Contaminated: the fentanyl crisis in St. Louis

[Music] this drug is a monster they're trying to find narcan it's possibly an overdose these people didn't even realize they were selling the most dangerous drug in the world one of the major causes of the opioid crisis in the first place is over prescribing by doctors we were ignorant and we've suffered in that matter of fact we paid great price for that they did locked up or they out here hopeless poisoned by the deadly drug fentanyl killing seven in the central west end the illicit fentanyl that's killing people comes from china that's enough fentanyl to give every member of the united states population a potentially lethal dose a formidable enemy scoring the drugs on social media life just instantly began to spiral out of control it could kill you immediately i've never seen a drug threat as prevalent and as dangerous as we're seeing right now with them now on every corner everybody selling vietnam everybody it happened in my family and i never thought it would we're saying this is a real life and death situation had we really wanted to go out and save lives we could have done so we lost a child you know nobody should have to do that every year it gets not just worse but exponentially worse and st louis has been hit particularly hard [Music] fentanyl is the defining drug of the overdose epidemic in st louis it has no taste or smell even a handful of it could kill thousands of people it reaches into every corner of society suburbs and cities rich and poor black and white many who become addicted have no idea they're even taking it and it's caused drug addiction in the region to spiral out of control more than 70 percent of overdose deaths in the st louis area now involve fentanyl i might see a person five minutes and five minutes they did because they took something that they had no idea what they was taking in 2019 more than 70 000 people died of a drug overdose in the united states for perspective imagine there was a cardinals and blues game on the same night and both venues were sold out if every person in attendance died it would be about six thousand shy of that statistic now fast forward two years to 2021 and overdose deaths reached more than 107 000 the most in u.s history fentanyl is alarming it should be alarming it is killing people like that in missouri overdose deaths have risen drastically our area is the epicenter of that statewide tragedy st louis city st louis county jefferson and franklin counties have four of the five highest overdose death rates in missouri this is north st louis this place has been suffering from a thing called benign neglect you ever heard the term benign neglect what it simply means is if something goes wrong i just let it i allow it to go wrong we spent months looking into the local crisis this story is told by recovering addicts you become more dependent and reliant on this one specific thing just to get out of bed and say hi to your family it wasn't tough it was miserable it was just horrible man those fighting for change will always be a thorn in your side pushing for what actually needs to happen and those left behind it can happen to anyone because it happened to my family and i never thought it would from news 4 i'm matt woods and this is contaminated the fentanyl crisis in st louis [Music] when i look back i think there was a lot of depression that he may have had and he always hid everything like he always wanted to be happy around his family and stuff never wanted anyone to see him sad or upset about anything easy-going laid-back soft-spoken everyone says he had an infectious smile and a really sweet person everyone wanted to be his friend robbie was an avid skateboarder and other kids looked up to him because of it if you would ask him about stuff he would say oh i'm good i'm good everything's good everything's fine everything's good mom that's what he said all the time so i really expected him to say that when we walked into the hospital but we didn't get that second chance [Music] it goes back from me being only child no brothers no sisters a lot of cousins you know so i looked up to cousins so whatever they was into i was into it didn't know what i was getting myself into when i got 15 it was like okay i was at that age they were you know i can jumping off jumping off the porch so they was like okay here it was basically just here try this they was older they was like least like 20s and 25 i was the youngest yeah i was the youngest out of the whole crew i didn't know what i was doing i was just watching that's how it happens man these weren't like regular friends this was actually family members and every day from that day it was constantly just doing it because one thing about the drug when you doing this drug every day your body is getting immune so you gotta have it she was just everything i mean she had a kind heart she loved life she loved people she wanted to help people she loved her friends and her family i know i was her favorite i just i mean she was she was my everything and um she would always call me and want to know how i'm doing what i'm doing you know are you okay mom and stuff like that so i know she loved me very much patty's daughter jessica struggled with addiction for more than a decade patty fought for years to get back the daughter she recognized the first years weren't so bad i mean i knew she was doing stuff i you know would get on her i don't know what you're doing but you you know as it got worse i mean i would i wouldn't know where she was it's a nightmare you know there's so many times i lay in bed and wonder where she is and you expect a phone call because she did overdose quite a few times and i get a call [Music] every seven minutes and 