – “hillbilly heroin” to those who use them. It’s a dependency bound up with economic despair and financed in part by the same welfare system that is staving off economic collapse across much of eastern Kentucky. It’s a crisis that crosses generations. Full Story>>>
