(twangy music) - Addicts in general, we aren't bad people trying to get good, we're sick people trying to get well.

- No one got here on their best day, and in fact it might've been their worst.

I've been at capacity for almost a year now.

It means that there's a real need that we're not meeting.

- It's a journey to become the person that I was always meant to be before I started to use drugs and alcohol.

- It used to be I'd go out and get a bottle of 151 and be happy.

When I felt bad, when I felt good.

You know, you find a reason.

- The addiction, if person is currently using, it's not about the drug.

- Substance use disorder is a leveling place.

It doesn't matter if you're conservative, if you're liberal.

- One of my hashtags is recovery is purple.

Red people and blue people can find agreement on some solutions to what is just a ridiculous ongoing crisis.

- We have an opioid problem.

It's more serious than people may think.

- We have trained thousands of people.

They are ready to be productive members of a workforce specifically responding to the overdose crisis.

- It's gonna take grassroots boots on the grounds, people making everyday changes in their communities directly to really get to the root of this problem.

- Meeting people where they are at, loving them where they're at.

We are trying to save lives so that one day that they can thrive.

(upbeat music) - I have friends again.

You know, I was very scared to go out for a long while.

- You can stand up and you can dust yourself off and you can do that with the help of your peers.

♪ In the heartland ♪ We rely on ourselves and one another ♪ ♪ Hand in hand ♪ We must stand ♪ In the heartland - [Announcer] Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by... (mandolin music) - A lot of people look at addiction as just something that happens to other people until it infiltrates their families or their own lives.

There's definitely, like, a very strong hold stigma still and I think that's why people have trouble getting help.

It's not just about access to care, it's about willingness to navigate that first phone call.

- To everyone it's different.

Even why they use, why they quit, why they continue to relapse like the door at Macy's.

- I describe myself as a person in long-term recovery, which for me means I haven't used illicit substances since May 13th of 1991.

- Me, I got clean February of 2000.

In the beginning it's fun, in the beginning it's exciting.

(solemn music) - Opiates are so heavy hitting because it just takes one time to overdose, right?

It just takes a second.

But alcohol is equally as problematic.

I mean, it's still a leading cause of death in adults in America.

- Really anything can become an addiction at some point in your life.

But most always, people are seeking out a solution to a problem and then sometimes that solution becomes the problem itself.

- This is my favorite part of Farley, actually is the courtyard.

Think it's the prettiest.

Sometimes we do, like, meditations and stuff over here.

Substance use is symptomatic, right?

Nobody really, like, woke up one day and was like, "Man, I can't wait to end up in rehab and, like, ruin my life with cocaine."

But what people did do is wake up and say, "I really dunno how to deal with this thing that I'm facing."

- They come in and detox and they're baby chicks and then they have to graduate.

So then they're baby ducks.

- And then we get 'em right across the road safely.

(laughs) - We do.

My little baby duck chillins, I love 'em.

We just have a good team that loves each other and then loves our little baby ducks.

- Yes.

Appreciate ya.

- Yeah.

But I'm also in recovery, so it's different, I think, for those of us that are in recovery and we work at places like this.

- I started using 2005 and then I didn't get clean until 2014.

I had this unspoken dialogue with myself, like, "I can't keep doing this."

A peer is essentially somebody with lived experience.

Recovery in a peer means I've been where you are.

I'm still there.

(tender music) When you're in a clinical thing, when you're with a professional.

There's always this thing, we're here, right?

I'm the teacher, you're the student, right?

I'm the clinician, you're the addict, right?

But a peer kinda levels the playing field.

- You can tell my fingers are stained from tie dyeing.

(laughs) That's a cute little iron!

- We love tie dye.

If you haven't noticed (laughs) tie dye's kind of our theme.

Oh, this one's nice.

The great thing about tie dye is you can't mess it up.

I think that's why we feel so comfortable with it.

There are some unique things that come out of it and we call that creative and interesting.

(laughs) Oh, right, success.

Yay, yay.

- Welcome, Andrea (members laughing) - Logan and I wanted to set up another day just to tie dye.

- I'm not about getting messy, but Ill wear it.

- If we made you one, would you wear it?

- Yes.

- Okay, okay.

What are your favorite colors?

- Like blues and... Like unicorn colors.

When you come to the peer groups, it's good because there's familiar stories.

It's like, "Okay, I'm not alone in the world."

Just trying to be in community.

(peaceful music) - Recovery to us is trauma-informed care.

It means helping each other in a mutual aid type of way.

- [Brinkley] So we actually met in jail.

- I watched her come in like three times.

I was in for two years and she come in three times.

- I was just in and out and in and out.

And then you ended up messaging me on Facebook afterwards.

And I was in a bad spot, but we ended up finding sobriety together.

You got the 30, 60 day chip and then the 90 day.