22 seconds someone dies of a fentanyl overdose in the u.s that means someone died since you started watching this video there was one particular time over here at festus hospital i got a call and i went over there and somebody had dropped her off in the parking lot and stuck a needle in her breast of all places but i think they did that so they would know what she was there for one of the nurses just frankly told her you know what we about bagged you she was out of it she was basically almost dead that time addiction is so much more difficult to treat than say infections or other conditions this is one disorder that throws the patient into a survival mode and survival is the worst thing that can happen to a human being being in a survival mode and i describe that as a form of internal homelessness they have you know they're not literally on the street but the disorder has made them do things that only a person in a survival mode would do so i fell into addiction early in life i came from a broken home parents were divorced got separated my father was an abusive alcoholic after my parents split i started getting emotional abuse from my mom and i kind of fell into addiction early on about 11 12 years old smoking weed real heavily drinking alcohol at the age of 14 i was shooting cocaine i just kept moving from one drug to the other the first time i ever used heroin i actually overdosed the very first time and was left for dead in an abandoned house and that was probably whenever i was 18 19 years old from that moment i told myself for one i would never use a needle again and i would never use heroin again but eventually i did so even that first time of a horrible experience did not keep me from getting high again and most of the time the drugs are not the problem for an individual they're the current solution to different problems trauma adverse childhood experiences non-medicated non-treated mental health disorders lots of things go into why somebody has problematic use and rarely is it ever they just like getting high after she had passed i got some of her journals and reading them it's just heartbreaking what she went through she was raped a couple times she was dumped on the side of the street she was left in hospitals and it was horrible justin started committing crimes to provide for his addiction and ended up in court supervision my most recent charge i didn't go to prison for and it was for second-degree burglary i was actively in my addiction and i was actually at a drug dealer's house and burglarized the people that lived above the dealer and it turned out to be a pastor at a church and that pastor showed mercy in the courtroom which is why i didn't go to prison i got probation justin eventually lost custody of his son because of his addiction and criminal history because even though he was taken it still didn't stop me from using i still see seeked out methamphetamine and fentanyl to mask my pain i used to argue with her because i get so mad at her you know you know you do have a choice and you're choosing this you can stop anytime you want to you don't have to do this and if i knew then what i know now i wouldn't have been that way because i don't think they really have a choice i think they fight for their life every day and the people who do end up facing substance use disorders it doesn't mean that they're bad or that they came from like a bad family or that they have some sort of character flaw it's that they didn't have perhaps the coping skills to be able to deal with the inevitable pain that life brings because let's face it life is hard it is hard she went to jail and she stayed in there for almost two months i would send her money for cigarettes whatever i go visit her and she hated it there told me how horrible they were to her and stuff but again i was thinking well at least i know where you're at you're safe i finally got her out and she spent the night that night and um my granddaughter was here and we had so much fun because she had been clean that whole time she was in jail and it was like the old jessica you know and i [Music] i kind of look at that as god given me one last day with [Music] her i mean because she was just so much her old self when she went to excuse me one minute the biggest challenge we have in treatment is they do well for a period of time they may go to a residential program they may be in jail or prison when they come out back to the natural environment nothing has changed and the relapse rates are just unacceptably high paddy was supposed to pick jessica up the morning paddy's grandson was getting baptized patti texted jessica but she didn't respond at the time jessica had been sober for six months i called her phone and some guy answered and he told me that that jessica spent the night and that he woke up that morning and she was unresponsive on the floor and he called an ambulance he didn't know where the ambulance took her didn't know anything i called a couple hospitals and then i finally i finally got a doctor well when i called and they said yes she's here and they said hold on the doctor wants to talk to you when he when she said that i knew it was bad because doctors don't usually get on the phone to talk to you once i got to the hospital and i kind of told them about her history then they ran more labs and stuff and then they found out it was fentanyl his death certificate was fentanyl intoxication at the time did you even know what fentanyl no i knew that my mom's friend had cancer and she had a fentanyl patch but that's the only time i'd ever heard of fentanyl robbie died in 2017 at 31 years old he was one of 951 people to overdose on an opioid and die in missouri that year jessica died in 2018 when she was 32. she