In an innocuous meeting room on the south side of Newark, a small city in central Ohio, about 20 people, members of the Newark Think Tank on Poverty's leadership team, are gathered on a Sunday afternoon in late October. They are deciding on a new campaign, and Eric Lee is hoping it will focus on addiction—hoping that, as an organization, it will begin to advocate for equal treatment for all users, whether their drug of choice is opioids or methamphetamine.
The think tank, focused primarily on poverty, re-entry, and housing, is now applying its grassroots organizing model to the addiction crisis here in central Ohio, what many consider to be the heart of a nationwide epidemic. Allen Schwartz, a community organizer and one of the group's founders, is running the meeting, a wide-ranging discussion focused on Newark's problem with meth, which he says is viewed mostly as a "poor man's" drug. Only half of the crisis is being addressed in this community, he says. Unlike opioids, which dominate the headlines and produce the spectacle of an overdose, meth kills slowly—people, and families, and communities.
There's a lot of skepticism here. Some wonder if state and federal grant money is earmarked exclusively for opioids or if it can be used for meth. Some wonder if there's going to be enough money at all. And some wonder if the people who need resources will actually have access to them.
[For more on this story by JACK SHULER, go to https://psmag.com/magazine/a-y...in-rust-belt-america]
(Photo: Will Widmer)
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