Three metal scrappers with a grocery cart along East Third Street pose for a moment on their way to the scrapyard. Credit:Steve Bennish This is the story of my hometown. An epidemic of such scale, it inhabits all the facets of my life – friends, family and work, where it's by far the biggest story in our part of the country. I try counting the number of people I know who have either overdosed or died from opioids – former friends, friends of family, family of friends – and I lose track of names at a dozen. There was the first cousin, who overdosed in front of his children at his home. He was my age, injected heroin in his house. When the paramedics arrived, he was dead. They revived him at the hospital. After he regained his wits from his medical resurrection, he slipped out of the hospital so he couldn't be identified for a police report.

A largely vacant trailer park near downtown Dayton testifies to an economy devastated by the "Great Recession". Credit:Steve Bennish There was the friend of an in-law, who died from an overdose after returning from university, the friend of my brother who simply "disappeared" five years ago only to reappear in the obituaries last week. The fellow graduates I knew at high school and elementary school, former co-workers, so many of whom fell into the spiral and couldn't climb out. Familiar names I see on Facebook or in obituaries. Dayton's fall into the opioid epidemic started with economics and pharmaceuticals. A father and daughter in an East Dayton neighbourhood ravaged by the drug epidemic. Credit:Steve Bennish Offshoring gutted Dayton, a city of inventors where the Wright Brothers were born and built the first airplane, where the self-starter for the automobile was invented, where the first cash register was built. A city that held more patents than most countries during the mid-20th century.

Dayton held on to its automotive jobs longer than most communities until Delphi, a General Motors parts subsidiary, went bankrupt and then moved its operations to Mexico and China. A pair of scrappers fight blizzard conditions to deliver their haul of aluminium cans to the scrapyard. They may earn $30 to $50 for the lot. Credit:Steve Bennish My dad worked at one plant while I was in college. I worked at a warehouse up the road, packing large equipment for overseas shipping. I remember the general manager coming back after taking measurements to ship the production lines from my father's plant to India. I literally packed my father's job and sent it overseas. Montgomery County coroner Kent Harshbarger outside the door to the morgue. On April 12, 12 of the 13 bodies in the morgue are overdose victims. Credit:Steve Bennish

Dayton lost 15,000 jobs just from Delphi. Nearly every suburb and small town had a Delphi parts supplier; they were out of business, as well as the pizza places, restaurants and bars that served the local workers and neighbourhoods. The total number of people affected is incalculable. A Narcan kit at the community centre used for drug overdoses. Credit:Steve Bennish After the GFC, which we called "The Great Recession", the only thing left for some Daytonians was the abandoned plants and houses. They led to a new kind of market. Steve Bennish, who covered political economy in the Dayton Daily News until last year, witnessed it first hand and told the stories of the Scrappers.

While Dayton no longer exported cars, it was exporting recycled scrap metal. Given this experience, many Daytonians and Ohioans were sceptical of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Recycled scrap metal is now one of the US's biggest exports. Locals spent hours digging through the dirt where former buildings stood, on the hunt for scrap metal to sell to recyclers. In these circumstances, it is no surprise that the 2008 economic crash coincided with the explosion of heroin and other opioid addiction. Unemployment in the US at that time meant no health insurance, which means taking pain medication or drugs. US President Donald Trump visited Dayton frequently as a candidate – his message of reviving manufacturing and bringing jobs back to our shores resonated in Ohio.

When he said America was in decline, the Democrats and many voices on major op-ed pages were enraged, but they had never been to Dayton and scrapped aluminium in abandoned houses in below freezing weather for 12 hours a day to make $US25. Their family hadn't been destroyed by an addiction epidemic that wasn't for a hedonistic high but in search of feeling normal, without pain. While the major media searches for answers as to why the white working and middle classes voted for Trump, it's simple. Our way of life is dying in many ways – not because of the oft-cited "demographic" changes, but because of economics, addiction and a steep decline in quality of life. Because the dreams of retiring aren't coming true, and many will work until they die. To those not listening, Trump was a brick thrown through the establishment's window.

So saving his voters should be Trump's legacy With the current state of the Trump presidency, it could last eight years, eight months or eight weeks. But it's still enough time for Trump to save lives, particularly the people in the Rust Belt facing this spiralling crisis. He should follow the example of George W. Bush, who pushed the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. At the time when the bill was passed in 2003, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, "fewer than 50,000 on the African continent were given proper anti-retroviral medicines to curb the disease. By the time Bush left office the number reached 2 million, as of 2012 it was 4 million." Those people would be dead without Bush's program.

A similar plan introduced by the White House could save thousands in the United States. I'm not certain if Trump can bring back well-paying manufacturing jobs. I like that one politician is at least willing to try. But I am certain the voice of the White House is strong enough to begin a mission to save lives and end this opioid epidemic. The people of Ohio and Pennsylvania helped Trump to victory. Now that Trump is President, he needs to remember them in their time of need.