was one of 1132 people to die of an opioid overdose in missouri that year by 2020 synthetic opioid overdoses became the leading cause of death for americans ages 18 to 45 passing car crashes and shootings fentanyl has been the driver behind the rising fatality rate then finding out it was laced with fentanyl i don't think she ever would i don't think she knew that i don't think she would have done that and i was wondering why he would have any kind of fentanyl you know to take his life like i didn't know where he got it or what how he because i knew that was a patch i didn't know anything else about it i had a friend who died from fentanyl back in 2010 back when most people had never even heard of fentanyl his name was michael shaffermeyer he was from st louis he was a dj and he had the prescription patches but he was abusing them and died from an overdose combined with alcohol fentanyl is an important hospital drug and it's used by people in everything from childbirth to colonoscopies and so it has a really a legitimate use the illicit fentanyl the kind that's killing people almost all of it comes from china fentanyl is made in china for the same reason so many other things are made in china it's made you know very cheaply over there ben westhoff is an investigative journalist and st louis resident he published a book in 2019 called fentanyl inc how rogue chemists are creating the deadliest wave of the opioid epidemic westhoff eventually realized during his investigation that to tell the full scope of the american fentanyl crisis he needed to travel to china most people in china have never even heard of fentanyl and that includes a lot of people selling it i just googled buy drugs in china and i got all these websites from these companies that were just sort of blatantly selling it and they had email addresses and phone numbers for the sales people and so i just got in contact with them and i pretended to be a drug dealer and i said if i was going to come to china could i see their lab and some of the people responded that i could and i was shocked to find this giant company with hundreds of young sales people sitting at desktop computers they all spoke great english they were basically selling ingredients for fentanyl to western customers and it looked just like any other company what i found out later was that the chinese government actually subsidizes some of these companies and promotes the work that they do these people have like retirement plans and health plans it was considered a really good job except they were selling the most dangerous drug in the world police announced they took down a major drug distribution network that's enough fentanyl to kill 250 000 people including 800 000 counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl the ingredients to make fentanyl are being mass produced in china from there it's sent to mexico where fentanyl is made in illicit laboratories then it smuggled over the border and spread into communities like st louis our records indicate based on our seizures that four out of every 10 pills that dea seizes contains a lethal dose of fentanyl which is only two milligrams fentanyl is so lethal that the amount in this bag is enough to kill five non-tolerant people it's so small you can hide you know a million doses in a fake panel in a car [Music] it's being delivered right to people's doorsteps which is a huge problem and sometimes they're able to order this through social media apps or encrypted phone applications which obviously makes it very dangerous because all of us have access to smartphones children my son has access to a smartphone just how easy i mean you got it from like a guy at a gas station literally all i had to do was walk up to a gas station and ask somebody and people would approach you like i've had a dealer just walk up and stick it in my pocket after i told them no on an occasion it's that easy it's that easy the problem is that even the local drug dealers by the time it gets all the way to them they don't even know what are in these drugs you know they might be cutting it further but they don't know how powerful it is it knows dangerous it is killing americans at record rates and it's going to continue to do that until we get a grasp of this situation way too many that are beginning their addiction through the pen and pad of a doctor [Music] it's not an urban myth that people turn to heroin and fentanyl when they run out of prescription drugs hundreds of thousands if not millions of people had been started on these medications for chronic pain and some of them might need to be on these chronic opioids for the rest of their life because it's just so hard to get off of them got into a car with a buddy we were going to a gas station that sold to underage kids for cigarettes my buddy was speeding and hit some railroad tracks tried to make a right turn lost control and went head on into a tree and i was riding front passenger without my seatbelt on and hit the windshield and i mean lost a good portion of my forehead to it i was 15 and i'd never done drugs a day in my life and i was instantly put on 10 milligram percocets which is something that you should gradually work up to first time i got shot i got shot with a 357 hollow point and blew my i got shot in the back and it blew my stomach open the bullet hit my pancreas lard intestines small intestine and i lost a kidney and they had two surgeries and they say i'd be in pain for the rest of my life so i'm taking pain pills you know prescribed by the doctor you know that's basically how i started i was taught when i was a medical student that if somebody has pain they're not going to get addicted to a substance and to an opioid okay i was taught that now that