That would change your life, you know what I mean,
watching somebody die.
The pandemic has triggered a spike in drug-related deaths across the U.S.,
including those caused by opioids.
The unintended consequence of this lockdown in my life is that people are dying from it.
This Florida county has been hit hard.
Here, overdose rates have doubled this year to date compared to 2019.
Addiction doesn’t just affect the addict. It affects the families.
The addiction crisis is killing people and ripping families apart.
We're not doing enough, you know? It seems like it's never enough.
So what are the consequences of this pandemic on those struggling with addiction?
And why is lockdown having such a deadly effect on addicts?
Pasco County is largely a rural county. It's not a very affluent County as a whole.
This neighborhood is mostly rental properties, mostly transient.
You take away whatever income they had, 7 or 8 dollars an hour at a restaurant
or any service industry job or construction,
and now you have really a perfect recipe for people to struggle.
These were the ones that were hanging by a thread already.
They were vulnerable before the pandemic struck.
Kevin’s ex-partner Missy was unexpectedly left without any support during the pandemic.
I got a call from her nephew. And he told me on the phone his aunt had overdosed.
She's dead.
We have an 11-year-old son together.
So my first immediate thought was, how do I explain this to a kid that thought his mother was a rockstar?
Given her addiction and her struggles,
he loved his mother so much, and she loved him so much.
It felt terrible. I honestly thought it was a joke at first, and
as they kept telling me that it was true, I just slowly started crying.
She was my mom. She helped me with stuff. She was smart.
Kevin says during the outbreak, Missy was in jail waiting for a prison sentence for selling crack cocaine.
She was writing me letters telling me that essentially you were right.
“I have psychiatric issues I'm gonna deal with. I’m gonna get back into church when I go to prison.”
Missy had all the hope in the world for the 17 and a half months she was about to do.
And she was looking forward to doing that time and then coming back
and being the Missy that we all knew when she was sober for five years.
I’ve lost her before and she was finally back,
and we even made plans for the next weekend. We’ve always been talking,
and how much she loved me and how much she regretted leaving me.
Because of COVID, some nonviolent offenders like Missy were granted an early release.
The worst thing that ever happened to Missy was that they let her off of her prison sentence.
She was taken out of a protected environment of jail,
and she was put into a hopeless and helpless situation for somebody looking to recover.
No job, no meetings, no church, no income.
You gotta do what you gotta do to eat and get high and wait this thing out.
Florida's opioid crisis has its roots in the mid-‘90s when prescription drugs like OxyContin hit the market.
Florida was the epicenter for the pill mills before they shut them all down.
By the time they shut them all down, poor neighborhoods like Holiday were inundated with opioids.
In 2010, the state was home to over 1,000 pain clinics that sold nearly 90% of OxyContin in the U.S.
- earning Florida the name, “oxy express.”
Ariel Heart struggles with addiction.
She says she's witnessed three overdoses in the last two months.
So good to see you.
It’s been a long f*cking year. It’s been a long f*ckng year. But it’s all right.
- You look great! - Thanks, yeah.
- You were...? - I'm not doing too bad.
Samantha is a former addict who is now dedicating her life to helping other people with addiction.
She met Ariel while running a 12-step program.
This is a different situation than it used to be. You know? It’s dangerous.
People are dying, especially with the shutdown.
There's no meetings, there's no churches, there's no support, there's no — what do you do?
And then you're going to flush a bunch of money into the system.
Guess who just got rich? Dope boy fresh.
Ariel says that the pressures of lockdown have led some to spend their stimulus check money on drugs.
And the stress level is higher and it’s [dope is] everywhere.
You know like, it’s everywhere. It's a form of currency.
I come from a really good family and good name here in town
and for all intents and purposes, like my childhood was great.
My mom was addicted my whole life though.
I would do any opiate that I could get my hand on.
I was spending upwards of, at least like, $150 a day.
But I'm grateful now to have battled addiction myself because
it gave me an understanding of like what [my mom] was going through, and
that it wasn't just me, you know? Like, it wasn't that I wasn't a good enough daughter.
It was just that she was fighting a battle bigger than herself.
So now that you’ve been out and you've been struggling, you've been out here trying to make it,
right? And you're in the game.
You're back in the game. How has Ariel been keeping herself sane?
I haven't. I've been insane. I haven't. I've been insane.
Nobody makes it out alive.
