In an innocuous meeting room on the south side of Newark, about twenty people, members of the Newark Think Tank on Poverty’s leadership team, are gathered on a Sunday afternoon in late October 2017. They are deciding on a new campaign, and Eric Lee is hoping it will focus on addiction—hoping that, as an organization, the Think Tank will begin to advocate for equal treatment for all people who use drugs, whether their drug of choice is opioids or methamphetamine. Allen Schwartz is running the meeting. Methamphetamine, he says, is viewed mostly as a “poor man’s” drug. That means only half of the crisis is being addressed.
There’s a lot of skepticism here. Some wonder if state and federal grant money is earmarked specifically to combat opioid use or if it can be used in the fight against meth. Some wonder if there’s going to be enough money at all. And some wonder if the people who need resources will actually gain access to them.
The crisis has become a political issue—talks of funding a response have percolated all summer long. At the end of May 2017, Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, announced a lawsuit against five opioid-producing pharmaceutical companies.1 President Donald Trump announced that the “opioid epidemic” was a national public health emergency, though not a national disaster, as some had expected.2 Still, the problem of opioid addiction had been pushed into the national conversation and, apparently, federal dollars would follow.
In the fall of 2017, as part of his gubernatorial campaign, DeWine unveiled “Recovery Ohio,” a twelve-point plan to deal with the substance abuse crisis in Ohio.3 Going beyond the target of opioid use, it focuses on building greater capacity for treatment and prevention. At the same time, there’s talk of cutting Medicaid expansion, a move that would send many into a spiral.4
But here in this room, talk is of this community, of people with names and familiar faces, of family members, of loved ones.
Eric sits directly across from Allen. He’s quiet, contemplative, a little uneasy. Eric’s strength is the “one-on-one” and the outreach—what he was doing with C.J. and Johnathon almost exactly one year before. He’s not into deliberative processes.
Following the Ban the Box campaign, the Think Tank placed its members on the boards of a number of groups throughout the county, but they’ve struggled to find the energy that earlier movement generated. Now there’s a clear problem to address, one that many members, especially Eric and C.J., have direct experience with—how hard it is to get treatment for substance use disorder if you’re poor. They also feel like meth use is being overshadowed by opioids because there’s no medication-assisted treatment for it, no clear “cure.” Meth is clearly present, members of the Think Tank say. Local law enforcement agrees. Over the summer, three men, allegedly tied to the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel, were arrested after a traffic stop.5 A search of their hotel room uncovered twelve pounds of meth and fifteen thousand dollars in cash.
The Think Tank members vote to advocate for fair treatment of all people who use drugs who are struggling; they vote to raise public consciousness.
Eric speaks up. “I’m happy with the vote, but I’m hoping we can fold in housing and public transit. We have to remember that what we’re really talking about is poverty.”
“We’re not going to be crazy about not doing other things,” Allen responds, “but we’re saying for the next six to twelve months we’re going to own this campaign. Current title: Equal Treatment for Addiction Epidemics.” Allen says that they want to make the point that, compared with opioid use, methamphetamine use is higher around here and that people who use meth are treated poorly. He points out that they’ve talked both to local experts and to their in-house experts like C.J. who can speak to the stigma that people who use meth face when they seek help.
“This is not my line of work,” Allen says. “I’ve learned ten thousand times more about addiction since I started working with the Think Tank. But I have a niece who died from an overdose, and another who is now addicted to opioids.” He admits that until recently he never put these things together.
Eric speaks up again. “The only other thing that I wanted to say was, you’re leaving out taking this message to the street just like with Ban the Box … We went out, we got people it affected directly, and we had them tell our stories,” he says. “The last thing I’d want to see,” he says, concluding, “is us making all these plans, and we leave the addicts out, we leave the stories out.”
So the Think Tank begins the work of gathering stories and sharing their agenda with people in positions of power.
C.J., Allen, and five others meet one evening with municipal court judge David Stansbury, who runs a drug court. They explain their advocacy plan, how they want to make sure that people who use meth are being treated fairly in Licking County, looking for feedback.
