Big Pharma versus Kentucky

"Oxycodone has wrecked our home, and I ain’t seen Daddy for years.

Our last goodbye, I was high, and Daddy was fighting back tears.

Down in the cave, ain’t nobody saved from fear it’ll be their last time.
Daddy once said, 'Son keep your head, cause life it can turn on a dime.
Son just look at mine.'” – "Oxycodone" by Jeni Hankins & Billy Kemp

Back in 2008, right before we were getting ready to finish our Jewell Ride Coal record, my Dad sent me an article about the opening of a methadone clinic for oxycontin addicts in Tazewell County, Virginia. After reading the article, we stopped production on the record, wrote the song “Oxycodone,” recorded it, and then put the song on Jewell Ridge Coal. The song helped us tell the whole story of life in the Appalachian mountains, today. Over the years, I’ve received more thank you messages about that song than any other, and, in particular, more messages from people in Southwest Virginia. 

Today Pacific Standard magazine published an article on the State of Kentucky versus Purdue Pharma, the purveyor of Oxycontin. It seems that Purdue is getting ready to pay the piper, but we all know that no money and no admission of devil-dealing, will bring back the communities and families destroyed by this drug. 

It’s an excellent long-form article about the voracious greed of big pharma and just how insidious they were in their false marketing of the drug to physicians: http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/how-the-american-opiate-epidemic-was-started-by-one-pharmaceutical-company

For the excellent article, “A Dark Addiction” by Nick Miroff, which inspired our song “Oxycodone” you can go here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/…/01/12/AR2008011201181.html

And to hear Oxycodone and any song from any Jeni & Billy record, you can visit our newly designed website: http://www.jeniandbilly.com/listen/s/oxycodone

Black lung ain't gone away

Special report for National Miners Day from I-10 in West Texas: Black lung is called pneumoconiosis by doctors and what it means is that your lungs get so clogged with coal dust you can't breath anymore. Your lungs are like a kitchen sponge soaked in motor oil. Every breath becomes a struggle and a victory until their are no more victories. When there are no more victories, there's a widow and four children who are stunned to lose their husband and father at such a young age. The wife will take in wash, the son, when he gets old enough, will start sweeping floors at the local newspaper. The coal miner will not live to see his son buy that newspaper, to see his grandson graduate from Harvard, or to hear any of the songs his great granddaughter writes about black lung.

Sutherland Hankins died of black lung at the age of 46. He was my great grandfather. That is his story and I know very little more of it because I never met him. His children, who were toddlers when he died, barely remembered him, and there is no one left to tell me his story. This is hard for me to accept -- this missing story and no way to find it.

Sometimes I have conversations with him in mind and he asks me, "Why do you write songs about black lung, because of me?"

And I answer, "Yes, because of you and because it got better for a while, but now it's as bad as when I was born."

I ask him to look in a coal mine today and tell me what he thinks.

He says, "You put a man on the moon, you talk to each other through waves in the air, and this is your coal mine? This ain't much better than Jewell Valley in 1931." 

Then he walks away shaking his head. 

Yesterday was National Miners Day.

I dream of the day we tell the story of black lung because it's something that never happens anymore. I dream of the day when no miner has to live like he's drowning. I dream of the day when the safety and health of workers is the first concern before any other decision is made in every industry.

In honor of Sutherland Hankins, coal miner, Jewell Valley, Virginia, 1931. Top left, standing.