Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series.
Last month this column cited a Smithsonian article about a 13th century village in Greenland that was abandoned when the village's primary source of trade, walrus tusks, lost market value to African elephant tusks. The same situation is now happening in the Appalachian coal country as alternate forms of energy replace much of the world's need for coal.
A few, as cited in J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, moved to the industrial north, but then foreign steel and other cheap labor products from Asia and Latin America made those jobs obsolete. What were the former coal miners to do? Unfortunately, the answer was to turn to opioids, and the Midwest is now bogged down in an opium/heroin epidemic.
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