#for context in my area even 1 bedroom apartments are like 2000 and over for just the rent :/

[pathesis]

" No one wants to work "

Ma'am a full-time 7.25 minimum wage job can't even cover rent anymore. Nobody wants to work FOR NOT ENOUGH.

[antoine-roquentin]

1

In the nineties, during the aftermath of the first Goodyear layoffs, Summit County, where Akron sits, began to be known as the “Meth Capital of Ohio,” ranking third in the nation in the number of registered meth sites. Laid-off workers fell into biker gangs that sold the drug out of area bars. It was the city’s first drug crisis. It lasted for decades, until the next crisis arrived.

When driving into Ohio from the Northeast, as I now do several times a year, one of the first things one sees when crossing over is the towering Goodyear plant. The headquarters, and then the old factory. It is a haunting image, the “GOODYEAR” atop the factory with its lights blinking or fading, smoke seeming to rising out of nowhere, the windows broken or blackened. It is, in some ways, how I know I have returned home, to the site of a vanishing promise that I have not yet been able to articulate to anyone in my new region.

On a Friday night in the fall of 2016, Akron reported twenty-one heroin overdoses. The day before, there were four overdose deaths reported in Akron, bringing the total number of deaths due to overdose that year to 112. During one particularly startling stretch in July, there were 236 overdoses reported in just three weeks. This was a sharp spike from the period of January through June, when Akron paramedics got 320 overdose calls. In 2015, someone died from a drug overdose every two hours and 52 minutes in Ohio. The problem is worst in the northeastern part of the state.[*] The river towns, the factory towns, the towns where there was once hope and now less.

Today, heroin has become inexpensive to make, and therefore inexpensive to purchase, without cutting into the high it gives. To make it even cheaper, traffickers began cutting it with Fentanyl, a powerful opioid painkiller. Some would even cut their heroin with elephant tranquilizers, too powerful to be consumed by the human body, which is what kicked off the influx of overdoses in Akron last year. There is seemingly no end to it. In towns like Akron and the even smaller towns that surround it, officials have begun to throw up their hands and just let the epidemic play out, hoping that there will be a population left when it does.

It is perhaps hard to look at all of this in a historical context, as a story of how misfortune echoes down generations. Goodyear, having effectively outsourced its labor to places all over the globe, is back on its feet now. But the layoffs of the early nineties and the early 2000s had a lasting impact in Akron. There is no story that’s just an ending. Akron wasn’t always as hopeless as it seems now. The people who were laid off in each of those two eras were parents, neighbors, community members who supported the town and helped it thrive. Without their income, the town suffered, and without the ability to move anywhere else, their struggle was passed down to their children. In one decade, thousands of Akron’s working class were rendered jobless, and as the old story of deindustrialization goes, many of them didn’t have skills that transferred out of the factory and manufacturing settings they were trained for.

2

The Winemillers live on the eastern edge of Clermont County, about an hour east of Cincinnati, where a suburban quilt of bedroom towns, office parks and small industry thins into woods and farmland, mostly for corn and soybeans. Apple orchards and pumpkin farms — now closed for the season — are tucked among clusters of small churches, small businesses and even smaller ranch-style brick houses. Every so often, the roads wind past the gates of a big new mansion or high-end subdivision being built in the woods.

Jobs have returned to the area since the recession, and manufacturing businesses are popping up along the freeway that circles Cincinnati. The county’s unemployment rate is only 4.1 percent, and every morning, the city-bound lanes of skinny country roads are packed with people heading to work.

But the economic resilience has done little to insulate the area from a cascade of cheap heroin and synthetic opiates like fentanyl and carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer, which have sent overdose rates soaring across much of the country, but especially in rural areas like this one.

Drug overdoses here have nearly tripled since 1999, and the state as a whole has been ravaged. In Ohio, 2,106 people died of opioid overdoses in 2014, more than in any other state, according to an analysis of the most recent federal data by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In rural Wayne Township, where the Winemillers and about 4,900 other people live, the local fire department answered 18 overdose calls last year. Firefighters answered three in one week this winter, and said the spikes and lulls in their overdose calls gave them a feel for when particularly noxious batches of drugs were brought out to the countryside from Cincinnati or Dayton....

The younger Mr. Winemiller said that being back in the farmhouse had helped save his life by yanking him away from old patterns and temptations.

He started working on the farm when he was 12, driving tractors even though his father had to attach pieces of wood to the pedals so his legs would reach.

“I want to get back to it. That’s the whole idea,” he said. “It’s in my blood. It’s the family name. I’ve done enough to disgrace our name. I want to do everything I can to mend it.”

Death has pulled the men closer, but at home, arguments erupt over whether each understands what the other is going through. The son says he is grieving just as much as his father. The father says he is in recovery just as much as his son.

Quietly, apart from his son, Mr. Winemiller worries about leaving him alone in the farmhouse when his 16-hour days in the fields resume.

“I hate to say this, but because of his past, I don’t trust him,” he said.

They pulled into the Clinton County Adult Probation offices for the son’s twice-weekly drug test, then set out again for the drive to a new treatment center where he gets counseling and doses of buprenorphine, which can help addicts stay off opioids by keeping them from experiencing cravings and withdrawal.

The son was starting to feel anxious and queasy. He cracked open the car window. “I’m going to get carsick,” he said. “I’ve got to take my medicine soon.” He slipped one of the tiny strips into his mouth. Better.

Their conversation curled like a river as they drove. Mr. Winemiller was concerned about the low prices of crops like soybeans and corn. His son talked about an intervention the two of them had staged just down the road a few nights earlier — talking about their own losses and the younger Roger’s treatment — after a 33-year-old neighbor overdosed at his family’s home.

The younger man pointed at the red sign of a budget motel: “I used to buy drugs there.”

He said he had bought from dealers who drove out to the countryside for a day and set up ���trap houses” in trailers or apartments where they would sell to all comers.

He and his father talked about motorbikes, weather and politics. The elder Mr. Winemiller, who was among the 68 percent of voters in the county who supported Donald J. Trump for president, was rankled by scenes of political protest on the news. He saw only disorder and lawlessness.

“There are too many people who are too wrapped up in their lives. All they want to do is go out, bitch and complain,” he said. “My view on Donald Trump, he’s what this country needed years ago: someone that’s hard-core.”

He likes the toughness. After his son and daughter died, he began meeting with sheriffs and politicians at forums dedicated to the opioid crisis, urging harsher penalties, such as manslaughter charges for people who sell fatal hits of opioids.

kinda surprising how little i see about the opioid epidemic, especially since it’s maybe the most important part of explaining why donald trump was elected (in the sense that the racism has always been there, but this part that draws usual democratic voters away is relatively new) and explaining politics in general in america today (america’s individualist ethos, fostered on it by capitalism, condemns those who suffer from drug addictions rather than places them in helping communities, leaving those who typically vote, whether they be black middle class communities in the throes of the 80s epidemic or white ones in the throes of the modern one, wanting more crackdowns, more policing, and more violence as a punitive measure).