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

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — 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 disorder since he got sober two decades ago, says combating opioid addiction in the state with the highest rate of overdose deaths isn’t just his job. It’s an integral part of his healing.

“I really feel like it’s been the biggest driver of my own personal recovery,” says Loyd, who became the director of West Virginia’s Office of Drug Control Policy last month. “I feel that the longer I do this, the more I don’t mind 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 mining community doctor who becomes addicted to prescription drugs. Loyd was also an expert witness in a case leading to Tennessee’s first conviction of a pill mill doctor in 2005, and has testified against opioid manufacturers and distributors in trials spelling out their culpability in the U.S. opioid crisis, resulting in massive settlements nationwide.

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

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

The doctor started misusing painkillers when he was chief resident at East Tennessee State University hospital. He was given a handful of hydrocodone pills — opioid painkillers — after a dental procedure. He says he threw the pills in his glove compartment and forgot about them until he was stopped at a red light, driving home after a particularly hard day at work.

Anxious and depressed, he was struggling to cope with his more than 100-hour-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. By the time I got home, all my ills were cured. My job wasn’t as bad, my home life was better. And I wasn’t as worried.”

Within four years, he went from taking half a 5-milligram hydrocodone pill to taking 500…