Answer Addiction

Tag: advocacy

  • Why Aren't There More People of Color in the Recovery Movement?

    Why Aren't There More People of Color in the Recovery Movement?

    For many white people, recovery is a redemption story, proof that they were good people all along. For people of color, a known history of drug use might be the only excuse a prospective employer needs to shut the door.

    When Art Woodard walked into his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, a sea of white faces turned to stare at him. Some of the faces showed kindness; others hostility. Most people just watched as he took a seat in the back of the room.

    Woodard’s shoulders slumped. As a black man who had recently graduated Yale, he was used to being the only person of color in a room. Still, he thought, it would have been nice to share the recovery journey with other black folks. 

    “None of these stories are like mine”

    As his fellow AAers stood up to tell their stories, Woodard found he couldn’t concentrate. None of these stories are like mine, he thought. Many of the stories involved childhood abuse or mental health issues. For Woodard, heavy drinking didn’t start until he graduated from Yale, when he finally couldn’t take the weight of living in a white world where he constantly felt the need to prove himself, to justify his presence, to assure others he wasn’t a threat. 

    “I got drunk because I thought I had fooled an institution into giving me a degree I didn’t deserve,” he says in a phone interview. “I never really felt I had a place in the world…I embraced alcohol because I needed a release for that insecurity.”

    Woodard never returned to that AA meeting, during which not a single person approached or welcomed him. Luckily, he found a program specifically for people of color elsewhere in the city. When the program nearly folded for lack of funds, he wrote grants to keep it afloat—he was adamant about continuing his recovery journey alongside his peers.

    Over the years Woodard became more visible within the wider recovery movement. He became a public speaker and trainer, often co-leading health and recovery trainings with his friend Jim, who was white. But the specter of race was never far off.

    “I can honestly say that every position or opportunity that I was able to achieve was achievable through a Caucasian male offering me opportunities,” he says. “I was invisible in those settings if I didn’t have [a white person] to speak for me.” 

    He endured the barbs from the people who ignored Woodard if he asked a question, directing their answer to Jim, and the people who expressed astonishment at his “good English,” as they put it. And always, the experience of his first AA meeting came back; almost every recovery space was a sea of white faces. 

    Racial Bias, Recovery, and Criminal Justice

    Woodard’s experience as a person of color in the recovery movement is not unique. It’s no secret that the movement is largely dominated by Caucasians, whether in staff or leadership positions, on organizational boards, or among membership. Why do so few people of color play visible roles within the recovery community, especially given how much the effects of harsh drug policy and chaotic drug use have devastated many communities of color? To merely blame racism, though it certainly plays a role, is oversimplifying a complex problem. 

    One of the reasons we don’t see many people of color in leadership positions within the recovery movement is that it can be harder for people of color to sustain recovery at all. We all know someone who spent a good chunk of their twenties using drugs or alcohol problematically. Perhaps they went to jail once or twice. Perhaps they were even homeless for a while. But today that person is married with children, thriving at a good job, and talks about recovery to anyone who will listen. That person is also probably white.

    Sustained recovery is not as easy for a person of color. For black men, especially, once the criminal justice system sinks its teeth into you, it doesn’t let go. There is little room for mistakes in a world that expects you to fail, and we all know the statistics: Despite similar rates of drug use, people of color are more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white people, serve longer sentences for the same crimes, and find it harder to break the cycle once it starts.

    Even for people of color who are able to find and sustain recovery despite the odds against them, they likely won’t be as quick to advertise their new status. For many white people, recovery is a redemption story, proof that they were good people all along. For people of color, a known history of drug use might be the only excuse a prospective employer needs to shut the door.

    For evidence of racial bias in recovery, one need only pick up the nearest newspaper or turn on the TV. When the story is about a white drug user, the addiction or overdose death is reported as a tragic loss of potential. But a person of color can suffer a death completely unrelated to drugs—being shot unarmed by a cop, for example—and the public will dig into his past for any evidence of drug use or criminal behavior, then use this information to justify the murder. Any drug history of any kind is enough to brand a person of color for life.

    The overdose crisis presents a conundrum. On the one hand, it provides an influx of funding and sympathy to a movement in desperate need of both. On the other hand, it exacerbates the racial divide by further entrenching the narrative of white recovery as redemptive and black or brown recovery as something else. 

    Follow the Money

    Donald McDonald, a white man from Raleigh, North Carolina with 15 years in recovery, explains, “The opioid crisis is seen as a white issue not just because of the predominantly white images we see in the news. It’s this message about the ‘worthy afflicted.’ We hear about people with legitimate pain receiving lawfully prescribed pain relief. We can then vilify the pill or the pharmaceutical company – not the person experiencing addiction. Historically this has not been the black experience in America.”

