A day in the life of Boyd County QRT
Jun. 12—ASHLAND — It almost seems like the premise of a 1980s buddy-cop flick — a recovering addict and a patrol officer teaming up to fight the opioid epidemic in their community.
And although they joke and jive while on their rounds on a sunny Friday, the work of Cody Williams and Deputy Zachary Mitchell is deadly serious.
Since 2017, Williams and Mitchell have been going on rounds to the recently overdosed to reach out and give them help. They couldn't be any more opposite — Williams is laid back and low-key, while Mitchell is bombastic and with a type A personality.
As the Boyd County Quick Response Team — an effort backed by Pathways — over the past two years Williams said he has contacted 155 people who have recently suffered an overdose. Of those 155, about 56 entered treatment and 14 completed their treatment. At first, Williams said he hoped to get out there and lead droves of people to sobriety.
"I learned that wasn't going to happen like I thought," Williams said. "Now I'm just content with planting seeds."
Some seeds die on the top soil — the first stop in today's rounds was at a motel on U.S. 60. After several knocks on the door, Williams scratches the name off the list and sticks a card in the door. Mitchell said motel contacts are usually the trickiest.
"Most of the time after they overdose, they'll get kicked out of the room or they just don't come back," Mitchell said.
However, other seeds grow — Williams recalled meeting with one young lady, giving her some information and Narcan (an overdose reversal medication) and leaving her his number. Two months later, she called and asked to go to treatment.
As far as Williams knowns, after more than a year in treatment, she's still doing good.
Anyone who is familiar with door to door sales knows working a territory and developing a book of business can be challenging. But after a contact is made, the salesman might drop in on a potential client again after some time — follow up and check up.
It's pretty similar for Williams. Over the years, he's built relationships with the sick and suffering drug addicts and alcoholics, even if they opt not to go to treatment. Sometimes, that miracle — actually reaching out for help — never comes, Mitchell said.
"Unfortunately, some die before they can get it," he said. "I'll have to call Cody and say, 'remember so and so? He just OD'd again and he didn't come back.' It's pretty sad."
After the stop at the motel, Mitchell looked at his laptop and pulled up another name in the system — the pair travel a ways up 60 to a ranch style house up a side road.
There, a pale man in his mid-30s stood out in the yard listening to music through headphones. When the dogs started barking, he looked up to see Williams and Mitchell — one with a beard and a green polo, the other clean shaven with a utility belt draped with his night-stick, his gun and his taser.
"You're not in trouble at all, we're just here to talk with you," Mitchell said. "We about lost you the other night. If we'd been any longer, you'd been gone."
The deputy stood off to the side as Williams started asking the man questions. He said his story was fairly typical — he'd started out on painkillers and leveled up to heroin in his 20s. Over the past few years, he started using Subboxone — a medication used to wean addicts off heroin.
But he slipped up and took a Xanax.
"I lost my inhibitions, so the next I knew I did some heroin," he said. "I think part of the problem is I tried to wean myself off too fast."
Williams got clean the old-school way — he went to meetings, worked the 12 steps and kept away from all mind or mood altering substances. But his work with the QRT has taught him to be open minded about things like Subboxone and Methadone.
"I've come around to it, but for me I just couldn't stop shooting them up," Williams said. "I've gotten a lot more open minded about things like Vivitrol and Subboxone because if it helps them from getting it off the streets, then they can stay alive long enough to get clean."
Williams asked the man if he'd ever been to treatment — besides the Subboxone clinic, no. But he was open to going to some 12-step recovery meetings, so Williams scribbled his number down on a card and handed it to him, along with some information about treatment resources if he wanted to get off Subboxone and Narcan in case it ever happened again.
The man was polite and seemed interested. That, according to Williams, is the best case outcome.
"You might get people who said they overdose because they ate too much fried chicken, or whatever. They don't want to acknowledge the problem," Williams said. "He was pretty open about what was going on."
Mitchell added, "We extended the hand. Now it's up to him to reach out and grab it."
The next two stops are in Westwood — pretty nice neighborhoods, not streets of ruin and trash. Lawns are taken care of, houses immaculately decorated.
"It goes to show you, addiction doesn't know any zip codes," Mitchell said.
One overdose had happened hours prior to the QRT arrival — with no one answering the door, save some barking dogs, Williams and Mitchell chalk it up to the patient being at the hospital.
At another stop, the kid — he wasn't even 20 yet — wasn't home. But an exhausted woman answered the door, explaining that he only stayed there part of the time. A few days prior, he'd been working out in the yard with his dad, when he laid down and went into an overdose.
"If he was my kid, I'd made him go to treatment already," the woman said.
Williams heard her out and gave her his number. He asked for ways to contact the kid, ways he could follow up. Again, he left Narcan. It turns out, pressed pills were the suspect here.
"I remember when I was that age, I didn't want to do heroin, but I did pills," Williams told the woman. "The problem is, they're pressing fentanyl to look like any pill out there. So you don't know what you're getting."
The woman took the Narcan, saying she hoped she didn't have to use it.
"Spray in one nostril, wait a couple minutes, then spray in the other nostril," Williams explained. "Call 911."
The last stop of the day was in South Ashland. Again, nice neighborhood — none of that blight the popular imagination expects a heroin user to reside in.
When Mitchell knocked on the door, a little girl answered.
"Nobody is in trouble here, but can I talk to one of the grown ups here?" Mitchell asked.
The little girl ran off and fetched her me-maw.
Me-Maw was pleasant, but exhausted as well. Her daughter, the overdose patient in question, had agreed to a short stint in treatment. The family had been struggling with her addiction for four years now.
Williams said talking with the family affected by the disease of addiction is just as important as dealing with the addict themselves.
"It effects everybody around them, and the families can feel like they're the only ones who are dealing with it," he said. "We need to support them just as much as the addict to get them help. They need resources too, like establishing healthy boundaries, things like that."
The woman had been clean for a little bit, then started using at the tail end of her pregnancy. The child's father had already died of an overdose. Child Protective Services got involved and the woman was able to get into treatment again.
But on the anniversary of the death of her child's father, the girl OD'd again.
"She must be allergic to it, because every time she does heroin she overdoses," the grandmother said.
She'd been hanging out with users — Me-maw started rattling off some names and both Williams and Mitchell nodded their heads. They knew them. And a couple of them Mitchell called "bad news."
According to Me-maw, her daughter didn't come from a rough background. In fact, a few of the men in her family had careers in law enforcement.
"She was against drugs, against drinking, then she got with some of the people and here it is," Me-Maw said. "We even put up thousands of dollars to send her to a treatment center down south. She did good for a while, but then she went back to it."
Williams again offered resources and Narcan — the woman gratefully took them. He told her there are ways to get her daughter into treatment without breaking the bank. He offered to slide by once her daughter was out of her detox — as Williams later said, a week is quick enough to dry out, not attain any sustainable recovery.
"The best we can do is help people get their start," Williams said. "We can't force it on them, we can't make them do it. All we can do is lay it out there and hope they're willing to pick up the tools."
Mitchell, who has worked in law enforcement for six years, said he enjoys the work because it allows him to be more "proactive."
"We see drug use all the time in different crimes, especially petty thefts and things like that. So by putting treatment options out there on the street, it can make a huge difference," Mitchell said. "It improves the quality of life in this community. This isn't a bad community, but we have a drug problem here. My job is to protect and serve. This is one way to serve the public."
(606) 326-2653 — henry@dailyindependent.com