seems like foolishness right dr fred rotnick is the medical director at the assisted recovery centers of america before that he spent 15 years as the medical director at the st louis county jail and juvenile detention center the drug companies yeah they did their marketing and pushing and selling of opioids that were never typically used in outpatient settings however physicians also we didn't do our homework as an as a profession and we fell for it more than 263 000 americans died from an overdose involving a prescription opioid from 1999 through 2020. our job was to write out the percocet or the oxycodone or the hydrocodone for you know john doe one to two tabs every four to six hours is needed for pain 120 tabs 160 tabs with two refills and that was common practice after most surgical procedures my parents didn't know they were following what somebody with a medical doctorate degree was telling them was good for their child and it wasn't until after the prescription stopped that i realized something else was going on when the pill epidemic came doctors wasn't prescribing pills like they normally did you know and i'm like you know my medical history but they just wasn't giving me prescriptions so i had to look elsewhere you know to get i started buying pills off the street so it started with heroin um where did it go from there um stayed with heroin for a few years once fentanyl hit the city it was nearly impossible to continue getting heroin and fentanyl was all that was around now on every corner everybody selling vietnam everybody everybody it's kind of a bad time to be a young person because any pill or any powder that's bought on the black market could potentially be laced with fentanyl and could kill you immediately actually the first time i took it i overdosed i had been going to the same dealer for a couple years at this point and always knew how much i could do and saw him the day prior did a certain amount saw him the next day did that same amount and next thing i know i was waking up on the side of the road with emts around me do you remember the first time you took fentanyl honestly i don't remember the exact time because i probably thought it was heroin didn't even realize i was getting fentanyl i had bought um like two prescriptions of perk tens thinking that they was perk tens but they was spitting on pills you're talking on you bought this on the street on the street from somebody but you thought it was yeah i mean they had the bottle and the name on them and everything did you know there was fentanyl on it the first time you took it not at all it's almost indistinguishable fentanyl looks like many other drugs and it has no smell or taste it's often laced into other drugs in the form of powder or pills and the naked eye can't tell the difference as a result the stuff that people are buying on the street has an unpredictable potency too much fentanyl in the body can make someone feel nauseous or dizzy or cause them to start vomiting a fatal dose of fentanyl will paralyze the respiratory system and kill the user in seconds overdosed twice and been pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital one of those times how many times did you overdose last year probably 11 times you over this 11 times in one yeah about seven times i died about seven times and every time i overdosed i just i kept coming back every time these people have did fentanyl once a little a little amount and they died immediately didn't come back fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine despite how much stronger it is addicts have to use it more to avoid withdrawals so to put it into perspective with heroin i would have to use four or five times a day and i would make it through the day and be okay for what i considered okay fentanyl would be in every 30 minute every hour use just to get through the day so 10 15 times a day so i mean it required twice as much because the even though the high was stronger it lasted much less i'm up at 1am still doing fentanyl just trying to get to sleep if i put drugs in my system i'ma feel better but the pain gonna start over again when it's gone most mornings if i woke up without it i would pretty much be in the fetal position on my bed in cold sweats it could be 80 degrees outside and you're freezing cold can't make it to the bathroom sometimes throwing up on my floor or my bed i mean it's a really really bad sickness once my bones would start to just crunch up and i'd get tense up that was the moment that i would just say i can't do this and i'd go get high if you were freezing cold and you had a quilted blanket in the oven and you pulled it out and you pulled it from the tips of your toes to the top of your head it's about that feeling and then an hour later it's it's back to freezing back to freezing cold and have to get another blanket i'm actually getting kind of kind of cold just talking about it really if the second fentanyl enters your body it's instantly and so you get a rush of serotonin euphoria from not only the drug but also the relief addiction is really it's it's it's powerful man people clean right now still deals with it we still we're not perfect it's a disease because it's going to be with us forever people don't understand they they think it's something you did to them or they're just a bad kid or you know stuff like that they just with this kind of death there is so much of a stigma i had a lady in the grocery store asked how i was doing neither and i'm like oh i'm i'm doing okay i said i lost my daughter and she asked me how and i told her and she's like oh not i'm sorry or no hug no nothing no just oh you know and i wouldn't be that way to anybody you know i'm like a death is a death you know um is it