It’s late April 2018, and Your Voice Ohio, a nonprofit helping journalists to collaborate with and learn from their communities, hosts an event at Thirty One West, a trendy music venue in downtown Newark.1 The event, billed as a community discussion about the addiction crisis, was really an opportunity for journalists from around central Ohio (myself included) to listen to their community and hopefully produce stories that push the narrative away from problems and toward solutions. In a report of the event, the conveners write that “productive and community-oriented coverage of the crisis can be difficult to find.” This was meant to be a step forward. The ballroom at Thirty One West was packed. One hundred and twenty people showed. I had never seen so many people gathered in this community to talk about what was happening on the ground. A facilitator offered three questions for discussion. Your Voice Ohio compiled responses into a report. These are some of them:
1. What does addiction look like in our community?
Broken families. Crime and violence. Unmet needs.
Non-stop overdoses—first responders barely catch their breath between calls.
I have no idea. That’s why I’m here.
It has taken over.
My neighbor.
Child abuse, homelessness, unable to hold a job, hopeless.
Jail isn’t a solution.
Under the surface for those not yet affected. Desperation, poverty, despair.
Loss.
2. What do you see as causes of the addiction crisis here?
Lack of moral values, no spirituality or faith in anyone.
Overprescribing pain meds. Trauma.
No singular cause, but the isolation of drug users together … creates self-reinforcing culture.
Self-medication to treat undiagnosed mental illness and to cope with trauma.
Trauma.
Greed.
Poor health care.
Loss of community.
Spiritual poverty.
3. What steps might we take to combat the addiction crisis?
Addiction is a larger issue, eating disorders, cutting, depression, anxiety.
Reduce stigma.
Treat the soul.
Make addiction less profitable.
Decrease stigma: drug use, mental health, poverty, addiction.
The “Just Say No” mentality does not work.
Listening, collaboration, cooperation, open-mindedness, education.
Harsher punishments for criminals dealing drugs. Put up border wall.
“Attendees agreed,” Your Voice Ohio wrote, “that addiction affects every demographic in society, and nobody is exempt.”2
The attendees at this meeting had reason to be alarmed—the numbers are grim. In 2016, there had been seventeen overdose deaths in Licking County. In 2017, there were thirty-five. The responses—the fear, the anger—all of this is in keeping with the reality. When I spoke with people about the event afterward, many people saw it as a catalyst—a way to get things moving.
As part of their campaign, the Newark Think Tank on Poverty was planning a town hall meeting at the high school in partnership with Newark City Schools, inviting people to “learn about the local resources we have, what more we need to help those who desire recovery, and what steps we need to take to end this epidemic.”3 Trish Perry was one of the slated speakers, along with Scott Fulton and Kay Spergel, the executive director of Mental Health and Recovery for Licking and Knox Counties. They were also beginning to collect signatures to get an initiative on the November ballot that would reduce the number of people in state prisons for low-level drug charges.4 The measure—which appeared on the ballot as “Issue 1” that year—would make drug possession and use no more than misdemeanors, prohibit courts from ordering people on felony probation to be sent to prison for noncriminal probation violations, create a sentence credits program for inmates’ participation in rehabilitative work or educational programs, and require the state to spend savings that result from these changes on treatment, rehabilitation programs, and crime victim programs. If passed, the measure would lead to changes to the Ohio Constitution.
On the corner of Buena Vista and East Main Street, down the street from the Licking County jail, Trish and her friend Jen Kanagy had just started the homeless outreach. Homelessness, they had noticed, seemed like a growing issue in Newark—especially downtown. Minutes from a meeting of a downtown business association reveal concerns over people who may be homeless seeming to congregate in front of a restaurant with free Wi-Fi.5 Notes from a later meeting record a discussion about how social services bring people to Newark.6 According to a guest speaker at the meeting, the minutes assert, “The fact that Licking County provides better services to help the homeless than most other counties, encourages more homeless people to the area.” It did seem that more people were sleeping on park benches and on the streets, especially in the winter. One popular spot: under the eaves of the county government building, next to the Wendy’s on the Courthouse Square.
There has been a concerted and tireless effort by social service agencies and faith communities to address homelessness, both chronic and temporary. In the spring of 2016, Deb Dingus, the executive director of Licking County United Way, hiked for fifty days around the county, sleeping outdoors, in part to raise awareness about homelessness. In this moment, and despite all these efforts, there seemed to be so much more work to do. Frustrated by the slow pace of change and the efforts of public officials, in February Trish and Jen set up in a parking lot directly across from the jail and were soon offered the corner lot a few blocks away.
“People were talking about doing stuff and then we just did it,” Trish says.
