Fentanyl Part 8: The Activist
“Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. And some people ask, ‘What happened?’” – Dan Schneider, from the Netflix documentary “The Pharmacist.”
Together, Tonja Myles and Brad Barber are making things happen.
Myles is a community activist, a certified peer support specialist, a veteran, co-founder of Set Free Indeed Ministry and an expert on mental health, substance abuse and untreated trauma. She is also a recovered crack addict, a suicide attempt survivor, and a victim of childhood sexual abuse. She is recognized for her recovery work both locally and nationally, specifically by President George W. Bush, as his guest during his 2003 State of the Union Address. Her superpower is her vulnerability, her story, her past. She connects easily with people from all different backgrounds and experiences because she is so open about her own story. Her willingness to be that vulnerable cultivates deep relationships with many people in the Baton Rouge community. She understands that the solution to addiction is connection.
Myles is also a natural orator and great at one liners that make you think. She often says, “Addiction is a ‘DIS ease’” and Fentanyl can be found from “the curbside to the country club, Highland Road to Hollywood Street,” and “Fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction.”
She is also a wife and the mother of three-year-old Mitsy, her Australian Shepherd emotional support dog. Myles is black.
Barber is a businessman, the chief executive officer of H&E Equipment Services, Inc., a $1 billion Baton Rouge-based equipment company with 2,300 employees in 26 states. He is a philanthropist who spent five years as a volunteer for CASA, Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children. He is a father of five children – two of whom are adopted – and has an endless amount of empathy and goodwill for children who have been defeated. And he's white.
It's important to mention race at this point in the series because it’s an underlying systemic issue for nearly every social issue in the United States. What is currently happening with fentanyl and opioid addiction is often compared to what didn’t happen in the 1980s during the crack epidemic. Our country is focusing on harm reduction strategies to fight opioid addiction, which means protecting those suffering with addiction by providing resources and services they need like needle exchange programs, Methadone Clinics, Medication-Assisted Treatment or MAT. This is the opposite of what happened during the crack epidemic when predominantly black communities were devastated by those addicted to crack. Instead of offering health options as a solution, our country criminalized drug addiction. U.S. leaders created legislation with harsh penalties, so more people of color faced jail time, splintering families and communities. Access to harm reduction resources were basically nonexistent.
“I’m not going to lie, when I first started sitting in these meetings about opioids in the suburbs and how to get people treatment, it did hurt a little bit,” Myles said. “No one said that about me. No one said that about the thousands of people who looked like me. They called them crackheads and locked them up under the Rockefeller Laws. But I had to get past the emotion of it all and realize that addiction is addiction.”
Myles is referring to the Rockefeller Drug Laws, named after Nelson Rockefeller, who was the governor of New York at the time the laws were adopted in 1973. These laws created stricter sentencing guidelines and dramatically increased the number of incarcerations in New York, setting the stage for other states to pass similar laws. According to an April 2, 2009 article in Time magazine, “In 1986, the Reagan Administration passed a law requiring federal judges to give fixed sentences to drug offenders based on variables including the amount seized and the presence of firearms.”
Politics in our country often mimic a pendulum. When we swing too far in one direction as a country, we often tend to swing extreme in the other direction. After harsh penalties for non-violent drug offenders were enacted and people faced long and mandatory prison sentences, our country took a collective pause and decided those consequences were too severe, so legislation changed again, and criminal justice reform and harm reduction strategies became the new buzzwords.
Back to Myles and Barber.
They met a little over a year ago when Barber needed help with an employee, he had recently hired who was suffering from addiction. Myles is good friends with Mayor Sharon Weston Broome while Barber has contacts at the mayor’s office.
“I called the mayor’s office to see who could help me find my employee and they gave me Tonja Myles’ name,” Barber said. “I texted her before 7 a.m. one morning asking her for help and within five minutes she called me.”