- September 30th is the day of service, which is about harm reduction and that will be here.

One of the very first questions that people are gonna ask you is, "What about the name?

Why 51st Collective?"

- It's like when birds are migrating and when more than half of them start this swirling motion, they all sort of join in and become one.

- Yeah.

So every bird in this murmuration has like seven points of contact around it that it can see, constantly being supported by seven other perspectives.

Staying on message is very important because we will have a lot of eyes watching us.

We will have a lot of stigma that we have to combat.

- Addicts like me, their environment pushes 'em into staying in addiction.

But we can't change our environment.

Because once people hear the word addict, well, you're not getting that house or you're not getting that job.

It's almost impossible to do alone.

And it is one of the scariest things you're ever gonna do.

- I'm gonna let go of this drug, which means I gotta let go of my friends.

Ooh, that feels yucky.

You know, there's always a dim light on us.

"Oh, can they stay sober?

Can they hold it together?

Yeah, they're not gonna do it."

- It's really hard.

And you know, we're in a small place so you don't really get away from having it in your face.

And it's really hard in the beginning.

It's really, really hard.

- This town though, it's a silly little place.

(laughs) - We call it home.

- Yeah.

- [Angela] The biggest part is being here for each other.

- The more that we're out there and we're as honest as we can be about where we've been, that's what it's all about.

- Invite one person every time And also if they have a car and can drive, that's even better.

(laughs) Ask them for a ride and then just ask them to stay.

(group laughing) You have to put your things in, look.

- Oh me?

- [Nitch] What about right here?

- Just set 'em aside and I'll... - [Nitch] Well, I went to bed around 1:30 and then got back up at 5:30.

- That's so ridiculous.

Girl, just get the instant tea.

- Okay, I'm gonna go find all my flyers.

- [Caller] Did you see the cat this morning?

- That I'm fostering.

Yeah.

Oh well.

Well if she made a run for it, poor thing.

(Susan laughing) Hopefully she'll be back tonight.

It looks a mess but it's all gonna come together.

I trust.

(laughs) - This church is wonderful.

I mean I couldn't even ask for a better church.

We are all family.

If you white, you white, if you Black, you Black.

God loves everybody.

(happy music) - We have information up there about Narcan because of the population of the people that we may see today may need the information.

- A lot of models focus on making resources available at, like, doctor's offices or places where they want people to go, not where people are actually going.

(acoustic music) The system now is that in order to access services, you have to meet certain intake requirements.

You have to be willing to jump through certain hoops.

You have to be willing to say, "I am ready to be completely abstinent and sober."

And for a lot of people, those first initial steps into recovery do not look like that.

They look like a tapering down.

They look like a removal of one substance or another.

And in order to meet people in that window where they're willing to discuss recovery, we need to be able to accept their definition of their own recovery.

For people who are in active use, we have harm reduction kits.

And in here we have Narcan.

We also have a little bottle.

And then fentanyl test strips.

And then this allows for the user to test their supply wherever they are.

(plaintive music) In order to get them to the next step, they need to make it through this one.

- Our model for peer support and peer recovery is a little different than abstinence only programs such as the AA model or NA model.

We support every path to recovery and that is decided by the individual themself, not us.

And at 51st we're very specifically harm reduction focused and that means that we accept moderation management.

Now that is not for everyone and the AA model, total abstinence, sometimes that is the only way that people will survive.

But then we also understand that there are some people that simply abstinence is not gonna be their way to recovery.

- Recovery isn't one size fits all, which is a lot of times when you have people in treatment or drug court and you say, "You gotta go to this meeting and this meeting."

If that's not for them, then they're not gonna be successful.

You're kind of setting them up for failure.

Sometimes you have people in there, the old timers, they say, "You gotta do this, you gotta do that.

You know, work the steps or you die."

And I think as time goes on, you kind of gotta expand your thinking.

- You have those who have been here for 30 and 40 years that are stuck in their ways, stuck in the old ways.

There are other people that want to pacify the younger generation.

- We always kind of draw on these like-minded individuals.

And sometimes I kind of buck against that term in the sense that like you could be aiming for abstinence and I could be aiming for harm reduction, but we could still support each other in our overall goals.

- When you are offering peer support from a harm reduction perspective, you get blamed a lot for being enabling or even you have to be very concerned about contributing to any type of behaviors that would be considered part of a drug culture.

We do know that return to use in recovery is a very common thing.

So a return to use isn't necessarily indicative of failure.

It can be a red flag that you haven't found the right pathway yet.

- I was told that anybody that comes through the door, I had to give a due respect that they needed recovery too.

But there are certain people I can't give that respect anymore.

I've done it too long.

I've seen too many people get hurt and I've seen... Yeah.

If you're not honest about it, if you put anything in front of your recovery, you're gonna lose your recovery.

