WILSON Syringe Services Program
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WHAT IS A SYRINGE SERVICES PROGRAM?
It is a community-based program that provides a key pathway to services to prevent HIV and viral hepatitis transmission along with connections to substance use disorder treatment. WHAT DOES THE WILSON SYRINGE SERVICES PROGRAM OFFER?
HOW DO I LEARN MORE? Call: (252) 237-3141 E-mail: wilsoncountySEP@gmail.com Location: Wilson Health Department, 1801 Glendale Dr. Wilson, NC |
wilson professional services
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WPS Treatment Center provides medication-assisted treatment, combined with counseling and group therapy, to help opiate addicted individuals refrain from using narcotics. To ensure the highest level of care and provide for the best outcomes, we provide treatment planning tailored to each individual patient.
SCHEDULE A CONSULTATION We Can Help Today! Call 252-206-5799 |
105 Douglas Street Wilson, NC 27893 Tel 252-281-4724 We provide mental health and addiction services to people across North Carolina at our eight locations. Our goal is to help individuals and families achieve wellness and recovery. We provide a level of unparalleled care with a commitment that each person encountered by our providers and staff shall be treated with courtesy, fairness and respect. We also commit to provide a place where the values of our providers and those we serve are affirmed throughout each stage of the treatment process.
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What We Treat
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carolina family health centers, inc.
Medication Assisted Treatment Program
Available at Wilson Community Health Center (Wilson) and Freedom Hill Community Health Center (Tarboro)
Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) is the use of medication, in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies, to provide a whole-patient approach to the treatment of substance use disorders. MAT programs provide a safe and structured delivery of medication to reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms. When combined with behavioral counseling, MAT medications can improve overall well-being and decrease the risk of relapse, with low potential for adverse events.
GOALS OF A MAT PROGRAM
1. Promote long-term recovery
2. Reduce the potential for overdose for patients who struggle with opiate, opioid and alcohol use disorders
OUR MAT PROGRAM
· Vivitrol®, a once-monthly injection, for the treatment of both opioid and alcohol use disorder.
· Other oral medications for treatment of alcohol use disorder.
· Oral buprenorphine/naloxone (Suboxone®) and long -acting buprenorphine (Sublocade®) for the treatment opioid use disorder.
· Most insurances accepted.
· Sliding fee discount program available for uninsured patients.
· Our providers can refer to outside agencies.
· Our pharmacy offers discounted medication.
Call (252) 641-0514 Ext 410 or (252) 373-6767 for new and established patient appointments.
FREE TRANSPORTATION AVAILABLE
Available at Wilson Community Health Center (Wilson) and Freedom Hill Community Health Center (Tarboro)
Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) is the use of medication, in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies, to provide a whole-patient approach to the treatment of substance use disorders. MAT programs provide a safe and structured delivery of medication to reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms. When combined with behavioral counseling, MAT medications can improve overall well-being and decrease the risk of relapse, with low potential for adverse events.
GOALS OF A MAT PROGRAM
1. Promote long-term recovery
2. Reduce the potential for overdose for patients who struggle with opiate, opioid and alcohol use disorders
OUR MAT PROGRAM
· Vivitrol®, a once-monthly injection, for the treatment of both opioid and alcohol use disorder.
· Other oral medications for treatment of alcohol use disorder.
· Oral buprenorphine/naloxone (Suboxone®) and long -acting buprenorphine (Sublocade®) for the treatment opioid use disorder.
· Most insurances accepted.
· Sliding fee discount program available for uninsured patients.
· Our providers can refer to outside agencies.
· Our pharmacy offers discounted medication.
Call (252) 641-0514 Ext 410 or (252) 373-6767 for new and established patient appointments.
FREE TRANSPORTATION AVAILABLE
MOM: Moms on a Mission
MOMS ON A MISSION
Hell-bent to get high: Drug deaths spur mothers’ support group
Posted on March 17, 2022
Local newsTop news
By Drew C. Wilson
dwilson@wilsontimes.com | 252-265-7818
In the last year of his life, Katina Shackleford-Wright’s drug-addicted son beat her up, pulled a knife on her, fired a gun at her and threatened to kill her.
