Sister Beth Davies

Sister Beth Davies was an activist nun and addiction counselor in Appalachia whose experience organizing against powerful companies shaped her early response to the OxyContin crisis. Working with physician Art Van Zee, she helped bring the emerging harms into public view, supported people living with addiction, and rejected Purdue Pharma’s proposed $100,000 grant to the community coalition as an unacceptable exchange for silence. Her refusal connected the drug crisis to a longer history of corporate power and local resistance.

Background and Organizing

A Staten Island native, Sister Beth moved to Appalachia in 1971 after working in Stamford, Connecticut, where she ran a Catholic school. She had a Columbia master’s degree and experience challenging powerful institutions well before OxyContin appeared. Her activism included standing with coal miners and their families during the 1989 Pittston coal strike, a nine-month struggle over proposed concessions that included cuts to wages and retired miners’ health-insurance contributions. Sister Beth lay on the ground to block coal trucks; Sue Ella Kobak stood beside the striking miners with her six-month-old baby in a carrier.

Her record of advocacy also included confronting the Lone Mountain coal company after a faulty coal-slurry pond liner burst in 1996. At a meeting attended by roughly sixty coal miners, company executives, and lawyers, she demanded reparations for the damage to St. Charles and the Powell River area. The company eventually paid for cleanup, but she considered the settlement inadequate. The episode established a pattern that would recur in her response to Purdue: she would speak directly to powerful representatives, even when the room opposed her.

Sister Beth and Sue Ella had faced threats because of their activism. In one earlier case, Sister Beth persuaded an illiterate coal miner not to sign away a company’s liability for a mining accident. Her understanding of the region’s history was not abstract: she had seen outside companies distribute money while unions weakened, benefits diminished, and local communities were left with the consequences. That experience informed her suspicion of corporate philanthropy offered in the midst of harm.

Recognizing the OxyContin Crisis

As OxyContin began circulating in the region, Sister Beth worked at the Addiction Education Center in Pennington Gap and conferred daily with Art Van Zee about patients they both knew. Their work brought her into contact with changes that local institutions could no longer treat as isolated incidents. She saw young women turning to prostitution to obtain drug money, a high-school senior snorting OxyContin in a school library, and people seeking dental extractions in hopes of obtaining prescriptions. She also encountered repeated arrests related to distributing the drug. These cases made the consequences visible in schools, medical care, and ordinary community life.

Pharmacist Greg Stewart warned her in a phone call in the late 1990s that the new drug was being described as nonaddictive but that its arrival would bring disaster. Stewart had already faced two robbery attempts, one involving an OxyContin-addicted young man who entered his store through ceiling vents connecting it to a neighboring hair salon. His warning reached Sister Beth through a chain of conversations among an informant, a police officer, and a pharmacist. The message reinforced her concern that the crisis was taking shape before many authorities recognized its scale.

Sister Beth’s assessment was shared by Van Zee. Their patients were not simply distant cases in a public debate: many were former patients of his, friends, and members of coal-mining families whose pictures lined his examination room. Together, the doctor and nun were among the early local voices identifying the danger of OxyContin and its consequences in Appalachia. Their knowledge came from sustained contact with patients and families, even as their outsider status and limited institutional power made their warnings easy to dismiss.

Community Action and the Purdue Grant

After Van Zee and Sue Ella recognized that the problem extended beyond their immediate circle, they organized through the Lee Coalition for Health, a grassroots group of ministers, social workers, and other community-minded people. Within weeks, Van Zee had arranged public meetings. With Sue Ella’s editing and coaching, he sent Purdue letters describing injection, overdoses, abscesses, and increased hepatitis C in the region, and asking the company to investigate local prescribing. Purdue responded with Adverse Event Report Forms. At a forum for local doctors and families, Van Zee also invited Yale substance-abuse experts to explain the physical and psychological stress of withdrawal and the chronic, relapse-prone nature of opioid addiction.

A later meeting at Kathy’s Country Kitchen brought together Van Zee, Sue Ella, Sister Beth, law-enforcement officers, and pharmacist Greg Stewart. When Purdue offered $100,000 toward local drug treatment and law enforcement, Van Zee and Sue Ella were initially prepared to accept the money as partial compensation for the damage the company’s business had brought to the area. They even drafted an acceptance letter. Sue Ella’s comparison was with coal companies that had extracted wealth while leaving communities to bear the human costs.

Sister Beth opposed the proposal. Her experience had taught her to recognize the familiar pattern: a wealthy company offering money in a place where people had been harmed, while the underlying power imbalance remained. She warned the coalition that she would leave if it accepted the grant. Van Zee’s letter was never sent, and the coalition declined the offer. The confrontation was not simply over how to fund local services; it was a dispute over whether corporate money could substitute for accountability. Sister Beth’s insistence turned a prospective donation into a test of the coalition’s independence.

Partnership, Care, and Continuing Work

Sister Beth’s work extended beyond public protest. She led a twelve-step support group and maintained a close working relationship with Van Zee, combining community-based support with his medical care. They continued to communicate about patients’ circumstances, including setbacks such as bereavement and job loss. In one case, their longtime patient Susan lost two brothers to overdose within months. The example shows the ongoing human losses that informed their daily work, rather than a crisis limited to a single public campaign.

Van Zee’s first appointment with Susan lasted two hours as he learned her medical history, addiction, and childhood abuse. Sister Beth’s group provided another point of support in a region where patients could face stigma around medication-assisted treatment. The approach associated with the two collaborators was not an insistence on one path alone: in their Appalachian community, a combination of medication-assisted treatment and twelve-step support could be useful. Their coordination made Sister Beth a continuing participant in care, not merely an early critic of Purdue.

The demands on the partnership remained substantial. Van Zee was working sixteen-hour days and conferring with Sister Beth by phone or email multiple times a day about a growing group of patients, in addition to the 150 people on his waiting list. At seventy, he worried that if he were no longer able to work, his patients would have nowhere to go. Susan and other group members likewise worried about what would happen if the doctor or the eighty-three-year-old Sister Beth could no longer serve them. Their concern revealed how much local care rested on the labor and continuity of two aging community figures.

Sister Beth also represented the coalition at a rally in Abingdon when Van Zee could not attend because of a family commitment. She marched in a raincoat carrying a sign bearing a photograph of Eddie Bisch in his prom tux. Van Zee had left her detailed arrangements for the rally, from the sound system and water for participants to talking points for follow-up letters to the editor. The scene joined public advocacy to the losses behind it: the rally’s image of a young person was also a reminder of the families and patients the organizers had come to know.

Significance

Sister Beth’s account of the epidemic was shaped by continuity: she recognized in Purdue’s offer echoes of the mining companies that had long wielded economic power in Appalachia. Her opposition to the grant and her earlier confrontations with coal operators were expressions of the same principle—that money offered by a powerful company does not erase the consequences of its actions or purchase a community’s consent.

Her contribution also joined warning to sustained care. She helped organize public meetings, supported Van Zee’s efforts to document local harms, led a recovery group, and remained in daily contact about patients long after the first warnings. The book presents her as one of the early sentinels of the crisis, but also as a practical community caregiver whose work continued amid relapse, bereavement, and long waits for treatment. Her refusal to accept Purdue’s money mattered because it preserved the coalition’s ability to speak independently; her continuing partnership with Van Zee mattered because patients still needed someone to answer.