    The people whose faces are presented as sympathetic victims are almost always white. And this is no mere coincidence. The recovery movement is made up of people who have long suffered heavy stigma, but now, for the first time, thanks to the attention that the overdose crisis has sparked, the movement is experiencing more public sympathy and financial support. 

    Laurie Johnson-Wade, an African American woman who leads recovery efforts in Kensington, Pennsylvania, says that money lies at the heart of the exclusion of people of color in recovery spaces. 

    “If you show my face [as a black woman] or if you use me as the leader at a conference then you are not going to get the money that you would have if you had somebody representing a different community,” she says. “I think those in the recovery movement started out with good intentions, but if you want to win, you have to play the game…At the end of the day, it is all about dollars and cents.”

    Organizations are putting forward their most sympathetic faces to potential funders and allies—and the whiter and more connected to prescription pills (as opposed to street drugs), the better. Keeping the conversation revolving around pharmaceutical companies also makes it seem as though problematic drug use is a new phenomenon, which allows us to ignore the last few decades of harsh drug policies that have decimated communities of color. 

    Devin Reaves, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Coalition and a black man in recovery, explains, “There is hyper focus on Big Pharma creating the opioid epidemic, but [problematic drug use] has been going on in the black community for a long time.”

    These narratives and “solutions,” in which drug problems among white people are the primary focus, further drive people of color away from recovery. Too often, out of genuine desire to be colorblind and put racial strife behind us, people believe that what works for white people should work for everyone. But that is not true in most spaces, and especially not in the recovery space, where racist drug policies have created a very different environment for people of color.

    “I don’t like it when white folks tell me how black I should be” 

    Reaves, who often finds himself the lone person of color trying to shift recovery conversations towards criminal justice reform and strong economic policies, says it’s more than just uncomfortable. It can challenge a person’s very identity.

    “[The recovery movement] is a pretty white space and when you go into white spaces they want you to talk white, dress white,” says Reaves, who says he has been reprimanded many times by white people for being too outspoken about race. “I don’t like it when white folks tell me how black I should be.” 

    For a person of color, living in a predominantly white world can be exhausting. You have to watch your behavior lest someone consider your very presence a threat. You never know when you might encounter someone who will show open hostility towards you. You have to put up with constant micro-aggressions. And often you are a solitary voice trying to remind everyone not to forget about people of color, not to pursue solutions that only benefit white people, not to pretend that race doesn’t matter. 

    Woodard explains that there is a price to getting ahead. The people who “succeed” in a primarily white environment are the ones who act in a way that white people consider socially acceptable. But when someone else is dictating the terms of your behavior—sometimes literally, sometimes passive aggressively—that experience can change you. Spend enough time straddling two worlds and you may find that you no longer belong in either.

    “People of color [who spend a lot of time in a white world] get locked into these insecurities,” explains Woodard. “There is an environment we want to have success in, but that environment is changing us.”

    For many people, that is too steep a price to pay, which is why historically white spaces often remain that way. It takes a long time for enough trailblazers to change the environment to one that feels safe and welcoming to people of color. 

    How to Be More Inclusive

    So how do we start that process of change so that recovery environments become more inclusive?

    Donald McDonald says that the first step is to acknowledge that race and gender inequality exists in recovery spaces and then to take action to correct it. He admits that although there is awareness within the recovery community about the lack of space for people of color, it hasn’t yet translated into action on a large scale.

    Devin Reaves says that people of color should be represented on organization boards, in community meetings and at conferences…but not in a way that implies mere tokenism. 

    “Every movement should be trying to find the next generation of advocates and pull them up,” he says. “Give people an opportunity to excel, but also try to mitigate the harms of being a black person in an all-white space.”

    Laurie Johnson-Wade says that rather than asking for more inclusion in white spaces, people of color have to organize on their own and become a “constituency of consequence.”

    Some self-organizing is already happening. At the 2018 Harm Reduction Conference in New Orleans, leaders of color came together prior to the main conference to hammer out priority issues for their communities. They are tired of having their identities challenged by a world that continues to put their issues on the back burner, tired of the steep price of participation in a white space. And tired of asking permission to speak.

    “We have to make ourselves visible, almost like a force to be reckoned with,” says Johnson-Wade. “We have to pull our own resources together and say we are going to do this work regardless. We will not sit around and wait.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Harm Reduction vs. Gentrification in Asheville, North Carolina

    Harm Reduction vs. Gentrification in Asheville, North Carolina

    “Harm reduction is on the front lines [of drug overdose] but we have to argue for our existence and the lives of the people we serve. That is unconscionable.”

    In August 2018, Hillary Brown received a bizarre notice from the city of Asheville. The small syringe exchange program that Brown ran three hours a week in the backroom of a bookstore was ordered to shut down within 30 days for operating an illegal homeless shelter.