Shackleford-Wright’s son died from a gunshot wound as he broke into his mother’s Ashbrook Drive home on Jan. 27. Rakim Jamar Shackleford, a 31-year-old Beddingfield High School graduate, was high on embalming fluid when he died, according to his mother.
Now, Shackleford-Wright has joined other mothers of drug-addicted children to form the new support group Moms on a Mission, or MOM.
Modeled after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, MOM began to take shape in February.
Its members are women who have either lost a child, seen a child incarcerated or experienced distress with a child stemming from substance abuse or misuse.
Alisha Winstead, head of the group, had already heard from another family about a a similar experience with a drug-addicted child, so when Shackleford-Wright approached her, they decided to join forces.
Winstead said she’s employed in a large corporation in Wilson and is a “philanthropist at heart.”
“I am somewhat of a community organizer, and I like organizing,” Winstead said.
After hearing Shackleford-Wright’s story, Winstead felt pressed to help by organizing the group.
“I couldn’t find rest,” Winstead said. “It was like, ‘We have got to do something.’”
‘IT MADE HIM A BEAST’
Shackleford-Wright said before getting involved with drugs, her son was “humble and well-mannered.”
Shackleford’s first involuntary commitment was in April 2020.
“He had wrecked his car, and he was high,” Shackleford-Wright said. “He went to rehab three times down to Wilmington.”
That’s when the mother learned her son was ingesting embalming fluid to get high.
“It’s a poison. There nothing he can do,” she said. “It messes with your mind. You hallucinate. One time they say he was holding his family hostage, but it was him holding his own self hostage. He just believed people were in the house. He got locked up and he stayed a couple of days and they let him out.”
After his release, Shackleford led police on a high-speed chase on Interstate 95 and U.S. 264 and was sentenced to jail for two months. He was released in October.
“He was doing good, and then right after Christmas Eve he started back on it, and he was just doing so much stuff,” Shackleford-Wright said. “It wasn’t him. It made him a beast.”
In the two weeks before his death, Shackleford was out of control, his mother said.
“I’m terrified of him, but I don’t want to put him in the street, because he’s mine.”
The day before he died, Shackleford was high and flipped his car into a ditch.
He was arrested and taken to Wilson Medical Center for evaluation.
Shackleford-Wright begged for her son to be kept in custody and re-committed.
“He’s high. He’s a threat to himself and the community,” she pleaded.
She said officials told her that unless her son signed his own commitment papers, he would have to be released.
“He had went back home and stole my car with no tags on it, and he’s riding around,” Shackleford-Wright said. “That night, when I got home at 7:30, he was knocked out, in a trance. He’s just in a deep sleep. So I go in my room.”
She pushed dressers and other furniture against the door to feel safe.
The mother said she and her cat had to crawl in and out of the bedroom through a window.
“This has been my life, living in fear,” Shackleford-Wright said. “He finally woke up, and I was scared of him.”
‘A HORRIBLE SITUATION’
Since her son previously pulled a knife and a gun on her, she knew anything could happen. Her son was known to walk up and down the highway naked when he was high.
The worried mother immediately called 911.
“They was like, ‘Yeah, somebody had called because he’s up the street screaming,’” Shackleford-Wright said. “The police come and can’t find him. He’s back in the woods. He came out high as he can be, ’cause now he’s drinking it. He’s drinking embalming fluid. So he’s a beast, and so they were like, ‘We remember him from this morning. He got out?’ ‘Yeah, they let him out.’”
Wilson police took Shackleford to Wilson Medical Center around 10 p.m.
“I’m like, ‘I can get some sleep now.’ I went to sleep,” Shackleford-Wright said.
But a couple hours later, one of Shackleford’s friends called to tell her he’d been released from the hospital.
“So by that time, my son called me all irate. ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that,’” Shackleford-Wright recalled. “And I can’t believe they let him out. I called 911, and by that time I’m telling them, ‘Please come on, hurry, because he’s already pulled a knife on me one time. He’s beat me up one time. Can y’all please just come?’”
Shackleford-Wright waited, terrified.
“Before I know it, he had kicked the whole door frame down. Me and him was in a tussle, and he didn’t make it,” she said, crying as she relayed the final moments of her son’s life.
Shackleford-Wright said last week she didn’t want to discuss the details of her son’s death.
“That’s something that is between me and my family,” she said.