Judge Stansbury agrees that methamphetamine use is significant here and that it is not getting enough attention. But, he tells them, “You know you’re swimming upstream, because once the national media gets ahold of something, it’s hard to reframe the conversation.”
Allen responds, “We’re used to swimming upstream.”
C.J., wearing a gray hoodie and a Cleveland Browns hat with a shiny helmet logo—his Browns haven’t won a game yet this year—smiles and nods his head. He asks the judge how often people come into his court and say they’ve tried to get help but nothing has been offered.
Stansbury says it happens from time to time.
The perception on the street, Allen says, is that you will be treated differently if you are using meth—that you can’t get into treatment centers. C.J. adds that it’s hard to get help. Drawing on his experience, he says, “The only way for the hospital to accept you is to pretty much say you’re going to harm yourself.”
But as Eric says, the most important thing for the group is to listen to people with drug use experience, to learn directly from them.
On a Saturday afternoon, the Think Tank gathers for a general meeting in downtown Newark. C.J. and Eric are there.
Allen opens it up and explains what will be happening at this meeting, that today they will only be listening. “It is by raising our voices that we will not be disappeared,” he says, explaining that this is what happens in some countries to people who speak up about political issues.
In this case, he means that if we want structural change, the people who have been most affected by the gaps in the system must be heard and not have their voices erased from the public conversation.
“That’s what the Think Tank is about,” Allen continues. “Using our experience and our voices to push those lessons out onto the people who have power so that we can get a system change. We don’t have the resources that some service providers have, but we’re here to change the system. That’s why we want to focus attention on the meth addiction problem.”
Allen then asks the invited experts, people with lived experience with substance use disorder, to help the Think Tank better understand the obstacles people trying to go into treatment face. One woman talks about the despair and lack of self-worth she felt when she was using, and how that hampered her efforts to seek help. Some people talk about transportation—the lack of fixed-route vans or buses makes it hard to get to any appointments. Others talk about the criminal justice system. People who use drugs, they say, often end up in jail over petty crimes or possession charges. When they get out, many don’t know what to do next. One man explains that when he got out of jail there was a trap house right in front of him, and he ended up in jail again.
It’s an important moment for the Think Tank. They have their own experts, people who understand these very circumstances, people like Eric and C.J., but on this day, they opened the doors a bit wider. The stories flowed, peppered not only with the language of personal responsibility of self-help and recovery but also with the frustrations of the justice system’s interventions into the lives of people who use drugs, this war on drugs.
Alex S. Vitale notes in The End of Policing that it’s true that illegal and legal drugs can produce many harms—to people who use them, to families, to communities—like overdoses and the spread of disease. “But there is a mountain of evidence that shows that most users suffer no significant harm,” he continues, “and that harms that do occur could be reduced by ending, not expanding, the War on Drugs.”6
A term I’ve heard folks in the Think Tank use at their meetings, time and again, is dominant narrative. Allen defines it as “the stories, images, judgments (values) used by the culture to justify/rationalize the system as it is, including the class structure and power relationships.” He says they call it that because “it dominates other narratives and it serves the dominant class.” The dominant narrative is that poor people and people who use drugs are somehow morally deficient. The dominant narrative is that they should be pitied and helped but not called upon to lead. The Think Tank is upending that narrative.
Days later, they meet with Scott Fulton, C.J.’s mentor and the head of adult probation in Licking County. They meet in an old warehouse that once housed a tech start-up and is the future home of the county’s new adult probation day reporting program. Rather than visiting a probation officer once a week for a urine screen and a check-in, adults on probation will come here every day for workshops, GED classes, and supervision. The hope is to reduce recidivism rates while helping adults with substance use disorder.
Allen tells the tired-looking probation officer that they have been talking to people and that they’re hoping he can provide them with data and a picture from his vantage point about treatment options in Licking County. The Think Tank is concerned, Allen says, that people are not getting the treatment they need.
Scott agrees that it’s important for people who want treatment to be taken care of. But he also says that most people need to be ready for treatment. “You got to change your environment, your friends, everything in your life,” he says, “because all of that keeps driving what you’re going to do and it’s easy to blame the program. It’s not the program.” He thinks it’s up to the individual, that it doesn’t matter where someone travels to, that they can get the exact same treatment here in Licking County that they could get at a place like the well-known, Minnesota-based Hazelden.