    At first, 31-year-old Brown, the sole employee of harm reduction nonprofit Steady Collective in western North Carolina, thought it was a joke. Every Tuesday since 2016 the Steady Collective had visited the backroom at Firestorm Books to hand out sterile syringes, condoms, and overdose prevention supplies to people at risk for overdose and drug-related infections.

    Syringe Exchange or Homeless Shelter?

    Separated from the bookstore by a curtain, the backroom is dimly lit and bare except for a couple of red-cushioned church pews against a wall and two gray folding tables where Brown lays out the supplies. The room contains no food, no beds, no bathrooms, and no showers. People who stop by to stock up on supplies rarely linger more than five minutes. And many of them do have homes.

    Brown followed up with the notice, which had been served to the building’s other tenants as well: Firestorm Books & Coffee, 12 Baskets (a small free-lunch program operating in the basement), and Kairos West, a community center run by the Episcopal Church. All four tenants were accused of violating zoning laws having to do with the operation of a homeless shelter in the city’s rapidly gentrifying west end. A $100 per diem penalty would be levied against all tenants if the Steady Collective did not cease operations within 30 days.

    The initial notice of violation seemed bizarre, but it was only a hint of the ongoing legal battle it would spark.

    Within the 30-day grace period, the city withdrew the notices of violation from 12 Baskets and Kairos West, leaving Firestorm Books and the Steady Collective to face the legal hurdles alone.

    Remarkably, Firestorm Books, which could have easily saved itself by asking the Steady Collective to stop coming on Tuesdays, chose to dig in for a fight, risking its 10-year business history and the livelihood of its four employees.

    Beck, one of Firestorm’s co-owners, explains that the Firestorm team see themselves as “community organizers first and business people second.” Throwing a community nonprofit out to save their own skins would run counter to their business and personal ethos.

    Lucky for Firestorm and Steady Collective, local attorney John Noor offered to take the case pro bono. Noor has worked the case since September and helped secure meetings between city management and the Steady Collective.

    Attracting the Wrong Kind of People

    According to Brown, during one meeting to make the case for why a small once-a-week syringe exchange should not be classified as a homeless shelter, a city official commented: “It’s less about what you do and more about who you serve.”

    Brown considers this a rare—and likely accidental—moment of honesty. The city wasn’t arguing against the need for the program or its efficacy. (There are mountains of evidence that point to syringe exchange programs as safe and effective for reducing bloodborne disease transmission and overdose death). And Asheville is in desperate need of help. Its surrounding county, Buncombe, has one of the highest overdose rates in western North Carolina. The Steady Collective, one of the few programs in the city that attempts to mitigate the overdose crisis, reported 719 successful overdose reversals since 2016—no other program in the county can claim those results.

    But as the city official admitted, it’s not about what the program does. It’s not about science or results or lives saved or providing resources to a population in desperate need. No, the city’s concern is the program attracting the “wrong kind” of people to a rapidly gentrifying part of the city; the eyesore of folks who might look homeless gathering on a street that is trying hard to look hip. And the fear of what “those people” might bring.

    Asheville’s tactics mirror similar efforts by other cities and states, including Los Angeles, Charleston, Claremont, and Lawrence County, to shut down syringe exchanges. “Zoning violations” are a favorite tool, as are concerns about discarded needles (a problem that can be addressed through syringe disposal bins) and policymakers’ personal discomfort with the idea of harm reduction.

    “At a time of crisis we are having resources taken away,” says Brown. “Harm reduction is on the front lines [of drug overdose] but we have to argue for our existence and the lives of the people we serve. That is unconscionable.”

    Fighting City Hall to Help Drug Users

    Earlier this month I traveled to Asheville to witness the state’s largest legal battle over syringe exchange with my own eyes. The day I visited, Brown and a volunteer were in Firestorm’s backroom riffling through bags of packaged syringes, condoms, Band-aids and naloxone, a medicine used to reverse opioid overdose.

    Although Brown remained calm throughout our interview, the past few months of legal battles have taken an emotional toll.

    “What is really exhausting is to hear [the city] debate people’s dignity,” Brown said. The legal process “has undone me in ways I wasn’t prepared for.”

    Brown described the frustration of having people come into the exchange crying over the loss of a loved one to overdose who “can’t talk about the loss [outside the harm reduction program] because they are engaged in a criminal activity.”

    And the whole process hasn’t exactly occurred in the open.

    “The city of Asheville wants to talk behind closed doors and go through their rules. They don’t want the public to know [what they are doing],” said Brown.

    In March, after months of legal wrangling, the city finally made an offer: the Steady Collective could operate under the classification of “medical clinic” if they kept a physician on site during all hours of operation.

