The drug crisis in West Virginia is rooted in opioids. It all started when oxycontin was brought in as a miracle pill that was supposed to help the coal miners in our area.
It personally hit Leon Brush and his wife hard — with the loss of their son Brian in 2006 to an oxycontin overdose, they knew they needed to do something.
“Donita said to me right after the funeral there aut to be a safe place where young men can go where the cops can’t get to them, where the drug dealers don’t reach them and so moms can sleep at night,” said Brush, co-founder of Brian’s Safehouse.
Once opioids became difficult to get through the oxycontin… fentanyl and heroin started rolling in and methamphetamine is also out there on the streets.
“Young people are just devastated by this,” Brush said. “They have lost their sense of purpose.”
The drug epidemic is ravaging the state of West Virginia but Brian’s Safehouse provides men struggling with addiction a safe place to learn to live life free from drugs.
Leon said each one of them rise to their own level of achievement.
“People that graduate from the safehouse, 75 percent of them stay sober and live productive lives. There’s a small amount of them that do go back… 10 percent of them do actually die from a drug overdose,” he said. “Our goal is to minimize that, try to tweak our system so that the 10 percent don’t exist.”
They do that by becoming a life partner with the graduates as much as they want them to be.
“Things that would make a difference on the real life level issues — for people who are struggling because once you’ve gone down this path of addiction, it’s a tough road,” said Brush.
It’s not relapse that Brian’s Safehouse wants to focus on; Leon says it’s what you do with your failures when it comes to this disease of addiction.
“You may have a choice at the very beginning stages of it. But once you get wrapped up into that, the choice is no longer really there,” Brush said. “We feel like the best way to do that is to get a person away from that environment and start a new path.”
To learn more…
https://www.brianssafehouse.org/