your child you lost a child you know nobody should have to do that they just act like oh they're gone so that's good one more off the street and and then that's hurtful because we do grieve differently and i think that she would be happy that i'm doing this right after we lost robbie i had a daughter get married that june and um he should have been there and then his little brother got married in july so we had a wedding in june and july and his little brother um he really wanted him at his wedding and he wasn't there so he should have been there unfortunately i don't really think there's a way to stop fentanyl from getting into the country even if you get china to really crack down on this the trade is going to move somewhere else it's kind of like a game of whack-a-mole you know every time you try to stop it it just pops its head up somewhere else all we can really do is try to help people understand what fentanyl is try to convince them to stay away from it and try to improve the treatment options for people who do become addicted to it would you say that combating drug addiction right now is a top priority in jeff city no i i don't think that it is overall and and again it goes back to the stigma of it the whole system that um a framework of harm reduction that we've been building and had buy-in from the government is under attack with false evidence and false narratives and when you start making health care political talking about saving lives shame on us we're suffering a crisis that this could have reduced harm it could have saved lives then we could have directed folks to rehabilitation trish gunby is a state representative in missouri she sponsored house bill 2570 which would have started a program to distribute fentanyl test strips to communities in missouri other states are already utilizing test strips to prevent overdoses and we would have been able to track how well the program worked and you know hopefully save lives and it just did not move at all it's it's a program that has been done nationally in red and blue states for me vetting it is it's a bill that saves lives how much more do you need to know prescription drug monitoring that took eight years to get across the finish line you know i had sponsored that for eight years before and it was really a just a fight every single session missouri senator holly raider's prescription drug monitoring bill was finally signed into law in 2021 missouri was the last state in the country to pass that legislation i grew up in drug addiction and are in and around it and and i understand it i understand it from the viewpoint as a child growing up in it i understand it um from the viewpoint as a mother whose child got caught in it you know even though she wasn't raised around it i raised her in church and mama up in her business all the time because i knew the signs i knew what to watch for um but yet she cut her finger at work went to the emergency room at 17 got it stitched up and they gave her a script i didn't know anything about it because in missouri you're an adult at 17. once they were finished she just started buying them at work because she was sick because her body was sick she felt awful she started buying them at work that took her down 13 years of deep addiction um shooting up turned into meth heroin um bath salts my grandson being born with opioids in his system and me taking custody of him and she's eight years clean now and the best mama i know but that story i try to illustrate and show how it just doesn't matter where you come from matters what your dna is and how educated you are about this issue that's what matters and none of that has anything to do with morals um it's all in america um you know the first syringe access program opened in the netherlands funded by the netherlands government in response to hepatitis b outbreak in the 1970s the first safe consumption site opened in burn switzerland in 1986 worldwide these programs are accepted they're evidence-based um and they're successful when we come here people want to plug morality into what we know as science and what we know as best practices to save lives chad sabora is the executive director of the mode network outreach center on south broadway and a former heroin addict he said many people thought he wouldn't survive his addiction but he overcame it and today he helps others get treatment i mean the situation right now is that we bare bones for funding harm reduction harm reduction you know centers that work out that philosophical approach operate off like like a car driving on fumes certainly our foster care system is exploding has been exploding for years and the majority of those kids have come from substance abuse homes and so we there are many rippling effects to drug addiction and the opioid crisis specifically if we don't fund those things and if we don't decide that that's a priority as a as a state then it's going to continue to happen and people think that a lot of this stuff maybe ends up in urban areas but this particular epidemic is across the state it affects rural communities it affects urban suburban areas like many things it all boils down to money and what where we decide to put our money and where we put it that typically says what we value the most and so you've probably seen or heard kind of the old adage where all these bodies are floating downstream and people are just picking them up and taking them out of the water and no one stops and says why are all these bodies here so instead of putting an ambulance down at the bottom to figure out how to get these bodies from floating downstream let's put a gosh darn fence up nicole dawsey is the executive director of prevent ed the nonprofit works with students to provide