They are serving between forty and seventy-five people every Saturday, like on this sunny June day in 2018. Trish guesses most of those they serve are people who use drugs, and she sees the offer of food as an opening to work with them. “We’re able to give them resources. I give them my phone number, and if they call, I try to find them a place to go to.”
But mostly, she says, it’s about building relationships, about talking. “You know how it is, Jack. They’ll talk. You have to let ’em know they’re not forgotten.”
I’m following her back and forth from her car to a table set up under a tent. Jen is cooking hot dogs. Other volunteers are folding and displaying donated clothing for folks to take. Trish wants to do more—like offer naloxone training, drug testing strips, and harm-reduction kits. “We’ve talked to a lot of people down here, and a needle exchange is very much needed. Harm reduction as a whole. A lot of people are homeless because they can’t get into no shelters. If you’re using, you can’t get into any shelter. Where are you gonna go? By the river? Under the bridge?”
When Billy was homeless, he lived in an abandoned house. He drew up a fake lease so that if the police knocked he’d have a response. Billy’s why she’s here, Trish says. “I can help somebody, but I can’t help him. There might be someone that can interject into his life.” She says it took a few years for her to realize that she couldn’t save him. “I said a lot of bad things to him … but in the beginning, when you called people, no one knew anything about opiates.” And neither did she, really. So what is she doing here on this corner on a day off from work? She calls this outreach. But what is this? Service, amends, penance, atonement?
Right now it’s being as close as she can to Billy. He was not out of jail for long before he violated probation, shortly after I spoke with him about Chad and Tommy. This time it’s not clear how long he will be there—he’s trying to get into a treatment program, trying to end this cycle of going in and out of jail. I go to visit him one day at the Licking County Justice Center. When I tell the officer signing in guests who I’m visiting, a tall man behind me responds, “You’re going to see Billy, too! That’s awesome. Billy’s my boy.”
“Oh, well, if you want to go first, that’s fine,” I say. “I won’t be too long.”
“No, we can go together. I just want to tell him I’m putting some money on his account. He put money on my commissary when I was inside.”
Marcus, I’ll call him, told me he wanted to surprise Billy, so we try to get into the waiting room early to let him hide off camera before Billy can see who has come to visit him. The room contains about fifteen booths with monitors and old payphone-style telephone handsets. It takes a while for Billy to appear on the screen, and so we wait. It’s busy today, which is no surprise—jails are busy in Ohio and throughout the United States. According to the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), people go to jail 10.6 million times each year in the United States (some of this number, of course, reflects individuals going to jail more than once in a year).7 Some will make bail quickly, while those who can’t afford to pay will wait days, sometimes years, until their trials—as many as 76 percent of people in jails have not been convicted of a crime, according to the PPI. “It’s enough,” the PPI notes, “to fill a line of prison buses bumper to bumper from New York City to San Francisco.” The initiative refers to this revolving process as an “enormous churn,” people in and out of the criminal justice system—not just the accused or convicted but also the family members and friends who also get caught up in it. Those people are left figuring out how to support themselves and their families; who is going to watch the house, the dog, the children; or who is going to speak to the boss or the landlord.
In the visiting room, some of those complications are being worked out. Some people lean in close and speak quietly; others couldn’t care less about being overheard and talk as if they’re at their kitchen table chatting over coffee. I catch snippets of conversations, intimate moments of connection and confrontation.
“I’m gonna keep my teeth until they fall out my mouth.”
“I blacked out—forgot to take my meds.”
“Well, you’re not wasting any money when you’re in there.”
“Stop going to jail, bro, and when you’re out you need to listen.”
“I’m just stressed out.”
And then Billy appears on the screen—he’s in jail-issued khaki scrubs. He’s smiling and looks good. He says hello, and I ask him how he’s doing. And then Marcus jumps into view. Billy’s head goes down and he cracks up. He’s so happy to see him—even though Marcus just got out a few days ago. He tells him he’s going to put some money on his account, and Billy thanks him. Billy is on his pod in the rec room, so there are others milling about in the background. It’s an odd feeling to be on the outside, free, while seeing others in jail. As people walk by, they can see that Marcus is outside and chatting with Billy, and folks start crowding the camera. I can’t hear what they’re saying because Marcus has the handset up to his ear, but there’s a lot of laughter and joy. Marcus turns to me and says he needs to go. We shake hands and he leaves.
Billy’s still smiling when I turn back to him. “He’s a good dude,” he says, and explains that Marcus didn’t have any money, so he loaned him twenty bucks. Billy says he’s bored and has been reading a lot. There aren’t many options, but he did find a copy of Eat, Pray, Love. He says he knows it’s cheesy, but he likes that the author is on a journey to better understand herself. He can appreciate that. That’s what he’s trying to do—walk that path.
