West Virginia's new drug czar was once addicted to opioids himself

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. Stephen Loyd, who has been treating patients with substance use disorders since getting sober two decades ago, says fighting opioid addiction in the state with the highest rate of overdose deaths is not just his job. It is an essential part of his healing.

“I really feel like it's been the biggest driver of my personal recovery,” says Loyd, who became director of West Virginia's Office of Drug Control Policy last month. “I feel like the longer I do this, the less bothered I am by the guy I see in the mirror every morning.”

Loyd is no stranger to talking about his addiction. He has told his story to lawmakers and was an inspiration for the character played by Michael Keaton in the Hulu series “Dopesick.” Keaton plays a doctor from a mining community who becomes addicted to prescription drugs. Loyd was also an expert witness in a case that led to the first conviction of a pill mill doctor in Tennessee in 2005, and has testified in lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors outlining their culpability in the U.S. opioid crisis, leading to massive settlements in the led the whole country.

West Virginia received nearly $1 billion in settlement money, and a private foundation has worked with the state to send checks to affected communities to support addiction treatment, recovery and prevention programs.

Loyd says he is willing to advise the foundation on how to distribute that money, saying the state has a “moral and ethical responsibility” to spend it wisely.

The doctor began abusing painkillers when he was a senior resident at East Tennessee State University Hospital. After a dental procedure, he was given a handful of hydrocodone tablets – opioid painkillers. He says he threw the pills in his glove compartment and forgot about them until he was stopped at a red light while driving home after a particularly hard day at work.

He was anxious and depressed and struggled to cope with his 100-hour-plus-a-week hospital schedule.

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

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

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

“Would I steal from you then? Yes,” he says. “I would do whatever I had to do to get this, without which I thought I would die.”

But he didn't understand he was addicted until he first felt the intense sickness that comes with opiate withdrawal. He thought he had caught the flu.

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

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

A family intervention ended with Loyd attending the detoxification unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in July 2004. After five days, he entered a treatment program and, he says, has been sober ever since.

After his recovery, Loyd devoted himself to addiction medicine, focusing on pregnant heroin users, who often face judgment and stigma. He said his own experience allowed him to see these vulnerable women in a different light.

“I couldn't believe that someone could just keep sticking a needle in his arm – what are they doing? – until it happened to me,” he says.

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

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

He calls these “the two systems of care” for substance use disorders: a robust and compassionate system for people with money and a different, less effective model “basically for everyone else.”

He plans to change that.

He says he also wants to expand access to prescription medications like methadone and suboxone, which could help people with substance use disorders get off opioids. Loyd says he wasn't offered either medication when he detoxed 20 years ago, “and it kind of makes me angry that I suffered unnecessarily.”

One of Loyd's priorities will be figuring out how to measure meaningful outcomes — something he says is happening in all areas of medicine except addiction medicine.

A cardiologist can tell a patient with heart disease the course of treatment and estimate the chances of recovery or being pain-free in a year or 18 months, he says.

“That doesn’t exist in addiction. We look at the results differently,” says Loyd.

When people are referred for treatment, the standards are not the same. How many showed up? How many participated in the program and graduated? How many continued to recover and make progress in their lives?

“We don't know how effectively we've spent our money because I don't think we've really talked much about finding meaningful results,” he says.

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

And on his phone he has a folder of baby pictures and photographs of recovery milestones that former patients have sent him.

“That’s what drives me,” he said. “The great paradox is that you can keep something by giving it away. And I get to do that.”

Copyright 2024 WDTV. All rights reserved.