West Virginia’s new drug czar was once an opioid addict

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) – West Virginia’s new drug czar has a very personal reason for wanting to end the state’s opioid crisis: He was once addicted to prescription painkillers himself.

Dr. has been treating patients with substance use disorders since he got sober two decades ago. Stephen Loyd says the fight against opioid addiction in the state is being done by: highest rate of overdose deaths It’s just not his job. This is an integral part of his recovery.

“I really feel like that was the biggest driver of my personal recovery,” says Loyd, who last month became director of the West Virginia Office of Drug Control Policy. “The longer I do this, the less I feel like I don’t care about the man I see in the mirror every morning.”

Loyd is no stranger to talking about his addiction. He told his story to lawmakers and became the inspiration for Michael Keaton’s character in the Hulu series.stupidKeaton plays a mining community doctor who becomes addicted to prescription drugs. Loyd also appeared as an expert witness in a case that led to Tennessee’s first conviction of a pill mill doctor in 2005, and testified against opioid manufacturers and distributors in cases. Guilt in the US opioid crisis causing mass settlements across the country.

Nearly $1 billion in settlement money was awarded to West Virginia and a private foundation is working with the state to send checks to affected communities to support addiction treatment, recovery and prevention programs.

Loyd said he was prepared to advise the foundation on how to distribute that money and that the state had a “moral and ethical responsibility” to spend that money wisely.

The doctor began abusing painkillers while he was a chief resident at East Tennessee State University hospital. After dental surgery, he was given a handful of hydrocodone pills (an opioid painkiller). He says he threw the pills in the glove compartment and forgot about them until he was stopped at a red light on his way home from a hard day at work.

Anxious and depressed, he struggled to cope with his more than 100-hour-a-week hospital schedule.

“I thought, ‘My patients get these all the time,’” he says. “So I cut one in half and took it. When I came home, all my illnesses were cured. My job wasn’t that bad, my home life was better. And I wasn’t that worried.”

Within four years, he went from half a 5-milligram hydrocodone pill to taking 500 milligrams of oxycodone (another opiate) in a single day.

He understands the shame many people feel about their addictions. To fuel his addiction, he stole pills from family members and purchased them from a former patient.

“Would I steal from you then? “Yes,” he says. “I would do whatever it took to get what I thought I would die without.”

But he didn’t realize he was addicted until he first felt the intense discomfort of opium withdrawal. He thought he had the flu.

“And the next day when I got my hands on the pills and took the first one, I was healed in about 10 minutes,” he says. “I realized I couldn’t stop or I would get sick.”

It was “a pretty devastating moment” that he said he will never forget.

A family intervention ended with Loyd checking into the detox unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in July 2004. Five days later, he entered a treatment program and says he has been sober ever since.

In recovery, Loyd devoted herself to addiction medicine, focusing on pregnant heroin users who often face judgment and stigma. She said her own experience allowed her to see these vulnerable women in a different light.

“I couldn’t believe he could keep sticking a needle in someone’s arm; what are they doing? — until this happened to me,” he says.

Loyd first noticed the disparities in addiction treatment while in the detox unit. There were 24 people on his floor, and the only person referred for treatment was the then 37-year-old doctor. The rest were simply released.

“I get a pass because I have MD next to my name, and I’ve known that for a long time,” he says. “And that’s not fair.”

He calls it “two systems of care” for substance use disorder: One robust, compassionate system for people with money, and another, less effective model “for basically everyone.”

He intends to change that.

He also says he wants to expand access to prescription medications like methadone and suboxone, which can help people with substance use disorders wean off opioids. Loyd says he was never offered medication when he was detoxing 20 years ago and that “it made me angry that I was suffering needlessly.”

One of Loyd’s priorities will be figuring out how to measure meaningful results; He says this happens in every field of medicine except addiction medicine.

A cardiologist can explain the course of treatment to a patient with heart disease and estimate the chances of recovery or remaining pain-free within a year or 18 months.

“We don’t have that in addiction. We look at results differently,” says Loyd.

Measurements are not the same when people are referred for treatment. How many people came? How many people attended and graduated from the program? How many of them went on to recover and make progress in their lives?

“We don’t know how effective we are at spending our money because I don’t think we’ve really talked too much about looking at meaningful outcomes,” he says.

As for his own measurable results, Loyd said there were a few, including walking his daughter down the aisle and serving as his son’s best man.

And she has a folder on her phone of baby pictures and photos sent to her by former patients celebrating their progress in recovery.

“That’s what drives me,” he said. “The greatest paradox is that you can keep something by giving it to someone else. And I will do this.