I haven’t heard of one successful, like, successful drug addict, drug dealer
that's alive and not in prison.
Despite the odds, these women are fighting for their recovery.
Jennifer set up this sober living home just weeks before the pandemic.
I'm an addict. I obsess over things.
We're confined in our apartment and there is only so much you can clean, right?
So you clean and then you come back through and then you start looking and you start obsessing.
- It's a problem. Yes, because you're just here, so.
In this past week, we have lost what? Two or three [people to addiction]?
This week. This week.
And I don’t know anybody — yeah, this week — that even contracted the virus. Right? - No.
- I don’t know anybody who has the virus right now. - Right.
The whole world got to wear a mask. The whole world has changed.
You’ve got to stay indoors, all this.
Yet there are all these people out there who are fighting for their lives, losing their lives to their addiction.
But it’s isolation that does it.
So where is that epidemic at?
Thank you, Jesus, for today. Thank you for all the women here, Lord.
Thank you for forgiveness of our sins, God. Thank you for providing Anchored in Recovery.
Thank you for loving us, Jesus, and never giving up on us, God.
I was not gonna close.
I would much rather stay open and die of the coronavirus than active addiction.
As of June, 30 to 40 million Americans lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
Leslie Ingram also lost her home.
She couldn’t find a place to stay with her kids, so the family had to live separately.
I’ve never been without my kids, never,
and to be pushed to the point where I couldn’t even have them under my roof?
I didn’t even have a roof.
And it was easier to walk into a trap house, you know what I mean?
I don’t have to worry about going to sleep if I just don’t sleep.
You know, I don’t have to worry about being hungry if I don’t eat,
and that's the hard truth of it.
'Cause you wanna escape, you wanna escape the pain.
You want to run away from it.
You can’t face that kind of thing.
Leslie’s kids supported her through the darkest moments.
I was afraid. You know, I finally broke down to them and I was like, look.
I broke it down and I was real and I ... I need help.
And they said: Mom, get it. They were there to see me off. They were there when Jen came to pick me up.
Me and my brother kind of sat outside and we cried for a good hour after she left
because I don't really have that much time left of my childhood
and just want to make the best of it.
I am sorry for putting our family through everything that it's went through.
Since I’ve made this choice, our family has gotten stronger and closer in a sense.
And I don’t want that to change ever.
Me either.
I think you're amazing and I think you're beautiful.
Peer support groups are fundamental to recovery,
which is why Kevin had such a hard time closing the 12-step program
he's been running for over a decade.
You know, instead of just being friends, we became like family.
We initially thought that we wouldn't shut down our 12-step programs, regardless,
because that's how important it is.
Fast-forward a month or two when my phone starts ringing and people are dying.
Now they're not just dying of a COVID virus, they're dying of overdoses and they're dying of suicide.
There is a hopelessness that comes along at that moment, I can tell you: you feel powerless.
Tonight, Kevin will open the doors for his recovery meeting for the first time
after being closed for five months.
There was an energy and an excitement to being back here again tonight.
I'm really looking forward to it. The timing couldn't be better to be filming tonight.
Then, of course, we have to worry that does anybody show up?
I mean, are people so used to — is anybody left out there that we haven't heard from,
that will come back and give recovery another try or continue in their recovery journey?
Today, Ariel is on the road to recovery and heading to Sam’s new sober living home in Georgia.
It's nice not to be forgotten, you know, when you get to a point where you try to do it all right
and it's still, like, everything just comes against you.
- Do you want to meet Miss Sheela? - Yes, yeah.
- How are you? - Good.
- Oh man, it’s so pretty! - Well, this is your new home.
I'm so excited.
They say teamwork make the dream work.
Listen, stop it. I say that to my kids. I say that to my kids, like,
I always tell them: teamwork makes the? And they say, dream work!
They get so excited — yes — that’s right. God is good, all the time.
Imagine your kids coming to visit.
Imagine you having a home one day, because you're gonna have one.
A yard where they can play in — yep — that you can call home, your very own.
Because when you leave this program, that's where you're heading.
I don’t know. I just don’t know if I can do this, you know?
Everything we ever wanted is right on the other side of fear. So, this is natural.
- So this is fear. - Exactly.
- That's good. - Yeah, no, I know.
I am under no delusion how powerful an enemy we face every day in the recovery community.
It's not a ... it's not a battle that will be easily won for sure.