WASHINGTON, D.C. — The story of Jessie Grubb's battle with heroin addiction changed the president's perception of the opioid epidemic. And though the 30-year-old's tragic overdose shortly thereafter may have closed a chapter, Jessie's story does not end with her death.
On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., introduced Jessie's Law, a bill that would require a patient's addiction history to be prominently displayed on their medical records with their consent in order to help prevent them from being prescribed addictive narcotics.
Jessie's father, David Grubb, believes Jessie's Law could help save others from the same fate that befell Jessie.
"We're hoping that Jessie's Law will save lives in the future," he said. "I think Jessie would think that was pretty good thing."
Jessie had been fighting heroin addiction for seven years by the time her father, a former West Virginia legislator, had the opportunity to tell her story to President Barack Obama during a presidential visit to Charleston last October. In fact, she watched her father tell the story on a live feed from an Ann Arbor rehabilitation facility. It was her fourth time in rehab.
Obama reportedly was moved by Grubb's story.
In late February, Grubb had surgery for a running injury. At the time, she was still in recovery from her addiction. Everything seemed to be going well. She was in the hospital for about a week and was discharged. But she was discharged with a prescription for 50 oxycodone pills.
Jessie died in her sleep that night.
Both Jessie and her family made the hospital aware of Jessie's history of addiction. But the information wasn't communicated to the doctor who discharged her.
"You just can't believe that this could've happened, that common sense wouldn't have prevailed," Manchin said.
Jessie's Law is a common-sense bipartisan piece of legislation that, hopefully, will help prevent situations like Jessie's from occurring, Manchin said.
Her father believes the law will establish guidelines and standards that will ensure addiction history is conspicuously displayed in patient medical charts.
"I think it really is important that we do something to try to make this tragedy into something positive," David Grubb said. "We have not yet seen the medical records from the hospital. We were told that in those records, there was information about her history, but it wasn't prominently displayed the way allergies would be. The information was probably there, but we think it was somewhere buried in the records."
"When I talked to the discharging doctor, I asked him did he know she was a recovering addict and he said he had no idea," he added.
The law will allow family members, not just the patients, to proffer information about drug history, Capito said.
"It would not rely on just patients to bring that information up. It would allow parents and support groups to get that information included," she said. "Jessie's Law will not solve the big problem but it can go a long way toward saving some lives."
And Jessie's Law is enforceable, David Grubb said. The standard of reporting could be voluntary or mandatory, and it would work because it would be in the best interest of hospitals to self-regulate.
"Once these standards are promulgated or issued, everyone's going to follow it. If they don't, everyone's going to ask, 'Why didn't you follow the standard?' They're going to have to answer the question later on," he said.
Views on drug addiction are beginning to shift, Manchin said. Manchin said, in the past, even he viewed drug addicts as criminals, but he's changed his way of thinking over the years.
"We've never treated it as an illness. An illness needs treatment. We have to have funding for treatment centers. Every county should have a drug court and day reporting," he said.
But it shouldn't end there, Manchin said. Prescription drugs are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which is another place to start in attacking the problem.
"Here we have a product made by legal manufactures, the FDA approves it and the most trusted person in your life, next to your family, says go ahead I'm going to prescribe this for you. That has to change," he said. "We've got many steps to go to fight this epidemic. Once the addict is addicted, and they want to be clean, there's not a whole lot hanging out there to give them hope because they probably have a criminal record. You can't get a job if you have a criminal record. We have to take a multifaceted approach."