The father of Jessica Grubb, the West Virginia woman whose battle with addiction is said to have deeply affected President Barack Obama, will share her story overseas later this month as one of three private sector advisors to the U.S. delegation to the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland.
David Grubb, a Charleston attorney, will travel to Geneva May 23 through 28 to meet with public health leaders from around the world and discuss his personal experience, as well as other dimensions of the public impact of the world drug crisis.
"It's a mixed thing for me," Grubb said. "It will be a great experience, and it will be wonderful to be able to tell Jessie's story to a larger audience of people who are specialists in this field, but at the same time, it's very hard, because the only reason I'm going is because Jessie's no longer with us."
Grubb first shared his daughter's story last year, ahead of Obama's October visit to Charleston to hold a forum on the opioid epidemic. At that point, Jessica was in the midst of her fourth rehab and doing well in Michigan - she even listened in to the president's talk and later told her father that it was "both hard and heartwarming" to hear him tell her story.
In February, the Huffington Post reported that Obama's trip to Charleston and his meeting Grubb changed the way he viewed the country's opioid epidemic - in particular, Jessie's story and how familiar it had become in communities across West Virginia and the country.
"He got very emotional," an unnamed White House official told the Huffington Post of Obama's talk with David Grubb. "You're in this deep-red [conservative] environment, but people are just opening up their hearts on this. [The president] sort of was taken aback at how candid people were talking about this."
Just a few months after his visit, Jessica suffered a setback in her recovery that would prove fatal. After being released from the hospital following surgery for an infection, a discharging doctor - one who had never met Jessica before and didn't know her history - prescribed her 50 oxycodone pills on her way out the door. Jessica, 30, died that night in March.
"It's not just about getting people into treatment and getting them on the road to recovery. We have to be diligent from that point forward and make sure we're not, in essence, creating situations that cause recovering addicts to relapse," Grubb said. "It's a real opportunity to talk about the broader part of treatment, which is what happens after."
His daughter's death and the question of how it had been allowed to happen drove Grubb, with the help of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to develop Jessie's Law, a bill before Congress that would, with a patient's permission, make a patient's status as a recovering addict as prominently displayed on their medical records as an allergy. His daughter's life has inspired the Grubb family to further Jessica's legacy in other ways, including a crowd-funding campaign to create "Jessa's Place," a residential facility for adults with autism, like her beloved sister, Emma, and others with developmental disabilities.
"I have a feeling that, because of what we've gone through, in one way or another, we're going to be working on these issues for the rest of our lives," Grubb said. "I think right now, the pressing need from our perspective is passing Jessie's Law...but there are so many other aspects, so many other issues, like the creation of treatment centers. Especially with our experience with Jessie - she couldn't even get into a facility in West Virginia because of the waiting lists, and so we were forced to take her somewhere far away, and that was very, very hard."
Reach Lydia Nuzum at lydia.nuzum@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5189 or follow @lydianuzum on Twitter.