Allen wonders, “Will money coming down be just for opiates? That would be a big issue for us.”
Scott says that’s what his perception is, adding, “The thing is, there’s no magic wand. The person going in there is going to have to do the work … They have to listen and do the work. It’s not easy getting clean. It’s not easy staying clean. Basically, you have to change everything in your life. Right?” Scott looks at C.J., and C.J. nods.
Allen presses. “Where the rubber hits the road, because we’re going to have to come up with a list of demands, but if I was a TV reporter and I came up to you and said, ‘Mr. Fulton, what would you want? We’re being told that the response to the meth crisis is not adequate, what would you suggest?’”
“I don’t know how to answer that yet. You have to get that conversation going.” Scott pauses. “I don’t know if saying meth … It’s addiction. That’s what upsets me about this whole opiate thing. It’s not opiates. It’s about addiction. It’s about people having issues and problems and dealing with them. It’s not about the substance.”
“It is to the system,” Allen says.
“You already know why that is,” Scott says. “It’s class. Middle-class, upper-class white people—the banker’s son, the senator’s son living on the cul-de-sac that are hooked on this and dying, not the person working at Universal Veneer living in the East End.”
Lesha Farias speaks up. “I don’t think it’s just meth. We just don’t have an adequate number of addiction facilities whether it’s inpatient or outpatient.”
“And I’m sad to say,” Scott replies, “that [for some people] they have to be involved in the criminal justice system to get help.”
“I’m trying to get at the frame of our campaign,” Allen says, guiding them back on track. “We could frame this as seeking adequate addiction services for all. The frame that we’ve chosen, though, is that at least half of the addiction community in Licking County is not getting served. We have to choose one or the other.”
Lesha responds, “Can you look at it as ‘Can we look at the real addiction problem in Licking County?’ Then you can look at meth and you’re not limiting yourself … Our education piece is ‘What is the real addiction problem in Licking County?’ And then we bring out the statistics because we’re educating people. We don’t want to go to another one of these meetings where we hear about the problem but nobody has any idea for a solution. I can’t sit through another one of those.”
Throughout the conversation, C.J. has been mostly quiet, at times holding his head in his hands, scratching a pen on a pad. He’s the guy who has the experience, more than anyone in this room. They are talking about his struggles because it was his story of not being able to get into treatment that lit this fire. But he trusts them with his story. In some ways, these are the people he trusts the most.
He suddenly turns to me and asks if my recorder is off. It is. And then he tells a story, one whose full details I’ve agreed not to share but that even in outline helps explain C.J. in ways that, until now, I’ve not been able to. C.J. says that he was abused as a child, and he has run from it most of his life. Meth was one way out. And now, right now, he can’t hold back the tears. This man with his tattooed body. This tough, strong, resilient man.
The room is quiet after he speaks. No one knows where to begin.
Lesha says, “You are so strong for sharing that with us.”
“It’s been on my mind,” C.J. says. He pauses, then adds, “I guess it’s the talk about trauma.”
C.J. is deeply intuitive and self-reflective, almost to a fault. He struggles still to find meaning in the complications of his life and says often that his favorite book of the Bible is Job because he can relate. Every time he has a success, something presses back. But Job is also a story about a relentlessly hopeful man. C.J. has now uncovered something that begins to explain his life and could help him move forward. Gabor Maté—the Canadian physician—argues that underlying some addictions is untreated trauma. In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he writes that deprivation, physical or emotional, can be traumatic for a child and can negatively affect brain development.7 If abuse happens, if you don’t feel connection, especially at a young age, then a drug can become that “warm, soft hug” that may have been absent for you. He writes, too, “A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture. The drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people and has limited means of escaping it.”8 That may have described the C.J. of a decade ago. But now, in different circumstances, with different means and supports, he can see a way out.
After his revelation, the rest of the conversation about addiction doesn’t matter—which substance is more prevalent in Licking County, what the grant dollars must be used for. What matters is this one man who is coming to terms with his childhood, who is building a new life before their eyes.