New life, no drugs

Five miles north of Beckley, a curving driveway christened “Reality Road” leads to a small white house at the top of a grassy hill. There’s a gazebo, a lawn dotted with wandering geese and a front porch lined with lilies.

The eight men who currently live at Brian’s Safehouse follow a strict routine: breakfast, devotions, chores, three hours of classes, lunch, work on the 14-acre property, recreation, dinner, the 6 o’clock news then lights out. It’s a daily rhythm that helps them gain control over their lives and develop a sense of being grounded, Mr. Brush said. They rarely leave the campus, except for Sunday services at Faith Baptist Church down the road. Residents pay $700 a month, although in reality the program costs $2,000; local churches help cover the cost gap. Residents are admitted based on an application and interview.

Unlike most of the addiction clinics dotting Raleigh County, which prescribe methadone and Suboxone, Brian’s Safehouse uses a nonmedical approach. The 12-step treatment program, which is spread out over the course of a year, challenges residents to accept their own weakness and surrender to a new order in life: God first, sobriety second. After that, Mr. Brush said, everything else falls into place.

“Our focus primarily is not so much about drugs as it is about the life-controlling issues that got them here to start with,” he said. “We deal with anger. We deal with the victim’s mentality. We deal with how to know who is safe and who isn’t. We deal with boundaries.”

As the residents move through the program’s phases, they receive increasing responsibilities and rewards, like visits from friends and family. By the 10month mark, they can get a job, often through “second chance” employers in the region like construction companies,auto shops and Chickfil-A. And when they complete a year, they can opt into a six-month “aftercare” program, which eases their transition into life after rehab.

Over the past eight years, 35 men have graduated from Brian’s Safehouse. Twentyeight are still sober, Mr. Brush said. Last year, the Brushes opened the Sparrow’s Nest, a rehab program for women, half a mile down the road. It will have its first graduating class in a few months.

Complex problem, complex solution

Beckley Mayor Rob Rappold thinks the program model can be expanded to a larger scale. He’s working with experts from West Virginia University to create a regional treatment center that builds off of the Brushes’ program.

“If we can provide that same sort of multi-disciplinary treatment — withdrawal, a healthy routine, job prospects — we think we'll make significant progress against this plague,” he said.

It’s the hope of respite in a battle that can seem interminable. Last year, there were 42 fatal overdoses in Raleigh County. There have been 21 so far this year, in addition to 217 instances in which naloxone was administered, according to data from the West Virginia Bureau of Public Health. Over the past four years, naloxone has been given 16,000 times in West Virginia, rising from 2,419 instances in 2014 to 5,900 last year.

“As long as there’s a demand for drugs, there’s going to be a supply,” said Kenneth Burner, the West Virginia coordinator for the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, an organization that works with local law enforcement to target mid- to upper-level drug traffickers. “Law enforcement alone isn’t enough. To get out of this situation, we need a collaborative relationship with public health and safety. It’s a complex problem with a complex solution.”

Robert Richards, a West Virginia state trooper and coordinator of the Raleigh CountyDrug Task Force — a joint effort of local police, state troopers and the FBI — said that law enforcement is making progress in the region, with a major drug bust last month.

“I like to think that it’s getting better, but when we shut one down, another one pops up,” he said. “We try to do the best we can.”

Mr. Rappold said that some individual counties have begun to file lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies that funnel billions of drugs annually into southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Virginia and eastern Tennessee.

“This hasn’t happened overnight,” he said. Still, “we feellike we’re making a dent.”

For Mr. Brush, the solution to the opioid epidemic isn’t building more methadone treatment centers, which he believes end up being stopgaps for addicts.

“We don’t need beds — we need help,” he said. “If we’re just looking for beds, we’ve got some motels on Harper Road, we can fill them up. But the only problem with beds is they don’t solve the drug addiction issue. What stops addiction is when a person has another reason to live besides drugs.”

That’s what happened to Jeff Miller, 37, of Fairdale, a community not far from Beckley.

When he was 19, “OxyContin just flooded the streets” and permeated the construction sites where he worked, he said. Once he started using prescription painkillers, they quickly took hold. He fell in and out of rehab for the next decade, going to methadone clinics and sobering up for a few days, but it never lasted.

“It was just more insanity for me,” he said. “Those moments were probably the most depressing and unhappy times of my life just because I didn’t know how to cope with life without drugs. I would just use [methadone] as a backup to keep me from getting sick.”

He used drugs up to the day he arrived at Brian’s Safehouse in 2010. He was 30 years old, married and the father of a young girl. Unlike other residents who went to medical detox programs first, Mr.Miller quit cold turkey.

“The withdrawal was my biggest fear in life,” he said. “Nothing else in life scared me. Dying didn’t scare me, losing my family didn’t scare me.”

But it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Even as he struggled through the physical effects of withdrawal, his mind was at rest, he said. He had no other options; there was no going back.

He would wake up thinking that he’d never make it through the day, but the program’s schedule kept him busy,and before he knew it, it was nighttime. He’d made it. Days became weeks and months and eventually his mind began to get sharper. He’d never been religious, but he took solace in the program’s Life Recovery Bible, which has recovery themes on one side of the page and Scripture on the other. Supported by the staff and other residents, he began to create alife worthy of staying sober.

“As a young man, I developed this outer shell that