- If they reach out for help and you say, "You don't meet my requirement for recovery," why are they gonna try?

They're giving everything they can and then some at that point in their life and they are going to feel like there's no point.

- I've seen so many people go back and feel so ashamed, come back in the room, even though they know they need it.

I've probably got a couple that don't come around because of me, and that bothers me, that hurts me.

In a sense that what if things were different?

- Things really started to get darker for me when I started to isolate.

It's one thing when you're getting high or getting drunk with a group of people and it's fine, but when you're shut off in a room, it can get pretty dark pretty quick.

- [Ernie] Isolation brings on sure death.

(rain falling) - I've lost four family members to substance use disorder.

Two of them to alcohol use disorder.

One to an accidental prescription, opiate overdose, and one to fentanyl poisoning.

(melancholy music) Everybody hits a spot where they're open to recovery.

If you are not there for that person in that moment, who knows how long it will be before they get to that moment again, if they ever make it to that moment again.

(rain falling) - We're not trying to dictate anything to anyone, right?

It's gonna take time.

When you hit rock bottom, you're not just coming back up.

- Recovery is so much more than just about treating a substance use disorder.

We're not first talking about recovery.

What we're talking about is, "Hey, do you need a ride to your court date?"

People wanna figure out what to do.

All they need to do is ask.

Ask what people need you to do instead of trying to figure out what you wanna do for them.

But people kind of forget that first step.

- Dont get run over.

- Here you are.

(overlapping chatter) They gave us this little room here on the left.

Okay.

Is that good enough?

- I was down there by myself last night because they had to go get us food.

They slashed his tent.

- Oh no.

- So I'm gonna get-- - Took a couple blankets.

Rummaged through my stuff.

- Oh no.

- But I do wanna give him this.

- Okay.

- Because we have Benjamin's tent.

- That's fine.

Okay, that's good, that's good.

- He looked out for us and gave us somewhere to camp near him.

Thank you for looking out for them.

- That's what you're supposed to do.

He gave us a place to tent and that's, you know, it's respect, man.

- You see the spirit of generosity amongst people that are struggling.

They are the only ones that intimately understand their situation.

- I already bought two solar panels.

They're 5 watts.

I'm gonna give 'em them one.

I got one.

I'm waiting for it to come in the PO box.

- You're really excited about that.

(laughs) That fan that he has for his dog.

Let me tell you something, that thing is high power.

- Most often when we're meeting people where they're at, it's in a crisis situation.

So you can't really get to the long-term sustainable aspects of recovery when you're simply trying to provide a service in the middle of a crisis.

You had six months to live, but you've been going two years?

- They told me it was critical.

I tried drinking myself to death.

I didn't want the cancer eating me up.

- [Nitch] How are you doing now with that recovery?

- They said it's gone.

They took the tumors and the jumbo bleeding, cancerous polyps, whatever those are.

- Oh.

And what about your recovery with the drinking?

How you doing with that?

- I drink when I drink and when I don't, I don't.

- And a lot of people will get into the work or think that they wanna get into the work and think it's all like the feel good helping people achieve recovery and we all get together and kumbaya our way to recovery.

No, that's not... No, it's hard work and it requires hard love too.

(calm music) Almost always there is an issue of housing or poverty that is really wreaking havoc in people's lives and I don't see that getting any better these days.

The systems that are already in place are doing the best job they can do.

So unless we build new systems, new ancillary services that are community led and developed, until we make it sustainable, everything we do is just a bandaid.

Couple of -- oops.

(phone ringing) I guess I should answer that first.

(button beeping) Hello?

- [Caller] Hello.

- [Nitch] Hey, Sweetie.

What you doing?

- [Caller] So mom's in the hospital in Bluefield.

- Oh no.

- [Caller] Apparently Janet had no idea that mom had 17 different diagnosis.

- Well, let me take a look at my calendar.

So are you gonna be able to take off work to go this week at all?

(reflective music) - You know, these are folks who come in with trauma, mental health disorders, addictions, that's all generated because people have been hurt.

There are just so many ways in which we hurt each other.

Sometimes that's economic, sometimes that's isolation.

Sometimes that's the direct assaults that, you know, people will do upon people.

I mean, you can get traumatized so easily in our current life.

- You're suffering from an illness.

There's been trauma, there's been hurt, there's not been diagnosis and people are self medicating.

(minor-key music) - A really close friend of mine overdosed on fentanyl about four years ago, it just really hit me so hard.

I've been struggling with alcohol and other things a little bit, like, but it's just been hard to, like, want to take care of myself when I'm losing people.

Unfortunately in Nelson the only way to get help is to get in trouble with the law first.

- We really are in year one or year two of drug war 2.0 and the penalties are staggeringly harsh.

A trillion bucks and we are in worse shape now than we were 50 years ago.