Wilson police said Shackleford died of a gunshot wound around 1:27 a.m. on Jan. 27. Investigators say the fatal shot wasn’t self-inflicted.
“It’s just something I don’t want to talk about,” Shackleford-Wright said. “It’s already a horrible situation, and I just prefer to keep it like that.”
No charges were filed in the death.
“I was just begging them to help me,” Shackleford-Wright said. “I just needed help that day.”
She wished recovery programs were available for people abusing embalming fluid.
“Some people say it’s PCP. Some people say it’s ‘loveboat.’ Some people say it’s ‘poison.’ Some say it’s not a drug, but it’s doing something, because Wilson is terrible. Our young kids are on this mess. It’s nothing for you to go and see them like zombies. It’s just crazy, and I just felt like my son would have been alive.”
ALARMING FACTOR
Jeff Hill, director of the Wilson County Substance Prevention Coalition, said smoking embalming fluid produces a similar high to PCP.
“Embalming fluid can also be a carrier for the drug PCP,” he said. “It can be dissolved into it and used as a dipping substance to be able to smoke it.”
Addicts will dip cigarettes, blunts or marijuana cigarettes into the fluid before smoking them. Others will inhale the aerosolized fluid in vaping systems.
“The prevalence of ‘pressed pills’ on the streets is becoming higher and higher, and that is why you are seeing an increase in overdose rates because people are buying one thing and taking it and getting something completely different,” Hill said.“The alarming factor that they are bringing to light is that it is really beginning to infiltrate our youth within the county. The prevalence and the availability and the ease of access is the alarming thing for an organization like us to see when that gets into the hands of a 12-year-old or a 15-year-old.
We spoke with the county at a conference last week where they had two middle schoolers age 12 that overdosed off of fentanyl.”
‘THEY ARE NOT THEMSELVES’
Patricia Harris Atkinson, another MOM member, lost son Al Douglas Langston III to a fentanyl overdose.
Langston, a 2015 Hunt High School graduate, had joined the Navy and served aboard the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman.
Atkinson said as a youngster, her son was polite and “never cussed me out before.”
“He never, ever, ever disrespected me in any shape, form or fashion as far as talking back,” Atkinson said.
In 2020, Atkinson said, her son started taking “Perc,” or Percocet, a prescription painkiller that combines opioid and non-opioid pain relievers with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid the Drug Enforcement Administration calls “80 to 100 times stronger than morphine.”
“They are paranoid when they get this stuff in their system.” Atkinson said. “They are not themselves. He fussed me out last February. He had a chance to wake up and call back and apologize. He wasn’t himself.”
Atkinson said her son had a bright future.
“He had a lot to lose by putting a pill in his mouth,” she said.
When Langston died on April 3, 2020, Atkinson said a toxicology reported showed her son had 6 milligrams of fentanyl in his system.
“It bust his heart wide open,” she said. “He had a heart attack. My son was bleeding out his ear.”
Atkinson said most people don’t understand opioid addiction until it affects their family.
“There needs to be something done about these drug dealers inside here making it, purchasing it, putting it out there on the street,” she said.
Unlike prescriptions filled at the pharmacy, pills bought on the street don’t come with a list of ingredients.
“I could be anything,” Atkinson said. “It’s supposed to be a Percocet, but if it ends up being heroin once they take it and put it in their mouth, it will kill them just like that.”
‘STREET CHEMISTS’
Hill said his first interaction with a person on embalming fluid was in 2018.
“I worked previously as a case manager for a different organization here in Wilson County, and unfortunately we had a client that, while they were intoxicated or high on this substance, unfortunately jumped from a building and took their own life,” Hill said. “It was literally because they thought they could fly.”
The drug’s effects can vary widely between individual users.
“It impacts us on a neurological level to the point where it can create feelings of mass euphoria to feelings of frenzy and anger and aggression,” Hill said. “It can also do things from making us so hyper-stimulated and hyperactive that we can barely control our actions to the point that we are so stuck in where we are at that moment that it feels like our nervous system is locked up to the point that we can’t even move.”
Hill said street chemists use a machine called a pill press.
“What it does is it allows them to take a substance such as fentanyl and mix it with something, and we will use heroin as an example, and it presses it into a pill that looks almost identical to a Percocet,” Hill said. “It can look like a Xanax. It can look like a bunch of actual prescription medication, but in reality it is a high dose of fentanyl or heroin, something along those lines, and that has become more and more pervasive.”