    Brown described the offer as a slap in the face. The tiny exchange can barely afford a single employee to run operations. To pay a supervising physician—when the only real task is to hand out non-prescription supplies from the back of a bookstore—is a non-starter. (Notably, the Steady Collective operates another exchange on Wednesdays out of a church in a non-gentrifying part of town; the city has not required that location to keep medical personnel on site.)

    Thanks to legal help, the Steady Collective was able to counter the offer and settle for an agreement to keep a nurse on site. They are the only syringe exchange in the state with such a requirement.

    The day I visited, Vanessa Bourgeois was the on-site nurse. Bourgeois works weekends at a local hospital but volunteers on Tuesdays for the Steady Collective where she puts packets of syringes and condoms in plastic bags and hands them across the table to participants—hardly work that requires a nursing license.

    The absurdity of the predicament is not lost on her.

    “This is not a situation that needs a nurse,” she says bluntly. “Harm reduction is appropriate for laypeople.”

    Though she is happy to support the Steady Collective’s work, she denounces the city’s actions as “part of the narrative to make people who use drugs seem dangerous or scary.”

    Because Bourgeois volunteers her time during exchange hours, the Steady Collective and Firestorm Books are no longer under threat of being shut down. But to Brown, their work is far from over.

    Asheville Impedes Harm Reduction Efforts

    Asheville, a city often touted as one of North Carolina’s “most progressive,” has shown little evidence of progressive thinking towards drug users in any of its major government facilities. When North Carolina legalized syringe exchange in 2016, Asheville police responded aggressively, ripping up the ID cards that syringe exchange participants are required to carry by law.

    In 2018, Mission Hospital, the largest medical facility in Asheville, implemented a draconian policy against drugs users: If any patient is suspected of IV drug use, regardless of the medical condition for which they are being seen, hospital staff will confiscate their electronic possessions, refuse them visitors, and keep a staff member in the room at all times to supervise them.

    And the City of Asheville Planning Department has not given up their war on harm reduction. The city plans to write syringe exchanges into the zoning code, which would allow the city to impose restrictions on their locations. Brown believes fighting against such legislation is “the most important issue facing harm reduction in the state” and urges other programs not to be complacent.

    Asked what the Steady Collective would do differently if faced with the situation again, Brown says that the organization would be more aggressive about raising public awareness of the city’s actions and mobilizing people to fight back. At the time, the concern was that drawing too much negative attention to the city would disrupt the negotiation process. But now Brown sees that there was never much negotiation to begin with.

    To other harm reduction programs facing similar threats, Brown advises: “Be more vocal about the process. Invite other people in. Organize the community to fight back. Mobilize medical professionals and faith leaders.”

    North Carolina accomplished a great feat when it legalized syringe exchange programs in 2016. But the real work still lies ahead. We still live in a world that stigmatizes and devalues the lives of people who use drugs. Until this changes, every harm reduction program in every community is at risk. People who use drugs and their allies must stick together. Stay vigilant. And be ready for the fights when they come.


    Maribel Lopez and Hillary Brown at the church location

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Kim Kardashian On A Mission To Free More Non-Violent Drug Offenders

    Kim Kardashian On A Mission To Free More Non-Violent Drug Offenders

    Following her initial success, the reality TV star is gearing up to convince the Trump administration to do it again on a larger scale.

    Kim Kardashian West managed to commute the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a non-violent drug offender, with a single meeting at the White House.

    The 37-year-old reality television star is back to present the case of Chris Young, 30, who received life in prison for drug possession after three strikes.

    However, this time she is expanding the scope, calling for a systematic change to stop drug criminals from receiving extreme sentences at a listening session headed by Jared Kushner.

    “It started with Ms. Alice, but looking at her and seeing the faces and learning the stories of the men and women I’ve met inside prisons I knew I couldn’t stop at just one,” West wrote on a Twitter post with photos of the meeting. “It’s time for REAL systemic change.”

    West spoke about Young’s case on the Wrongful Conviction podcast, sharing that Young has already been in prison for 10 years at this point.

    “Yesterday I had a call with a gentleman that’s in prison for a drug case, got life. It’s so unfair… It was just a crazy—there’s so many people like him,” she told the podcast’s host, Jason Flom. “His prior conviction to get him to his three strikes was marijuana and then marijuana with less than half a gram of cocaine.”

    Summing up all the drugs that Young was sentenced for, Flom calculated that the total weight of all the drugs Young was serving a life sentence for weighed less than three pennies.

    West also revealed in the interview that the judge who presided over Young’s case, Kevin Sharp, actually stepped down from his position because he felt the life sentence was “so wrong … [Sharp] was like, ‘I’m gonna make this right. I’m gonna step down and I’m gonna fight to get him out.

    West has reportedly been in touch with Kushner regarding minimum sentences for drug offenders. This new battle is likely to be long-fought, unlike her first success in freeing Johnson.

