Jan Rader spent 27 years with the Huntington Fire Department in West Virginia, becoming the first woman to lead a career fire department in the state and a national voice on America’s opioid crisis. Since stepping down as fire chief in 2022, she has served as Director of the Huntington Mayor’s Council on Public Health and Drug Control Policy, where she continues the community-based response work she helped build. Her career has taken her from responding to overdose calls in the field to testifying at the federal opioid trial, appearing in the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary Heroin(e), and being named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list.
How Jan Got Here
Jan didn’t start out in emergency response. She grew up in Ironton, Ohio, just across the river from Huntington. After a year and a half at Marshall University, she went to Santa Monica for a six-month gemology program and then spent eight years working as a jeweler in Fairfax County, Virginia, eventually becoming assistant manager at a store near Tysons Corner.
The turning point came inside that jewelry store. A woman collapsed from a heart attack in the doorway, and Jan didn’t know CPR. She stood there helplessly while paramedics arrived and saved the woman’s life. That moment sent her to a CPR class, then an EMT basic class. Friends in her running group told her she had the fitness and temperament for firefighting. She applied to Fairfax County, but Huntington called first (her brother, a pastor there at the time, had heard about an opening). She was hired in August 1994 as the third woman ever to serve with the Huntington Fire Department.
Watching the Opioid Crisis Take Over Her City
Jan rose through the ranks and kept adding skills: paramedic training, Fire and EMS Instructor certification, work with the Ceredo Volunteer Fire Department alongside her Huntington duties. Then around 2008, she recognized that the biggest threat to her city wasn’t fires anymore. Bottles of oxycodone and hydrocodone were showing up at overdose scenes. She enrolled at Ohio University Southern for an Associate Degree in Nursing so she could understand what she was seeing from a medical angle, and worked as an ER nurse at Cabell Huntington Hospital on her days off. She later finished her Regents Bachelor of Arts at Marshall.
The numbers she was tracking in real time tell the story. In 2010, Huntington firefighters responded to 1,238 rescue calls total. By 2017, they responded to 1,241 overdose calls alone. At the peak, more than 25% of all emergency calls were drug overdoses, compared to 8% for actual fires. Firefighters were seeing an average of five overdose deaths per month. Victims ranged from age 12 to 78, and Jan has said she could drive through any neighborhood, rich or poor, and point to houses where someone had overdosed.
Cabell County, home to about 96,000 people, had close to 2,000 overdoses in 2017. One in ten residents had a substance use disorder. Huntington became known as the “Overdose Capital of America.”
What She Built
Mayor Steve Williams brought Jan onto his newly formed Mayor’s Office of Drug Control Policy in November 2014. In March 2016 she was unanimously confirmed as fire chief, and sworn in on April 12, 2017, commanding a department of nearly 100 firefighters.
She wrote the department’s naloxone policy, requiring every first responder to carry it. She pushed the department away from the traditional “cavalry” model of emergency response (ride in, put out the fire, leave) and toward sustained, non-judgmental follow-up. She built a real-time system for tracking overdose statistics that counted not just ER transports but people arriving by personal vehicle, and made those numbers public even knowing it would draw negative attention to Huntington.
The intervention she’s best known for is the Quick Response Team. Within 72 hours of an overdose resuscitation, a team of four (a paramedic, a police officer, someone from the recovery community, someone from the faith community) visits the person who overdosed. They talk, listen, and offer treatment options through partners like ProAct. The QRT model has since been studied in peer-reviewed research published in Substance Use & Misuse, and replicated in communities across the country.
Jan was also one of the first fire chiefs in the country to openly address the mental toll on first responders. In 2017, more American firefighters died by suicide than in the line of duty for the first time. A Huntington firefighter died by suicide in 2018. Jan brought on-duty yoga classes, on-duty massages, off-duty cooking and pottery classes, and PTSD training into the department, and secured a Mayor’s Challenge Grant and later a Bloomberg Philanthropies grant to keep the wellness program running for at least three additional years.
Under this combination of work, Huntington’s overdoses dropped 40% and overdose deaths dropped 50%. The city started being called the “City of Solutions” instead of the “Overdose Capital of America.”
Public Voice and Recognition
Netflix’s Heroin(e), a 39-minute documentary released in 2017, followed Jan alongside Necia Freeman of Brown Bag Ministries and Cabell Huntington Drug Court Judge Patricia Keller. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short and won a News and Documentary Emmy.
In April 2018, TIME named her to its 100 Most Influential People list in the Pioneers category. Senator Joe Manchin wrote her tribute. In late 2018 she recorded a TED Talk called “In the Opioid Crisis, Here’s What It Takes to Save a Life,” released in January 2019, which has been used in addiction studies and first responder training since. In May 2021, she was a key witness at the federal opioid trial against AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson. She demonstrated for the judge how naloxone is administered and testified to the toll on Huntington’s first responders. The drug distributors chose not to cross-examine her.