comprehensive drug and mental health education it takes about two hundred dollars for us to go in and teach a classroom of 25 students you can do the math that ain't a lot of money right versus holding somebody in a cell or a treatment bed it's a lot more expensive the state spends like 60 million a year on hepatitis c cases syringe programs can reduce that by 50 in new cases you know you look at an overdose death which is preventable um for a dollar or five bucks or you know something like that when somebody dies your minimum cost to tax i mean ten thousand dollars you got toxicology you've lost a you know a member of our capitalist society that you know buys themselves goods and you know you can look at me for example taxpayer naloxone saved my life many years ago long time ago 100 was invested into me now in my lifetime i'll probably pay the federal government over a million dollars in taxes so if i had died that would have been a loss to the federal government in a million dollars so why are they not willing to invest a dollar to save a million this is a way you're saying to save taxpayers money well this is a way to sometimes get to people that lack empathy and you need to go to fiscal responsibility as well because not only is this the right thing to do for other people for humans so they don't die it's going to be the most cost-effective thing you know at the current situation before i got there you know we had one senator that had made a comment of well it's just a cleansing of the gene pool and it's like okay i mean we've come a long way from there in educating people about um how awful the stigma is you know if somebody has a has a bad heart condition because they've been a smoker all their life we don't prevent them we don't say oh no you don't get your uh heart medication you did this you know um it's an addiction i think that we've come a long way but we're certainly not where we need to be when it comes to people focusing on this issue people don't know what they don't know and you know that that was hard for me to accept when i got in the legislature because people seem really pompous that haven't been seeing this face to face there was a major commission study between landsat the medical journal landsat and stanford university and i saw a figure they have have a modeling figure that says between now and the end of the decade we will lose about 1.2 million people [Music] it absolutely angered me that you were fatalistically say you know let's just let's just accept that we'll lose about another million people that is unacceptable to me we have the resources fentanyl and and drug overdose deaths are getting to be even worse than covet deaths and yet we don't have that same state of emergency we don't have that same sort of outlay of funds and resources and i think we really need that we do have to treat this as a medical problem and we do have the the right medicine there are three fda approved medications to fight opioid addiction buprenorphine methadone and naltrexone you know there's no cookie cutter you know this is it you know that's it's very individualized unfortunately when it comes to addiction treatment we are still in the dark ages we have not shown the kind of you know frontier mentality that you see in medicine naloxone is a drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose naloxone is better known under the brand name narcan so if somebody is overdosing on any opioid naloxone will displace some of those opioids because it has a stronger magnetic effect to the receptors in the brain than all opioids so it will kick out some that are there allow the person to resume normal breathing um which in turn basically is what reverses the overdose and the individual wakes up news 4's cameras caught this man who odd at a bus stop near north florison and st louis avenue st louis fire responded giving the man narcan and reviving him paramedics carry narcan for responding to overdoses the saint louis city fire department used more than ten thousand shots of narcan in the last four years that's an average of seven times a day i've been narcan quite a few times sometimes it works sometimes it didn't but narcan only brought me back to get high again that's all i did i'm not foreign but i can't say that i'm against it either because it does help save lives to an extent but it didn't help suppress any of the cravings or any of the mindset that led me back to getting high you know there's a difference between treatment programs and recovery programs and that's another area and just unless you've been in it you really don't understand and you know people need to go to treatment to get clean and to get healthy but there's it's so much more than that because you have to learn to manage your triggers you have to have a community of recovery specialists around you while you walk that out some people it takes two years some people it may be your entire life that you still need that support [Music] for the longest time we have neglected the black community here enough is enough the local black community has been affected especially hard by the overdose epidemic in february eight people died in the central west end from the same batch of drugs laced with fentanyl all eight of them were black and black men specifically are three times as likely as any other demographic to die of an opioid overdose in missouri that's what we suffer from it's a posted child for the non-neglect and we still deal with people saying it can't be like that why don't those people just simply pull up put themselves about their own bootstraps addiction is is a heavy weight it buckles the knees [Music] ryan came and that evening he said pastor thank you so much for all that you have done i really