Huntington: America's overdose capital where former addicts are helping people get sober

“That’s the ‘Roach’s Inn’,” Richie said, as we drove past a dilapidated motel.

The Coaches’ Inn – it was the kind you see in the movies.

“Dead bodies found in that place,” he said.

I was in the car with Richie Armstrong and he was giving me a tour of his town.

A boarded-up business was not something unusual in these parts. But in Huntington there was something different.

Along Main Street, but on the side streets too, there were recovery centres. They were everywhere.

We passed three centres for addiction recovery within one block. Richie knew them all. He’d recovered at two of them, he told me, and now worked at a third.

Richie and I had met a few minutes earlier at a coffee shop in this West Virginian town and already I could sense that this was going to be an expectation-busting story.

It’s natural to have preconceptions of the type of story you think you’ll find on an assignment. Huntington has the inauspicious tag “the overdose capital of America”, or at least that is the enduring stigma it carries.

Having reported on America’s opioid epidemic across the country, from the streets of Philadelphia to the classrooms of Austin, I’d come now to the place where this awful story began – a small town in the Appalachian mountains of one America’s poorest states, West Virginia.

I thought I would find a place on its knees. Forgotten, impoverished, neglected. The drive-by of the “Roach’s Inn” was preconception-affirming.

The coffee shop was the first surprise. My prejudices would not have placed this hipster pop-up in America’s “overdose capital”.

Over iced lattes, Richie sussed me out. Was I to be trusted with the real story of his town? Like so many people he was wary of the media. He’d been stung before, he told me without elaborating.

Richie’s story was, it would turn out, reflective of the town: a cycle of addiction, crime, jail on repeat.

But the people who were broken by all this have now begun to break the cycle itself. Against the odds and from the bottom up, Huntington is turning itself around.

The tri-state hub

Huntington sits on the Ohio River at the point where three American states meet: Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.

The town itself is proudly West Virginian, but within minutes you can be in either of the other two states.

In the 19th and 20th centuries its geography was its success. Huntington was a transport hub from where Appalachian timber and coal was shuttled around the country.

But by the beginning of this century its geography had turned success into tragedy, with a bit of help from an all-American scandal: opioids.

A so-called miracle painkiller called OxyContin had been developed by a pharmaceutical firm, Purdue, owned by the now-infamous Sackler family.

For doctors in communities like Huntington it was just what they needed. Industrial accidents were common among a low-income population that was not altogether healthy anyway.

Huntington became a willing guinea pig for this new drug. Between 2006 and 2014, an ultra-aggressive marketing campaign pushed more than 81 million painkilling pills to the town and the surrounding county.

Huntington was the transport gateway to other communities. And the painkillers, it would turn out, were themselves a gateway to a secondary wave of addiction to heroin, then fentanyl. It would endure through generations.

“The town of Huntington got so overran with out-of-state drug dealers,” Richie told me.

“The population here was preyed upon by any and everybody to distribute drugs how they saw fit. And that’s where everything started going downhill.”

Like so many here, Richie’s spiral began with an accident.

“The opioid addiction really started during that time when I fell off of this ladder,” he told me.

“I landed on one foot, chipped the bone in my heel, broke my foot, broke my knee and fractured my lower back on the left side. For the doctors here, pain medication was used very widely. They didn’t care. Write it, write it, write it.”

Prescriptions for OxyContin were flying off doctors’ desks in the early 2000s. It would be years before the impact it was having would become clear.

People became hooked long after their injuries had improved. And when doctors stopped prescribing, the users would turn to black market painkillers, and then, for so many, to other street drugs. Again, Huntington’s geography made it the perfect hub.

The guinea pig had become the canary in the coalmine. But America’s opioid crisis would spread too fast for the canary to give any meaningful warning.

A town in collective recovery

For more than 20 years, Huntington has grappled with the immense challenges behind its “overdose capital” tag. In America though, it’s easy to get left behind and forgotten.

And so Huntington’s healing and renewal came from within, driven by those broken by the crisis.

“Huntington’s recovery community is huge,” Richie told me.

“This is all I’ve done since I’ve been sober. And you know, God willing, on the 22nd next week, I’ll have eight years of continuous sobriety. And this is all I’ve done since I’ve been sober, is work in the field of recovery,” he said.

“I had made the decision early on into sobriety that the recovery world was going to be my life. And it absolutely is 100% my life.”

Richie wanted me to meet a friend of his. Brandon Scarberry runs Recovery Point, one of the numerous centres I’d seen on the drive-around.

My introduction with Brandon outside the centre turned out, quite by chance, to give a remarkable insight into the many sliding door moments on the journey from addiction to sobriety.

Just after introducing me to Brandon, Richie darted away up the pavement. Richie had spotted a young man he knew, bag in hand, leaving the centre.

