In the heart of Appalachia’s opioid epidemic, a sliver of hope

For three years, Leon and Donita Brush struggled to help their son Brian beat his opioid addiction. What began with a pill quickly spiraled out of control. A 20-year-old college student, Brian was reeling from a breakup when someone offered him Percocet to ease the emotional pain, his father said.“He just said, ‘Dad, there was no turning back. Once I started down that path, I wanted more,’” Mr. Brush said.The owner of a carpet and flooring store in this small city in southern West Virginia — in the heart of the opioid epidemic that kills hundreds annually in the state — Mr. Brush didn’t know much about addiction treatment. But he and his wife were committed to getting their son sober.They tried a 28-day rehab program. They sought help from the regional mental health center. They sent him to “Grandpa’s bootcamp.” They did private counseling. They enrolled him in the U.S. Army. Nothing worked.Brian fatally overdosed in January 2006. He was 23 years old.“Donita and I were sitting in the living room and she said to me, ‘You know, there ought to be a safe place where men can go and learn to deal with addiction, where the cops can’t capture them, where the drug dealers can’t phone them and so moms can sleep at night.’ I said, ‘Are you serious about that?’ She said, ‘Yes.’”The Brushes consulted with their pastor and visited a range of addiction treatment centers to find the right model. Two years later, they opened a 12-month residential addiction treatment program. It was the rehab they had never been able to provide for their son. Named Brian’s Safehouse, it has become a sliver of hope in a region eviscerated by addiction. 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.”