People in West Virginia don't like Barack Obama. But in a state with the nation's highest rate of lethal overdoses, they're ready to try anything - even the president's lefty approach to fighting drugs.
Obama is talking with people in an auditorium at the old Roosevelt Junior High School, which is now a community centre in the Charleston, West Virginia's East End neighbourhood.
He's open-minded about drugs. As he wrote in his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, he smoked marijuana and tried cocaine when he was in high school.
(He doesn't anymore. When I asked a spokesman, Eric Schultz, on Air Force One whether the president smoked pot in the White House, Schultz gave me a hard stare and said: "No.")
Yet it doesn't take "Freudian analysis", as Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University says, to understand why Obama favours innovative ways to look at the nation's drug problem.
The number of lethal heroin overdoses in the US has nearly tripled in three years, experts write, with more than 8,250 people dying every year.
The number of those who've overdosed on prescription drugs has also jumped. About 23,000 people died in 2013, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, twice the number from 2001.
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