One University Takes On the Opioid Crisis

The opioid epidemic has spread to every corner of the country, but perhaps nowhere has been rocked so deeply as West Virginia. The city of Huntington witnessed 26 overdoses in less than four hours one day last year. A stretch of Interstate through the eastern panhandle is known as the heroin highway. Two drugstores around the depressed southern coal town of Kermit sold three million doses of pain medication in one year.

With a weak economy, the state has struggled to respond to waves of addiction and the aftermath. It has the nation’s highest opioid death rate and the highest percentage of babies born addicted.

Tucked into the hills of Morgantown, West Virginia University may not see the worst of the epidemic on its campus. But higher education holds certain commitments. And for a land-grant institution and the state’s largest university, the opioid crisis is its problem, too.

People here are marshaling resources to treat patients in recovery, study the mechanisms of addiction, help communities respond, and train future health-care providers in alternative pain management. The university has deliberately hired faculty members with relevant specialties and is seeking the resources to expand research, education, and treatment. Beyond the campus, the university is supporting overwhelmed agencies like police forces and clinics.

To many academics, the mission is both a moral obligation and a practical necessity. The future doctors, business owners, teachers, and public officials who enroll at the university will all confront the crisis in one way or another. It is overburdening health-care systems, wreaking havoc on county budgets, and gutting the work force. The future of the state is at stake.

But what progress can one university realistically make? “When I came in, everybody said, You need to solve the opioid problem,” says Clay B. Marsh, vice president and executive dean for health sciences. Two years ago, he created a substance-abuse task force to coordinate resources in the university’s health-care system and beyond. “What I’ve come to realize is that it’s a complex systems problem,” he says. “Everything in our world is completely interconnected.”

Opioid addiction has been called a disease of despair, and West Virginia has plenty of that. Cities and towns across the state have been devastated by the decline of coal mining and manufacturing, residents are plagued by poor health, and the labor-force participation rate is the lowest in the country.

A university, by contrast, represents opportunity. As some people here work on the front lines to stem the crisis, others are trying to come up with long-term solutions, like job creation and work-force development. E. Gordon Gee, WVU’s president, says his ambition is no less than the “total reinvention” of the state. The crisis reveals a breakdown in the health and education of communities and families, he says. “One of the ways to deal with that is to provide hope.”

West Virginia University has seen the opioid crisis unfold. When the institution first offered treatment for addiction, the biggest culprit was alcohol. By the early 2000s, it had shifted to opioids. Today the university’s Comprehensive Opioid Addiction Treatment program, the largest in the state, is a national model in patient care.

Opened in 2005, the program has treated thousands of people seeking to wean themselves from addictions that have taken over their lives. Many have driven hundreds of miles for weekly group meetings and for consultations with James H. Berry, an addiction psychiatrist, or his staff. Like most states, West Virginia is short on treatment programs. The university’s waiting list stood at 600 before it opened a second clinic this year. Now about 200 people are waiting for a spot.

Recovering addicts often need medication to break their chemical dependence. But without support they can backslide, especially when entire communities are in the grip of drugs. About three-quarters of participants in the treatment program here have also experienced some sort of trauma, like neglect or sexual abuse.

Built-in group therapy acts as a buffer against those forces by creating an alternative community. It also allows the university to treat more people at a time. About 50 percent of those who enter treatment are able to stay clean for 90 days and make it to the next level, where groups meet less frequently. Of those, 80 percent complete the program.

But people still suffer from underlying conditions like acute or chronic pain. So this year the university opened the Center for Integrative Pain Management, where specialists practice acupuncture, massage therapy, and behavioral feedback, among other treatments. It’s one way to try to reduce the role of opioids in health care.

Persuading insurers to cover such treatments is a challenge, says Richard Vaglienti, head of the WVU center. Another is to persuade West Virginians that they can take charge of their pain and their lives through alternative therapies and better choices. “Much of the addiction problem stems from a lack of sense of control, so they turn to drugs,” he says. “If we can convince them they have some control, that can help them get better.”

Serving the state also means thinking about West Virginians who can’t make their way to Morgantown. The university has expanded its reach through a national program, Project ECHO, or Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes. Using telemedicine, faculty and staff members support primary-care physicians in nearly 20 health centers around the state.

At the Cabin Creek Health Center, in rural central West Virginia, physicians are often unprepared to deal with opioid problems, says Mary Aldred-Crouch, a longtime addiction counselor there. Some wean patients too quickly off prescription drugs that help break their addiction or fail to require counseling, which is critical to success. ECHO helps doctors avoid such mistakes and encourages family physicians to seek federal certification to participate in medication-assisted treatment programs, she says. “It gives them a sense of, OK, I’ve got backup.”

The university is reaching into West Virginia in other ways. Extension services, with a focus on healthy communities, provide natural inroads into counties wrestling with opioid-related problems. Several extension agents have collaborated on local addiction plans.

Elizabeth Reynolds is a nutritionist with the WVU Extension Service in Greenbrier County. She works with a nonprofit group, Fruits of Labor, that teaches culinary skills to recovering addicts in the drug court system. While the nonprofit group prepares people for jobs in food service, Ms. Reynolds teaches personal nutrition as part of a healthful lifestyle. In an area beset with obesity and diabetes, she explains how to cook quick, nutritious meals instead of heading to a fast-food drive-through. “I truly have compassion for these people who need a little bit of motivation,” she says, “a little bit of encouragement to do better.”

Many academics see their work as necessarily engaged with real-world problems. At West Virginia University, that’s especially true, given the state’s historic struggles with poverty. And some researchers are motivated not just professionally, but also by dealing with addiction in their families and communities.