Since leaving the fire chief role, she has focused more on prevention and education, speaking at high schools and community groups across West Virginia and beyond. Her position is straightforward: the epidemic doesn’t discriminate by race, income, or background, and communities that respond with compassion and data get results.
Core Philosophy and Approach
Jan Rader’s approach to the opioid crisis is built on several principles that she has consistently articulated across her career:
Compassion over judgment: “I took an oath to save lives and property. Nowhere in there does it say I have a right to judge. I want people to be treated like I would want my family treated — with respect and dignity. I don’t know their backstory.”
Listening as the foundation: “I started talking and listening to my patients. I wanted to know what led them to where they are. What exactly are they experiencing? What makes their situation worse? What makes their situation better?”
Redefining substance use disorder: Rader was an early and vocal advocate for reframing addiction as a brain disorder and health epidemic rather than a moral failing — replacing the term “addiction” with “substance use disorder” in fire department practice and community communications.
Prevention and education: Since leaving the fire chief role, Rader has focused on prevention and education outreach, speaking at high schools and community groups. She has emphasized that the epidemic does not discriminate by race, economic background, or spiritual background.
First responder wellness: “If we’re not safe, physically and mentally, then how can we help others?” Rader was a pioneer in recognizing that PTSD and compassion fatigue among first responders is just as stigmatized as the opioid crisis itself, and requires dedicated attention and resources.
Doing the right thing: Rader credits her nursing instructors at Ohio University Southern with instilling the principle to “always do the right thing” and to be a patient advocate first and foremost. She frequently returns to this: “It doesn’t take a lot of energy to do the right thing, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Hope and solutions: Rader consistently reframes Huntington from “Overdose Capital” to “City of Solutions”: “We’re the city of solutions. We’re doing the right thing.”
Empowering women: “I want young women to know no matter where they are, whether they’re here or all across the country or the world, that the sky’s the limit. They can do what they want to do, and don’t let anyone tell you can’t do something.”
Major Awards and Recognitions
| Year | Award/Recognition | Presented By |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | First Female Fire Chief of a career department in West Virginia | Huntington Fire Department |
| 2017 | Featured in Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary Heroin(e) | Netflix / Center for Investigative Reporting |
| 2018 | Academy Award Nomination — Best Documentary Short (Heroin(e)) | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences |
| 2018 | News and Documentary Emmy Award Winner (Heroin(e)) | National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences |
| 2018 | TIME 100 Most Influential People — “Pioneers” category | TIME Magazine |
| 2018 | Guest at U.S. State of the Union Address | U.S. Senator Joe Manchin |
| 2018 | Invited to Inaugural Obama Foundation Summit | Obama Foundation |
| 2018 | Lydia Main Breaking Boundaries Award — WV Women of Achievement in Municipal Government | WV Municipal League |
| 2018 | TED Talk Speaker — “In the Opioid Crisis, Here’s What It Takes to Save a Life” | TED |
| 2018 | Dr. Dan Evans Ohio University Southern Alumni Leadership Award | Ohio University Southern |
| 2020 | Nexstar Media “Remarkable Woman” Nominee | WOWK-TV |
| 2021 | Key Witness — Federal Opioid Trial | U.S. District Court, Southern District of WV |
| 2022 | Featured Speaker — SXSW | South by Southwest |
Media Appearances and Coverage
Jan Rader’s story has been covered extensively across national and international media:
Television
- NBC Meet the Press — Multiple appearances discussing opioid epidemic (2017, ongoing)
- CBS This Morning — Featured discussion on TED Talk and opioid response (2019)
- Netflix — Heroin(e) documentary (2017)
Print and Online
- TIME Magazine — 100 Most Influential People profile (April 2018)
- Vanity Fair — Feature coverage
- Guideposts Magazine — First-person essay on faith and fighting the opioid epidemic
- The Herald-Dispatch (Huntington) — Extensive ongoing coverage
- The Ironton Tribune — Hometown coverage
- The Parthenon (Marshall University) — In-depth profile
- Firehouse Magazine — Multiple features on firefighting leadership and opioid response
- EMS1 — Coverage of TED Talk and opioid strategies
- Roll Call — Congressional coverage and podcast
- American Dental Association (ADA) News — Coverage of opioid awareness
- Gov1.com — In-depth interview on harm reduction strategies
- West Virginia Public Broadcasting — Career retrospective interview (2022)
- WSAZ-TV, WOWK-TV — Extensive local coverage
- WV MetroNews — Trial testimony coverage
- WV Gazette-Mail — Trial and community coverage
Radio and Podcasts
- NPR Studio 1-A — Interview
- Roll Call Political Theater Podcast — Featured guest
- Appalachian Care Chronicles — In-depth interview (2024)
- TED Talks Daily — Featured episode
Public Speaking and Conferences
- TED — Main stage speaker (November 2018)
- SXSW — Featured speaker (2022)
- Aspen Institute — Film screening and discussion
- Obama Foundation Summit — Panel discussion
- High schools and community groups throughout West Virginia — Ongoing outreach and education