    “I spoke to the president … He let me know what was going to happen [with Johnson] and he was going to sign the papers right then and there and she could be released that day,” she recounted. “I didn’t know, does that happen right away? Is there a process? What is it? So he was going to let her go. He told me she can leave today.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Dopesick: An Interview with Beth Macy

    Dopesick: An Interview with Beth Macy

    It takes the average user eight years and five to six treatment attempts just to achieve one year of sobriety. And in an era of fentanyl and other even stronger synthetic opioids, many users don’t have eight years.

    As recently as a few years ago, the opioid crisis could be referred to as a “silent epidemic,” perhaps in part due to its degrading nature. Opioid addiction is frequently described using metaphors of slavery, or enslavement, and those within its clutches are liable to feel acutely ashamed. No longer, however, is it possible to argue that the scourge of opioid addiction is being overlooked.

    No doubt that is partly due to the growing enormity of the problem. For each of the past several years, more people have died from drug overdoses than American service members were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

    Meanwhile, energetic and compassionate journalists have been doing outstanding work, covering the crisis from various vantages. Chief among them is Beth Macy, a New York Times-bestselling author, who first began noticing the effects of opioid addiction as a reporter for the Roanoke Times, where she worked for 25 years until 2014. Now she is out with Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. Gracefully written and deeply reported, Dopesick should act as a vade mecum — a handbook, a guide, an essential introduction — for anyone who may be seeking insight into the deadliest and most vexing drug epidemic in American history. 

    Beth spoke to The Fix over email:

    The Fix: The first chapters of your book, on the origins of the opioid crisis, cover some material that others have explored (most notably Barry Meier, in Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic). Still, I don’t have the sense that many people are aware of the role that Purdue Pharma played in setting off current epidemic. Briefly, what is their culpability? And why do think their crimes aren’t crimes better known? 

    Beth Macy: I think Meier’s book, Pain Killer, was too early, initially published in 2003, and it was largely set in central Appalachia — a politically unimportant place. Also, let’s not overlook the role that Purdue took in stifling Meier. As I write in the book, company officials had him removed from the beat after his book came out, arguing that he now had a financial stake in making Purdue look bad.

    After the 2007 plea agreement, in which the company’s holding company, Purdue Frederick, pled guilty to criminal misbranding charges and its top three executives to misdemeanor versions of that crime, Purdue and other opioid makers and distributors spent 900 million dollars on political lobbying and campaigns. Purdue continued selling the original OxyContin formula until it was reformulated to be abuse-resistant in 2010, continued for years after that pushing the motion that untreated pain was really the epidemic that Americans should be concerned about. Their culpability in seeding this epidemic is huge.

    You weren’t able to talk directly with any of the Purdue executives who made fortunes from OxyContin, and who criminally misled the public about its addictive potential. But you spent an afternoon interviewing Ronnie Jones, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for running a major heroin distribution operation in West Virginia. How were Jones’s crimes (and his rationalizations for his behavior) different from those of the Purdue executives you wrote about?

    Great question. Jones refused to see that he brought bulk heroin to a rural community in ways that overwhelmed families and first responders in the region with heroin addiction; he told me he believed he was providing a service — his heroin did not have fentanyl in it, he argued, and it was cheaper than when people ran up the heroin highway to get it in Baltimore (and safer because they could stay out of high-crime places).

    At the 2007 sentencing hearing, Purdue executives and their lawyers repeatedly claimed they had no knowledge of crimes that were happening several rungs down the ladder from them; that the government had not proved their culpability in the specific crimes. According to new Justice Department documents unearthed and recently published by The New York Times , that was simply not true. For two decades, Purdue leaders blamed the users for misusing their drug; they refused to accept responsibility for criminal misbranding that resulted in widespread addiction and waves of drug-fueled crime that will be felt in communities and families for generations to come.

    You quote a health care professional who said that previous drug epidemics began waning after enough people finally got the message: “Don’t mess with this shit, not even a little bit.” That provoked a thought: Shouldn’t we be long past this point with opioids? On the one hand, I’m enormously sympathetic to anyone who is struggling with addiction. But it’s frustrating to realize that the opioid crisis is still building. Why aren’t more people as risk-averse about heroin as they obviously should be?

    The crisis is still building because the government’s response to it has largely been impotent. And it’s been festering for two decades. Opioid addiction doesn’t just go away. It takes the average user eight years and five to six treatment attempts just to achieve one year of sobriety. And in an era of fentanyl and other even stronger synthetic opioids, many users don’t have eight years. I hope we will soon get to the point of public education where no young person “messes with this shit, not even once,” but right now we still have 2.6 million people with opioid use disorder. Even though physicians have begun prescribing less, we still have all these addicted people who should be seen as patients worthy of medical care, not simply criminals. Too often that doesn’t happen until we’re sitting in their funeral pews.