Public-health experts here are training first responders to use naloxone to reverse the effects of opioid overdoses, helping towns and counties design strategies for prevention and treatment, and talking to the public about the dangers of opioid misuse. Jeffrey Coben, co-chair of the university’s substance-abuse task force, was one of five public-health deans from the Appalachian region to brief members of Congress in June.

Judith Feinberg, a professor of behavioral medicine and psychiatry and a longtime HIV researcher, was recruited to West Virginia to focus her work on the opioid epidemic, after helping set up a needle-exchange program in Cincinnati. Dr. Feinberg is one of the leaders of a federally funded project to help nonprofit groups, churches, public-health agencies, drug-court judges, and others reduce the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C among needle users.

Her work concentrates on eight of the state’s poorest and most addicted counties, places already at high risk for infection and for babies born drug-dependent. “That’s the really scary part of the epidemic,” she says. “It’s not one generation, it’s two. And we have to stop it before it’s three.”

Dr. Feinberg is optimistic that she can help find solutions. “West Virginia is a poor state,” she says, “but they have political recognition and political will.” She’s aware, however, that it’s hard for an outsider to get traction. “We don’t want to be carpetbaggers. We don’t want to come in and say, Do it our way.”

To help build relationships, she plans to work with Rita Colistra, a faculty member in the university’s Reed College of Media and a West Virginia native who has helped rural communities develop branding campaigns. “You need to be able to get people to trust you and listen to you,” Dr. Feinberg says.

Inside the university’s laboratories, researchers are busy on another front, seeking to answer questions at the heart of the epidemic. Is there a genetic predisposition for addiction? Why doesn’t medication-assisted treatment work for everyone? Is it possible to make opioids less addictive?

Vincent S. Setola, a neuroscientist who runs a laboratory on the genetics of substance abuse, has recruited volunteers in the Comprehensive Opioid Addiction Treatment program to see if they’re more likely to have known genetic markers linked to addiction. Many were eager to participate, he says, as they recounted family histories of drug or alcohol abuse.

Using DNA swabbed from the inside of their cheeks, Mr. Setola wonders if, someday, physicians will be able to test patients for those markers and tailor treatment accordingly. His work gets funding from the university’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, which focuses on crucial public-health concerns, including addiction.

Such work doesn’t always command respect. Addiction can be seen as a personal weakness, and those who succumb unworthy of help. As one professor puts it, the sense is, “Why would you want to work with a bunch of junkies?” But in response to the state’s continuing crisis, WVU has prioritized this research.

Mr. Setola and David Siderovski, chair of the department of psychology, pharmacology, and neuroscience, are studying genetically modified mice that are resistant to some of the effects of psychostimulants. Marina Galvez Peralta, in the School of Pharmacy, is exploring why some patients don’t respond to opiate-addiction treatments like buprenorphine and naloxone.

Her colleague Marie Abate is working with the state medical examiner’s office to track patterns in drug-related deaths in West Virginia dating back to 2005. She has found that many people with a history of drug abuse had legal prescriptions at the time of their death. How does that happen? Can the university better train pharmacists to be on the alert for drug users’ doctor shopping?

As elsewhere, much of what West Virginia’s researchers can do depends on the national funding picture. Although President Trump has declared the opioid epidemic a national emergency, it remains unclear how the government will direct funds and other resources.

Researchers say policy makers could learn from the AIDS crisis of the 1990s, when coordinated federal strategies and increased funding helped turn the corner on research and treatment. More people died of all drug overdoses in the United States in 2016 than of AIDS at its peak, Mr. Setola points out: “I think it’s time for politicians to bring their A game.”

Such an agenda could also help reduce the stigma of addiction, which experts say can make people avoid seeking treatment, never mind inhibit the flow of money to research. Addicts may command more attention and resources if their problem is seen not as moral but medical.

Sustaining progress in the opioid crisis means adequately preparing health-care professionals to counter it. In that sense, the epidemic presents a reckoning for educators.

The problems began, after all, when physicians ramped up opiate prescriptions in the 1990s under the misimpression that the new formulations were not highly addictive. Drug makers may have underplayed the potential harm, but educators say prescription opioids were ripe for abuse. A 2011 study found “limited, variable and often fragmentary” training on pain management in schools of medicine, nursing, and pharmacy. A more recent study, at the University of North Texas, found that only two hours of course time, on average, is devoted to the subject of opioids.

Health professionals nationwide are training to better navigate the complexities of patient care. Some medical schools require students to sit in on an Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings to try to understand addiction, or to role-play a visit by someone suffering from chronic pain to discuss alternative treatments and lifestyle choices.

Mark Garofoli, in WVU’s pharmacy school, has been reviewing the curricula in all five of the university’s health-related schools to see what training students get in addiction and pain management. Educators are also looking to add more cross-disciplinary, real-world experience. One project brings together pharmacy and nursing students to talk to middle- and high-schoolers about substance abuse.

Instructors in other fields increasingly focus on the problem in class. Public-administration students discuss the impact on local governments. The counseling department is creating an addictions minor, the first of its kind in the state. Frankie Tack, a clinical assistant professor coordinating the new program, says the “assistance” part of medication-assisted treatment is often overlooked, in part because counselors may not understand the science and behaviors of addiction.

Andrew Caryl is helping to change that. A master’s-degree student in rehabilitation and counseling, he battled his own addictions to pills, alcohol, and methamphetamine for years. Now clean, he wants to help others. He spoke to the first class in the new minor this fall. And he works at Serenity Place, home of the university’s Collegiate Recovery Program for students who have struggled with addiction. He plans to become a licensed counselor on substance abuse.

“I feel compelled to be part of the solution,” says Mr. Caryl, whose hometown, Martinsburg, has been overrun by the heroin trade. As he sees it, the university must also play a role. “It makes sense that one of the biggest employers would need to step up and be part of the effort to deal with this,” he says. “Because it’s eating up the state.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.