White Opium, Black Coal, and the Appalachian Revolution Artie Ann Bates (bio) The Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC) authors' tour started three years ago as a way to raise awareness through writers about mountaintop removal mining (MTR). The hope was that writers would write about what they saw and felt, thus informing a public which is not aware of the destruction to mountains and streams. Many of the artists continue to meet and write, because MTR continues. It was around the time of the KFTC authors' tour that this writer was asked to review a book for the Journal of Appalachian Studies called Pain Killer, about the flood of Oxycontin into the central Appalachian mountains. What became obvious was the stark intersection of the destruction of the mountains from MTR mining and the destruction of young adults from narcotic dependence—two very dark forces that have affected virtually every family in eastern Kentucky, some more tragically than others. The overlap of these forces in space and time continues to present a disturbing phenomenon. An engineer explained the physics term entropy which is apropos to these forces. Entropy has to do with the quantity of disorder in a system which contains energy. As he illustrated it, start with a piece of paper in hand, such as the Gettysburg Address, then set it on fire. One might get 100 BTUS of energy. One could not, however, start with 100 BTUS of energy and get the Gettysburg Address. The same would be true for the process of mining coal in the Appalachian Mountains, and with drug addiction. One could blow off the top 150 feet of a mountain, shove it into the holler and stream below, mine the coal, burn it for the BTUS of energy, say, for an air conditioner. But one could never start with an air conditioner, or a power plant and get an Appalachian Mountain. One could not start with a drug related death and get a living person. From the point of view of entropy, and continuing disorder, sixty years of strip mining in Eastern Kentucky, now called mountaintop [End Page 56] removal mining ushered in the narcotics epidemic. The eastern part of the state has the highest rate of prescription narcotic abuse in the United States. As the third leading coal producing state in the country, 75 percent of Kentucky's coal production comes from here in the southeast coalfields. By some accounts, coal mining, including deep mining, is the fifth most dangerous occupation. Likewise, addiction is one of the most fatal diseases, and the eastern part of the state averages one drug-related death per day. From a money standpoint, the demand for coal is high, and the price is currently $90 a ton. In the year 2000, Kentucky mined 132 million tons of it from both surface and deep mines. At today's price, the gross revenue for the coal industry, for a year as productive as 2000, would be 11 billion, 880 million dollars. The price of Oxycontin in Eastern Kentucky is roughly a dollar per milligram. For a 20 milligram tablet, it's $20, and on to $80 for an 80 milligram tablet. But economics is economics, and the demand is high, so an eighty milligram Oxycontin may sell for 100 to 120 dollars. In terms of the mountains themselves, about 500 million years ago a geologic phenomenon called the Appalachian Revolution began in the northern part of North America, and by 350 million years ago the Central Appalachian Mountains began forming. Movement of the central shield land mass caused a subterranean upheaval with folding and buckling. The Appalachians are the first and oldest fold-mountain system in North America. Rock masses moved atop other rock masses. Older rock lifted overtop younger rock. Old rivers that existed even before this upheaval had to cut new paths and in so doing gouged out hollers and the parallel ridges sticking out from the mountains as we know them today. Oxycontin has been a player in Central Appalachia for more than ten years. It is a focal point of the vast prescription drug abuse epidemic that put Eastern Kentucky on the map as part of an...