    One of the women you write about, Tess Henry, slid down a long road. You got to know her and her family quite well, over a number of years. And some of the other stories in this book are just as heartbreaking.

    It was a lot of pain to absorb and process, yes. And yet my heartache was nothing at all compared to what these families are going through.

    In a couple instances, Tess reached out to you directly, asking you for help. How did you calculate how to respond?

    I took it case by case; I just went with my gut, and I got input from my husband and trusted friends along the way. I decided it was okay to drive Tess around to [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings, recording our interviews as I drove, with her permission. But it wasn’t okay when she texted me late one night to come get her from a drug house. (I referred her plea to her mother and recovery coach instead.)

    I occasionally gave her mother unsolicited advice because I cared about her and I cared about Tess, and I felt I had access to objective information about medication-assisted treatment that Patricia didn’t have. When Tess was murdered on Christmas Eve, I put my notes away and for several days just focused on being a friend to her mom. But I did accompany the family to the funeral home when they made arrangements (taking occasional notes), and I was there in the room of the funeral parlor with her mom and her grandfather when they said goodbye to her. It took funeral technicians two days to prepare her body for that. It was the most heartbreaking scene I’ve ever witnessed. There was no need to take notes in that moment. I will never forget it as long as I live. I said a tearful goodbye to our poet, too.

    Was there ever a risk, over the course of your reporting, of becoming too involved in the lives and predicaments of the people you were writing about? 

    Always there’s a risk, but I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years now, and I know that my greatest skill — which is that I get close to people — can also be my Achilles. When I trust my gut and try to do the right thing — always also getting advice from editor and reporter friends along the way, including my husband, who is just so smart and so spot-on always — it usually works out.

    I’m grateful to have read Dopesick. But at various times it left me infuriated, appalled, and depressed. Can you leave us with anything to be hopeful about? 

    There are some pretty heartening grassroots efforts that I spotlight at the book’s end, mostly involving providing access to treatment and harm-reduction services. And Virginia just became the 33rd state to approve Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which will help 300,000 to 400,000 people in the commonwealth have access to substance use disorder services. Seventeen more states to go! There is so much more work to be done, especially in Appalachia, where overdose deaths are highest and resistance to harm reduction programs (easy-access MAT and syringe exchange and recovery) can be severe. My goal is that Dopesick not only educates people but also mobilizes them to care and create what Tess Henry called “urgent care for the addicted” services in their own hometowns.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Harm Reduction: How to Engage Parent Advocates Effectively

    Harm Reduction: How to Engage Parent Advocates Effectively

    I’ve had to correct parents whose first line to any policymaker is “my kid was from a good family, not just some homeless person.”

    “I never thought I would end up here, but here I am. I choose to create beauty in the space left in this world that my daughter used to occupy” – Lettie Micheletto, mother of Megan McPhail, 1987-2014.

    Lettie Micheletto never thought she’d find herself on the steps of the General Assembly advocating for better treatment of people who use drugs. Neither did Shantae Owens, Tanya Smith, or Kathy Williams, all parents united by the loss of a child to drug poisoning. Stunned and grieving, these parents nevertheless possess a raw passion that makes them a force to be reckoned with. Like so many others across the country, they are mobilizing to demand change to how society treats people who use drugs and to memorialize the children they have lost.

    Undeniably, there is power behind directly impacted parents. In my years as a lobbyist for drug policy reform, I’ve seen the hardest, most tough-on-drugs legislators dissolve under the gentle tears of a mother pleading for reform. There is a connection between legislators and parents that no lobbyist or well-executed advocacy campaign could dream of forging alone. But at the same time, there are challenges to working with new, often unpredictable allies. So I thought I’d lay out, from my own experience, the top benefits and challenges of involving parents in harm reduction advocacy.

    Benefit #1: Effectiveness

    Parents who have lost a child to the drug war are a potent force for change. They have drive, motivation, and a unique ability to elicit sympathy. Nothing changes hearts and minds quite like a compelling, emotional story of personal loss. In some states, efforts to change drug policy have been led almost entirely by parent groups. In Georgia, parents rallied to pass one of the country’s most progressive 911 Good Samaritan laws. In Florida, a coalition of moms has been the driving force behind expansion of naloxone access. In Iowa and Illinois, parents are leading efforts to legalize syringe exchange programs. Everywhere, parents are standing up to declare that their children are more than just statistics.

    “If no one speaks up for our children and sheds the truth on the fact that they were bright, wonderful kids who had an illness that they simply couldn’t battle, nothing will change,” says Tanya Smith, who helped advocate for a Georgia’s 911 Medical Amnesty Law in 2014 after her daughter, Taylor, died of a reaction to methamphetamine the year prior.