Together, Myles and Barber found his employee at the CATS bus station on Florida Boulevard. He had been using “Mojo,” a synthetic cannabinoid that causes hallucinations and violent behaviors. Barber was impressed with how responsive Myles was when asked for help and how easy it was for her to talk to the employee.
Their relationship grew and this duo became close friends and started working on a fentanyl awareness campaign.
“I’m on this journey with Tonja. She has become a friend of mine. I like people of action and that sense of urgency and direct approach is very appealing to me,” he said. “She has a passion for making things happen.”
I met with them separately – with Barber at his H&E office on Pecue Lane off Airline Highway, across from Woman’s Hospital and with Myles at The Bridge Center for Hope, a short-term rehabilitation center on Florida Boulevard, across from the Baton Rouge General.
Barber’s office is glass windows and long conference tables with deep, high-backed leather, rolling office chairs. His receptionist asked me if I would like coffee or water when I arrived and when I left, chatting with me about the weather and my upcoming trip. The Bridge Center for Hope is directly across the street from the (former Mid City) Baton Rouge Clinic and it has a clinical, hospital-type feel. The doors are locked from the outside, you have to press a buzzer to get inside. There is a small waiting room, with staff wearing masks, looking at me curiously when I entered with Myles and Mitsy.
Even though Barber and Myles seem to come from two completely different backgrounds, their partnership seems very natural and needed. If fentanyl is affecting all demographics and populations of our city, it almost seems imperative that people from different walks of life should be sitting down at the same table to find solutions together. Maybe I’m more surprised by their partnership because it doesn’t happen as often as it should. But I’m certainly encouraged by it.
Sitting down with Myles, is like chatting with an old friend who is comfortable enough with who she is to share her story – all of her story. Myles has been in recovery for 38 years and survived three suicide attempts. No one thought she would live past 18.
“I tell the truth to tell people to decrease the stigma. Forever I wouldn’t go to therapy, and I owned a treatment center,” Myles said. “I said I would pray it away because I felt shame. People feel shame, they feel like it’s a moral issue, like it’s their fault because it’s their choice. Are you kidding me? No one says when they’re little they want to grow up and be a crack addict. Addiction is big and it affects everyone. We need to look at addiction and mental health as integrative. When the health care system starts to look at it as integrative, that’s when all the systems fall into place.”
Myles is a trailblazer for uniting people through her When You Are Ready BR Awareness Campaign, which has partnered with the city and business leaders – including Barber – to reduce opioid overdoses and addiction in Baton Rouge. They focus on areas where they know drug use is occurring and distribute Narcan, push cards with information on local detox and treatment providers and flyers with information on mental health help – including calling the number “988” if you’re feeling depressed.
“When I first started this two years ago, I felt like Paul Revere screaming about fentanyl,” Myles says. “I went to anyone who would listen and started inviting people to come together. We had to make sure we had everything clicking together and systems built into place. I knew we are all going to have to work together.”
She started creating a network, organizing meetings to collaborate services, and she invited business leaders, police officers, politicians, and the district attorney. The state talked to the city. The city talked to law enforcement and people started to listen, she said.
“People were listening because they were tired of losing lives and tired of having systems not built into place,” she says. “It’s affecting everyone. Fentanyl does not discriminate.”
After Barber and Myles met, H&E jumped on board to help Myles spread awareness with a $100,000 donation that included a one-year advertising and marketing campaign on billboards around town and in 225 Magazine, inRegister Magazine and the Baton Rouge Business Report, all magazines owned by the Melara Enterprise.
Barber hopes that his activism will encourage others to spread the word about fentanyl.
“Unless you know of someone who was impacted, you watch the news incessantly or are a mental health professional,” Barber said, “You may not know about the dangers of fentanyl. Everyone knows that drugs are bad, but this is a try-it-and-you-could-die-today bad.”
The ninth and final part of this series, “The Conclusion” will be published Monday, November 14, 2022.
November 7, 2022