Richie and the young man spoke for a few minutes out of earshot while Brandon and I chatted.

The young man then turned around and walked back into the centre. Richie returned. He’d just talked someone out of quitting the centre and returning to his life of addiction.

Inside a recovery centre

“This is going to be typically where they come through,” Brandon told me as we passed through the door.

“They’re shackled, handcuffed. They are going to be wearing a jumpsuit, orange from jail. Generally, they come in, they’re nervous, they’re scared. It’s their ground zero. They don’t know what they’re walking into. So obviously, we want to make them as comfortable as possible,” he said.

Brandon spoke with authority. He knew the place well not just because he ran it but because he was once here as a patient.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” he said.

He explained the various stages of a stay at the centre. It begins on the ground floor in the detox dorm.

“This is going to be where they kind of get acclimated,” Brandon explained. “They’re going to do all their paperwork, get seen by the doctors. We’re going to go over the do’s and don’ts, get them, you know, a little bit used to everybody.”

The detox dorm usually lasts between four to seven days. “This is usually where you’re going to see if someone’s going to stay or they want to go, which is out of your control. So once they get this part of it done, the chances go up for them,” Brandon explained.

On the wall in the detox dorm is a collage of people’s faces. “We call this the death wall,” he says. “They know these people on the wall. They went to school with them. They were in prison with them.”

It is a brutal reminder of the price of addiction.

The centre is male-only and has a capacity of 100. If the men make it out of the detox dorm they ‘graduate’ upstairs to another dormitory.

There is nothing sophisticated or clinical about the place. It’s basic, grass roots, free and run by people who know what it’s like to be addicted.

On stage two of the journey I was introduced to the man I’d seen earlier trying to leave – the man whose life Richie had turned around, for now.

Brandon McMillion was at the start of his journey to sobriety. He was covered with tattoos which doubtless charted his life journey and he wore an ankle bracelet – a condition of his prison release.

I asked him what made him decide to try to get sober. He paused for what felt like an eternity. It was painfully clear that he was in the midst of a huge internal struggle.

“When you lose everything and you’re completely rock bottom, you have nowhere to go. You lose all family… they all give up on you and they want nothing to do with you because they know who you can be and they don’t like who you are or who you have become. And that’s not what I want.”

It was a deeply powerful reflection of the determination to save himself.

Back downstairs, Stephen Dequaisie was in the third stage of this 9-12 month recovery programme and you could see it in his face: the colour, the smile was of a man almost through the tunnel.

“This place saved my life. I really believe that with all my heart,” Stephen told me.

“I actually worked in the coal mines and the pill epidemic was just a really big thing in the mines – giving coal miners OxyContin.

“And that’s what led to my addiction. And then it progressed once the pills were gone, heroin came around.”

Brandon Scarberry continued his tour. I watched how he interacted with the people he’s helping. It was clear that he commanded a huge respect. They know that he knows what they are going through. That counts for so much.

The next generation

In so many American communities an unbreakable cycle persists: painkillers to street drugs to crime to jail, and on repeat. But in Huntington I found they had begun to break that cycle by themselves.

The town’s statistics reflect the success but also the challenges still ahead – they are down to around ten overdoses a week compared to 14 a day not so long ago.

“Huge changes that I’ve seen happened in Huntington,” Richie Armstrong told me.

“And not even just Huntington, it’s all the surrounding areas. It’s seeped out from Huntington to across the bridge here in Ohio, down the street in Kentucky. There’s lot of things seeping out.”

And sure enough, up the road, I found recovery of a different kind, because the unborn here are victims too.

Just as Brandon was helping his peers to sobriety at Recovery Point, at Karen’s Place, I found Christina Sargent doing the same for young mums.

In a long conversation with Christina, one part will stay with me. She was describing the horror of trying to stay sober while pregnant and then discovering that her unborn child was in withdrawal just like her.

“When I would go through the physical withdrawal symptoms of not having heroin and fentanyl, he stopped moving completely. He was in withdrawal in the stomach.”

She began to cry.

“It was very frightening.

“I just couldn’t believe that I allowed myself to get that way. But then it wasn’t me that was doing that. It was the addiction.”

Christina managed to stay sober. Her son was born healthy. She now works at Karen’s Place, a dedicated centre helping so many other mums and their unborn children through their own addictions.

“I know there are mothers out there that are afraid to get help, you know, and not just mothers alone, but there are people out there walking the streets that don’t even realise this is a treatment centre.”

In a place once so consumed and so broken by addiction, my expectation was to find no hope. After all, it is a place with so much stigma attached to it. Its “overdose capital of America” tag. How do you recover from that?

Well, the point is, they are recovering. And that’s the story here. It is a collective recovery, one by one, people helping each other.

The lesson for so many communities across America is from those who know how hard it is to beat addiction but how possible it is too. It’s inspiring.

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