- [Brinkley] Being seen as a convict and you got a charge and... - You don't have that connection for resources when you're an addict, like... - [Brinkley] Even in jail.

- Yeah.

- I mean, they don't give you those opportunities - Trying to reenter society after incarceration.

They've taken a lot of your rights away, your right to housing, your right to jobs.

- Virginia has, by over 100, more barrier crimes to employment than the next state down, 175 of them.

But there's this huge pool of peers who are trained, ready, and willing to work in this environment and they can't get hired.

And their experience with that criminal background and jail history is critical to being able to support other people with the same history.

- Okay.

- So you can look and see what you want.

- Okay.

All right.

One of the biggest missing pieces to recovery for a lot of people is their ability to give back.

Whether or not you feel connected to your community, not just connected, but validated and accepted by your community.

(tranquil music) This is where I get what I need.

Sorry.

You know, this is the first time that Ive found a community that I feel I belong to.

I tell people that all the time.

Because, well, you know how it is, struggling out there in the rest of the world where society's telling you you're broken or there's something wrong with you, you don't fit in.

It's such a blessing.

And so I'm just so very grateful.

- These Mondays, it really helps all of us.

You feel what I'm saying?

- Thank you.

- So thank you.

- I have no doubt that we're gonna do great things in our community.

- [Missy] Thank you for starting it up.

(Nitch laughing) (tranquil music) (overlapping chatter) - My story is complex and constantly unfolding.

Most days I know where I've been, I know where I am, I know where I want to be.

Those days are my best days outside of ambiguity, hopelessness and chaos.

Today is one of those days.

But recovery in a vacuum could have never happened.

My recovery was intimately and intricately and inherently intertwined with yours.

- [Nitch] People are unaware that their trauma is kind of what's leading the way.

They've never been told, "That shouldn't have happened to you," or, "That shouldn't have happened that way to you."

Or, "There should have been someone there to comfort you after that."

- I'm a sexual assault survivor and that was at a very young age and that kind of, that trauma was just not something that I was equipped to deal with.

And so I sort of leaned into love and men and eventually Xanax (laughs) and then decided that those were the ways that I was gonna cope with what it was that I was feeling.

When I kind of got back on the right path, I found that I had a lot of people in my corner that I kind of had written off as being unsupportive of me.

We know trauma is a part of it.

We know that people who are at a disadvantage is a part of it.

We know systemic racism is a part of it.

But at the root of it is like our willingness to be vulnerable enough to recognize what it feels like to be desperately in need of help.

And like, are we gonna put our hand out and pull them up or are we gonna continue to put things between us and them?

- [Zach] What does recovery mean to you?

- For me it means my daughter.

It's been a long road.

I got her taken away and I got her back.

- I've seen people that have lost everything.

Kids, jail, whatever.

And they've picked themselves up and they've made a better life for themselves.

And, you know, in my opinion, I think people in recovery and addicts, some of the most resilient people ever.

- The belief that something can change.

You can't see light, you can't see light and all of a sudden you come out of the fog or the smoke from Canada and get to see, "Hey, there is a better life."

- My own personal recovery is continuing to get up every morning and put one foot in front of the other and understand that I'm doing the best that I can with what I have in front of me and that I'm continuing to surround myself with people that I know I can ask for help.

- It's okay to make mistakes.

People relapse, people make mistakes.

Like, most important thing is to keep trying.

I dunno, that's heavy.

- It's shocking what compassion can do.

- My ideal community would be built on compassionate action.

You have to have the compassion, the feeling, the sense of belonging to each other.

But you can't just have the feelings.

You have to put it into action.

And you have to build resources that people need.

- Everyone deserves to feel proud about themselves and about where they live.

- I want people to know, like, I'm a person in recovery and I'm the CEO of an addiction center.

And if you had met me at 19, and probably some people who see this have, you would know that I was a train wreck, that I was not a well person.

But I think like that's the story of recovery, right?

Is that it doesn't matter who you are, where you came from, you know, there's a saying in 12 Step, "But for the grace of God go I."

And it's something that I think of constantly.

Because I was a 19-year-old pregnant, you know, addicted to drugs, homeless, by the way.

And nobody in my life would've thought that, you know, today this is what I'd be doing.

And so I think that when we talk about addiction and recovery, like we have to talk about it with a, like, reverence and an understanding that, oh, I might cry, an understanding that like, it belongs to everybody.

And that it's accessible to everybody and that some of us, like, carry the responsibility of providing that.

- [Announcer] Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by... (tranquil music) ♪ Who belongs ♪ Is there room enough for all ♪ Who belongs ♪ Do we stand or do we fall ♪ And is there room in our hearts for this whole land ♪ ♪ Is there room ♪ For us ♪ In the heart ♪ Of the land (chime)