THE LONG WAY HOME

​Three years ago this month, Dustin walked out of jail in Asheville, NC, and headed straight to a nearby drug rehab clinic. He had a bag of clothes over one shoulder and an old TV under the other. It was a drill he knew as well as anyone; for 20 years, he’d been cycling through lockup and detox, between dead-end jobs and nearly life-ending ones, all in service of his heroin addiction.
 
This time felt different. Nearing 40, he’d lost all interest in the addict’s life, the exhaustion, the lying, the cost and periodic horror, the nearness of death. During the months behind bars, alone in his own head, he’d also begun to believe he had special powers, like the ability to see through walls and to visualize others’ thoughts. ​

“I mean, it was full-blown psychosis, and it wasn’t long before the rehab clinic called 911 on me,” said Dustin, now a central staffer at the Mental Health GPS, who listens to callers’ stories and guides them to suitable services. “I got thrown into an ambulance and spent the next 72 hours in a mental ward.”

​Dustin is what’s known as a peer support specialist. After years of behavioral struggles and bad decisions, he got himself well and completed formal training to help others in need – as a peer. Peer specialists are central to the mission of the GPS: they’re our premier navigators, listening to callers and guiding them to apt services using the GPS’s unique database.

In its first few months of operation last winter, the GPS demonstrated its niche (> 300 calls) and viability. This summer, the service matured and developed a rhythm: ten callers a day, on average, almost all of whom received multiple options for support. We also added another peer employee, Matt B.

Peers’ experience and inside knowledge are what give our service credibility with callers. Dustin can usually establish rapport with callers in minutes. They can feel who he is, where he’s been, over the phone. He listens, and so do they. 

That he’s here at all defies any odds. His drug use started in high school when he was prescribed Percocet, an opiate, for a football injury. He took one a day, then two, and soon was switched to Oxycontin, the legal heroin peddled by Perdue Pharma that helped create a vast market of addicts and a growing army of dealers, including doctors, pharmacists, and big pharma, like J&J.

The pills were easy to get, and by the time he got out of college, Dustin was taking 15 to 20 a day. He held it together, barely, through a year of teaching elementary school in Florida.
 
That’s when the bottom fell out. State and federal officials began to limit opiate prescribing after 2012, and Dustin, like hundreds of thousands of Americans, turned in desperation to heroin. No more teaching 4th graders, not like this. He went the other direction, south to Miami and to the club scene and its underground economy of drugs, escorts, deals gone wrong, and gangs. 

“Haitians and Russian mainly, and man, it was just – it was crazy,” he said. “I saw people get killed in front of me. I saw so many people die of overdoses. I just knew my time was coming, but I didn’t know how to get out.”
 
He got himself arrested first on drug charges, but there’d be no scared-straight ending in Miami. Once the sentence was up, he got sucked right back into the life. He moved out of Miami to escape the gang violence to Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, and Tallahassee, relocating when things got hot. The result was a tour of half the jails on the Gulf Coast and more detox and rehab clinics than he can possibly count.
 
The move to Asheville was one last attempt to start over, to find some purpose other than getting high. It didn’t happen, not for a year. The craving was too strong, and he couldn’t make enough money to feed the habit, much less himself. He became a regular at rehab centers and halfway houses in town, well known to the police: one of those people, all trouble and no prospects, no chance.

“For a while, I was living out of my storage space in the winter,” he said. “I had to get high just to stay warm.”
 
Days later came his last arrest (trespassing), his subsequent psychosis, and after release, the 72-hour psych ward confinement. There the delusions dissipated, and in their place, he discovered a grim commitment. “I don’t know if it was my age, or the bad relationships, or just the years – twenty years,” he said. “Most heroin addicts don’t last more than five.”
 
It was different this time. After leaving the hospital, he got support from his parents to enter long-term rehab in Georgia and completed a 90-day program. He returned to Asheville clean and, through a mutual friend, connected with the GPS. 

“Everyone’s story is different, you know, like I came from a good, supportive middle-class family – there was none of the childhood trauma so many people have,” he said. “But I sure know what psychosis is, how powerful it is. I know what it means to do time, to live as an addict, all that. And I remember that when I was trying to find help all those years, I could not find anyone who’d gone through what I had."
 
“That’s why I think that experience is so important for the GPS. You’re not calling someone who’s answering phones for a paycheck. No, you’re getting someone who knows exactly what you’re going through and who cares.”