appreciate you so much well that what i didn't realize was that that ryan was saying goodbye and he went home that evening and he he overdosed so this shirt here and this seat here reminds us of a time where we were ill-equipped we were ignorant and where we made a lot of mistakes costly pricely mistakes in this drug addiction pandemic jubilee community church sits on north grand boulevard in north st louis after ryan died of an overdose the church's leaders adapted their approach to addiction in the community they are in a state of hopelessness and despair right so they just need somebody to just pat them on the back or you know shake their hand hold them or hug them they just need to know that somebody cares that much it i am worth it this place we treat things such as addiction homelessness and mental illnesses in ministry when a drug took me to the point that my whole family abandoned me i was homeless sleeping up on the bridges being in places where people would never think that exists it got to the point that okay i got drugs that's all i got [Music] i got tired one day man got to be more to this i can't keep living life like this [Music] this is another one of the smaller rooms where people can just sit and rest and then another jubilee community church partnered with the assisted recovery centers of america to put a treatment clinic inside the church patients get medically assisted treatment there as well as mental health counseling because there was no hope especially with the black community there was nothing you know we call it a treatment desert and i said i want to build an oasis within the desert i didn't think about the future and now i do i think about when i turned 65 when i retired you know having money put up i say for the first time in my life i felt the taxes i did taxes yeah i filled out income taxes you know didn't get nothing but i did it you know it's it's wonderful to see them when the light bulb goes off when they start living life again when they start really thriving it's such an honor and a privilege to see them a place where there's hope a place away from the mess of the street nobody wants that and when they can come into an environment like this and feel the love and the care of a supporting staff it just becomes the first step in the right direction for them when you come so far in life accomplishing things a drug is not worth losing everything the street is nothing but hopelessness like drugs get you high they make you feel good right but it's so many more things in life that make you feel better you know setting setting goals and actually reaching them goals like i said it goes in my life for i made a three year goal and i accomplished them in six months that did it it was overweight after that what were those goals okay that was kind of not that not that big a job a bank account and a car you say it's not that big but is that something that you could have done an addiction never today i'm here to face the judge after leaving the state without permission for a second degree burglary charge that i pled guilty to back in 2018 i work two jobs i'm active in the recovery program in contact with my kids working on getting my kids back i just moved into my own apartment doing everything i can to be a productive member of society now it would mean a lot not having to report to somebody dictating what i can do in my lifestyle and control my every moment of life so to be free of those chains as well as the chains of addiction would be amazing any other time i would be worried because i was doing the wrong thing whenever i was walking into the courthouse this is my first time where i'm actually walking in hopeful because i am doing the right thing and here comes security justin has been sober for more than a year on april 21st 2022 he was released from court supervision for the first time in 16 years he called the man who helped him get treatment right after walking out of the what you're courthouse you know i'm always here and the only thing that could have been made this moment better is if they'd walk my son out right then and there that's the only thing that could have made it better i can't can't wait to have him back in my house i can only imagine what i can bring as a father to my son being sober you're climbing a very tall mountain here oh yeah i'll be dead before i get to the top someone else is gonna have to finish for me i would like to see missouri be at the forefront i'm tired of seeing us figure it out and we're the very last one because by then we've lost so many lives we've got to deal with right where people are right now and that's critical we have to all be pushing in the same direction to have the outcomes that are available impossible but in order to do that we've got to remove the stigma what are we doing here what are we doing we've got to get in front of it we have to build a sense of urgency around this right doc's help start this it's like why aren't more physicians engaged in this work we need to fight the drug overdose crisis the same way we're fighting kovid you know kind of like an all hands on deck situation if you're not able to grasp the concept that people around you are struggling and you should help that i think that's where the problem lies is that we've lost our humility and humanity amongst each other we've got to show that there are ways that we can help people because too often everybody's just wringing their hands and saying there's nothing we can do well that's not good enough we got to figure stuff out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: KMOV St. Louis

Views: 1,215,026

Keywords: kmov

Id: 3lbrAHYC12w

Length: 50min 9sec (3009 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022