To help, Billy goes to a group meeting that’s held once a week in jail. This is the highlight of each week he’s in jail. The group is run by Pastor Dave Pennington, a man who has earned a lot of respect from people in jail and out. Pastor Dave struggled with methamphetamine use for years and ended up in jail—he has been where they are. He has buried over fourteen people who have died of accidental drug overdoses.
In Licking County there’s a lot of meth use. In popular culture there’s a lot of talk about opioid overdose. But for him, Pastor Dave says, the problem is addiction.
“It’s not really about drugs,” he explains. “That’s the thing that’s most newsworthy because of the deaths. Addiction runs rampant in our society. The need to escape from the reality. The reality of some people that live in Newark is that they live below the poverty level. They are in or have been in abusive relationships. They come from a generation of people who were prosperous at one time and then when Newark fell into disrepair—I’m sure there are thousands of cities across the U.S. that would be the same—you know they’re looking for some escape. It does give you an escape for the moment, but it doesn’t take away the things that you’re trying to escape from. They just get worse.”
He talks about a young man who recently died from an overdose and says that he never wants to get used to burying people who die that way, never wants to be jaded or cynical. He still encounters people who will blame and judge the victim. “My compassionate heart says, How are we gonna take care of his family? How are we gonna take care of everyone that’s left? And why couldn’t we have done something while he was alive?”
Pastor Dave made his fortune with his company, American Kidney Stone Management, which pioneered the idea of mobile kidney stone lithotripsy machines. Today he lives in a gorgeous home at the top of a hill reached by a long driveway, horses in a pasture below. The man who, for the past ten years, has spent much of his time counseling people who are addicted to drugs lives in a pastoral paradise. He’s not disconnected, though. The system is stacked against so many people, he says. They can’t afford the two-hundred-dollar bond, so they sit in there and lose everything and when they get out and there are few high-paying jobs available, what are their options?
The same goes for the men in the group he runs in the jail. He tells them that most people in the room aren’t going to have access to a gold-star treatment program, and besides, he says, treatment programs don’t guarantee anything. This can be overwhelming to some—they think they are stuck in one path. He blames this thinking, in part, on the idea that “once an addict always an addict.” He insists that God made everyone perfect and sometimes people stray from the path. That’s okay. It’s possible to get back on it.
“You need to be accountable to something that’s omniscient,” Pastor Dave says. “You can’t get away from it. You can’t hide. And then you need to change your community. If you become accountable and change your community, your odds of making it are huge. But you can’t play; this is a life-or-death thing.”
He doesn’t knock counseling, the psychology and pharmacology, but Pastor Dave says his approach is different. His message must be direct and simple because he might not see these men again and he wants to give them something they can hold on to. A mantra. A way to be in this world. “Don’t pick up,” he tells them. Many times it will happen. He’ll be walking through Walmart and someone will come up to him and say, “I didn’t pick up.” Dramatic. Quick.
But he says that, long term, you have to adjust your priorities, find some other source of accountability. “I’m talking about a higher form of oversight that stays with you. And you don’t have to turn into a Jesus freak or carry your Bible around, but just in your head if you’re accountable to something that’s loving and greater than you, you will change your behaviors. You just will.”
He tries to empower people in his class, which he jokes is truly a “captive audience,” but he tries to get people to open up to talk about their lives and goals, their families, and their paths to jail.
“I’ll ask a question. I’ll go, like, ‘Who are you?’” Then he says to me, “Who are you? Answer me. Who are you?”
I gather that he’s not being rhetorical and struggle a bit. “I’m a father,” I reply.
“That’s a good answer. Most people go, ‘I’m Jack.’ No, that’s your name.”
“I’m a writer.”
“No, that’s what you do. What are you? I like to say, you’re a precious child of God. So when I go in there and ask my class, every man will say ‘I’m a precious child of God.’ They know to say that. You’re not some piece of shit. You may have been marginalized and your parents won’t let you come in their house ’cause you’ve stolen stuff and people have told you you’re a piece of crap your whole life. You’ve got this big emblem on that says ‘loser.’ I want you to take that off. Throw that sucker away. We’re starting with ‘God made you in the image of his son.’ That’s the floor. ’Cause otherwise, if you believe you’re a piece of shit, you’re a piece of shit. I want to raise them out of where they’ve been and let them know that they are cared about and people love them.”
Outside the county jail where Pastor Dave runs his group every week, maybe fifty yards from the building, there’s a path for biking and walking that runs alongside the north fork of the Licking River, extending north to Everett Field Park and south to a neighborhood called Little Texas. Sometimes people will chalk notes of support on the sidewalk, messages of hope and encouragement scratched in pastel letters so that people looking out can see: “Hope to see ur face!” “Keep ur head up, babe!” “You have someone that will be here.”