    Parents can unravel the false narrative of drug users as inherently deviant or immoral and paint a true, complex portrait of people who use drugs and people who love them. They can show the devastation of loss on families and communities. Most importantly, they can help battle the number one obstacle to meaningful reform – stigma.

    Benefit #2: New Allies

    Most movements start with a small group of people with similar ideas who are passionate about reform. But in order to evoke lasting change on a macro level, movements need to expand – and that means welcoming new allies into the fold. This isn’t always easy. New allies don’t have the institutional history and knowledge of the movement. Sometimes they have more social or political power than the original group of activists, which is good for expanding influence, but can threaten to hijack the founders’ original intent. The harm reduction movement has seen a lot of this dynamic as it has grown in recent years, accruing allies such as faith leaders, recovery communities, first responders, public health professionals and impacted parents. There have been some growing pains and continued debate over the allies’ role, but the expansion has led to wider conversations about harm reduction and more advocacy wins. Parent advocates have played a large role in bringing conversations about harm reduction into homes and communities that were previously silent on drugs.

    Benefit #3 Finding an Outlet for Grief

    For many parents who have lost a child, simply getting through each day can be an enormous challenge. But pain can also be a powerful agent of change. Lettie Micheletto lost her 27-year-old daughter, Megan, to heroin poisoning in 2014. Since then, she has been part of bringing awareness about drug laws to other parents.

    “About six months after Megan’s death I crawled out from under my rock and began to work with a local coalition in my hometown to help educate and bring awareness of the opioid epidemic,” says Micheletto. “I am obsessed with spreading the message and talking to everyone I can, everywhere I go. I have many friends who have lost children, other family members or friends to overdose. It is a nightmare that many people live and many others ignore.”

    Thanks to Micheletto’s efforts, a North Carolina lawmaker recently included $100,000 in the state budget to raise awareness about the state’s 911 Good Samaritan law. For many parents, advocacy creates a much-needed opportunity to channel grief into purpose.

    Challenge #1 Working with Newbies

    Though there are many advantages to working with parent advocates, these efforts are not without challenge. Of course many parents are or have been involved with drug use themselves, but it seems the majority of parent advocates today had little knowledge of drugs, drug policy or harm reduction until it impacted their children. In many cases, they didn’t even know their child was experimenting with drugs until after his or her death. Then suddenly they are thrust into a world of grief and new concepts that seems foreign and daunting. They want to act, but they lack institutional knowledge of harm reduction, drug policy and the criminal justice system. This can create some very uncomfortable situations.

    Some of my most memorable face-palm moments have come from bringing well-meaning, but very green parents to advocate at the legislature. I’ve spent many an afternoon with parents trying to explain the problems with involuntary commitment laws or to untangle the save-the-user but kill-the-dealer narrative. I’ve had to correct parents whose first line to any policymaker is “my kid was from a good family, not just some homeless person.” Sometimes step one is just to teach the parents to stop using stigmatizing language like “addict” to describe their own child.

    It takes patience to educate a parent who has been steeped in stigmatizing attitudes towards people who use drugs until the problem hit home and to help change the way they think about drugs and drug policy. There are so many wonderful parent advocates today who understand harm reduction and how all of us – users, sellers and people who have never touched illicit drugs – are caught up in the net that has killed so many people. They didn’t all start out with that knowledge, but by meeting them where they are at, we can get them there.

    Challenge #2 White Power

    It is frequently pointed out that the rhetoric around drug policy has softened since opioids started killing children from white, affluent communities. Certainly the majority of parent advocates who appear in the news are white and middle-class. And while there is nothing wrong with parents of any race or class becoming vocal advocates for reform, the stark homogeneity of media coverage doesn’t reflect the rapidly changing demographics of drug-related deaths, especially around opioids. According to the Centers for Disease Control, from 2015 to 2016 the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths involving any opioid rose by 25.9% among whites in the United States, but 32.6% among Hispanics, 36.4% among Asian/Pacific Islanders, and a whopping 56.1% among black Americans.

    Diversity is an important, and often missing component to parent advocacy. Correcting this can mean making the extra effort to pro-actively reach out to under-represented groups and create space for their voices. Out in rural Brunswick County, North Carolina, Kathy Williams and Alex Murillo are teaming up to do just that. Kathy Williams lost her 32-year-old daughter, Kirby, to an overdose in 2016. The following year she helped found B.A.C.K. O.F.F., an organization of feisty families who are fed up with losing their kids and have started to organize for change. Kathy and Alex are working to welcome Hispanic families into the group.

    “We had two recent deaths in the Hispanic community due to drugs,” says Murillo, who lost his 19-year-old nephew last year to an overdose. “I want to help get the Hispanic community involved in education around drugs, but it’s hard because parents won’t admit there is a problem. Here, if a child dies of an overdose, the parent will say they died in their sleep.”

    Overcoming cultural and even language differences to organize a diverse group of parent advocates can be difficult. Many of us, myself included, don’t do this as often as we should. But that extra effort can go a long way to showing policy-makers the true breadth and complexity of drug use.

    Shantae Owens, a parent advocate from New York, lost his 19-year-old son to heroin poisoning in 2017. “Whether it’s a white kid from Richmond or a black kid from New York, we need to put aside our differences and come together to solve a common problem,” says Owens. “The longer we keep looking at the one thing that separates us, the more people will die.”

    Shantae, Alex, Kathy, Lettie, and Tanya are among thousands of family members across the country united by tragedy, but also by strength. They may not have wanted or imagined ending up in this place, but they are here, creating beauty in the space where their loved ones used to be.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Dear Val Kilmer, Anthony Bourdain Did Love Us

    Dear Val Kilmer, Anthony Bourdain Did Love Us

    Suicide is not about someone wanting to leave their family. It is about them being in so much pain they felt they could not stay.

    Trigger warning: The following story discusses a the completed suicide of a celebrity and links to potentially triggering articles. Proceed with caution. If you feel you are at risk and need help, skip the story and get help now. Options include: Calling the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-TALK (8255), calling 911, and calling a friend or family member to stay with you until emergency medical personnel arrive to help you. 

    The news of celebrity chef and best-selling author Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide is tragic. He was relatable, he was witty, and he was raw. Bourdain, the host of CNN’s hit show, Anthony Boudain: Parts Unknown, never held back when it came to talking about his struggles with depression, drugs, and staying sober, endearing himself even more to a fanbase that already spanned the globe. 

    Still, many were shocked to learn of Bourdain’s death on June 8, 2018, just three days after fashion icon Kate Spade’s completed suicide. Suicide rates have risen 30 percent in the United States in less than two decades, says data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Depression reportedly played a part in both Spade‘s and Bourdain’s deaths.

    Mental health advocates have routinely cautioned against describing suicide as selfish because it may trigger a vulnerable individual to act. Hollywood actor Val Kilmer, however, seems to give more weight to what a spiritual guide once told him than the warnings of the CDC, the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Kilmer is now on the receiving end of fan disapproval after publishing a lengthy Facebook post in which he called Bourdain “selfish” for taking himself away from Kilmer and his fans.

    “From every corner of the world you were loved. So selfish,” Kilmer wrote. “You’ve given us cause to be so angry.”

    It was this spiritual guide, Kilmer says, who once told him a story to explain how “suicide is the most selfish act.”

    What Kilmer didn’t realize when he hit publish on this post is exactly how selfish he himself was being by prioritizing his need to publicly call Bourdain out over and above everyone else’s need to avoid triggering suicidal ideations. 

    Kilmer’s suicide shaming remarks, and those from others who share the same outdated view, are harmful to people who are depressed and vulnerable to suicide contagion.

    “Selfishness has nothing to do with it,” says Gigi Griffis, who remembers being so depressed that she wanted to die. When Griffis felt herself being lost to her depression, she remembers thinking the world would be better without her.

    “Suicide isn’t something people do to punish those around them…it’s a collection of lies – that you won’t be missed, that you don’t matter, that the world would be a better place without you – that has nothing to do with anyone around you – and everything to do with the depression itself,” Griffis says.

    When the brother of bestselling author Rene Denfeld died by suicide in 2005, he left notes for his family members.

    “He said he was sorry, he just couldn’t bear life any more,” Denfeld said on twitter. “That’s a tragedy. That’s our collective failure. The pain that killed him is no different than a cancer or illness.” 

    When the time came to submit the obituary to the local paper, Denfeld was asked to “change his cause of death” due to the paper’s policy of not printing the word “suicide.” Denfeld, determined to honor her brother’s memory with truth, stood her ground. 

    Denfeld’s focus right now is to remind people who are participating in the online discussions about Spade and Bourdain that insinuating the deceased did not love their survivors is shaming and hurtful. But Kilmer’s comments won’t be on her radar for too long. He’s just one voice. Denfeld would much rather celebrate the progress made in the 13 years since her brother died. 

    “I come from a family of suicides. Please don’t shame survivors by acting like our loved ones didn’t love us. Suicide is not about someone wanting to leave their family. It is about them being in so much pain they felt they could not stay,” says Denfeld. “A lot has changed, and it’s for the better. We are finally talking about this incredibly common, heart-breaking form of loss. I am thankful for that, because now we can finally sorrow together.”

    If you or someone you know may be at risk for suicide, immediately seek help. You are not alone.

    Options include:

    • Calling the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-TALK (8255)
    • Calling 911
    • Calling a friend or family member to stay with you until emergency medical personnel arrive to help you.

    View the original article at thefix.com