Hill said pressed pills are becoming more common.
“A lot of people refer to them as street-level chemists. You have to look at it in terms of this is not a controlled environment,” Hill said. “It’s not a pharmaceutical company. This is somebody who is taking a dab of this and a dab of that and throwing it in here and making it fit. And it becomes the phrase, ‘Is a dollar worth a human life?’”
‘IT WILL KILL YOU’
When Shackleford-Wright shared her tragic story, Alisha Winstead said “it was kind of like one and two clicking together.”
Winstead remembers saying “I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to go. Let’s just talk with Mayor Stevens and see if he can give us some direction.”
Wilson Mayor Carlton Stevens, who runs a funeral home, was shocked to hear that young people were smoking embalming fluid.
“I know the embalming fluid like in my job,” Stevens said. “If you ingest it, if it gets in your eye, it will kill you. So I don’t understand.”
Stevens said it seems to be “a rising epidemic in our community” and has vowed to help.
“I don’t think that people are aware of this terrible thing that people are getting into,” Stevens said. “These mothers have a story. These are moms that want to make a change.”
Winstead said she listens to hear the pain behind the mothers’ stories.
“What I was hearing was they had no help,” Winstead said. “They didn’t know where to go. They didn’t have any resources and didn’t know how to connect with the resources or the resources failed them. So when they came to me, I just said, ‘Let’s just see what can we start.’ We went into this blind. I was like, ‘I don’t know.’”
Winstead said Hill and the Substance Prevention Coalition are willing to partner with MOM.
“My passion is this generation that is coming up. I’m a grandmother,” Winstead said. “I’m concerned about my grandchildren and their friends. I’m a mother. You don’t want these kids having to go through this stuff, but it is out here, and I don’t think the community is aware just how bad it is.”
During a March 4 meeting, Hill told the mothers he was sorry.
“Let me say this as the leader of our organization: I apologize and I am sorry, and I wish that we would have been able to get you the resources that you need when you needed them, and I can accept that as a leader,” Hill said. “That was a failure on our part, so I apologize to you for that — to both of you, to all of you.”
Hell-bent to get high: Drug deaths spur mothers’ support group
Posted on March 17, 2022
Local newsTop news
By Drew C. Wilson
dwilson@wilsontimes.com | 252-265-7818
In the last year of his life, Katina Shackleford-Wright’s drug-addicted son beat her up, pulled a knife on her, fired a gun at her and threatened to kill her.
Shackleford-Wright’s son died from a gunshot wound as he broke into his mother’s Ashbrook Drive home on Jan. 27. Rakim Jamar Shackleford, a 31-year-old Beddingfield High School graduate, was high on embalming fluid when he died, according to his mother.
Now, Shackleford-Wright has joined other mothers of drug-addicted children to form the new support group Moms on a Mission, or MOM.
Modeled after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, MOM began to take shape in February.
Its members are women who have either lost a child, seen a child incarcerated or experienced distress with a child stemming from substance abuse or misuse.
Alisha Winstead, head of the group, had already heard from another family about a a similar experience with a drug-addicted child, so when Shackleford-Wright approached her, they decided to join forces.
Winstead said she’s employed in a large corporation in Wilson and is a “philanthropist at heart.”
“I am somewhat of a community organizer, and I like organizing,” Winstead said.
After hearing Shackleford-Wright’s story, Winstead felt pressed to help by organizing the group.
“I couldn’t find rest,” Winstead said. “It was like, ‘We have got to do something.’”
‘IT MADE HIM A BEAST’
Shackleford-Wright said before getting involved with drugs, her son was “humble and well-mannered.”
Shackleford’s first involuntary commitment was in April 2020.
“He had wrecked his car, and he was high,” Shackleford-Wright said. “He went to rehab three times down to Wilmington.”
That’s when the mother learned her son was ingesting embalming fluid to get high.
“It’s a poison. There nothing he can do,” she said. “It messes with your mind. You hallucinate. One time they say he was holding his family hostage, but it was him holding his own self hostage. He just believed people were in the house. He got locked up and he stayed a couple of days and they let him out.”
After his release, Shackleford led police on a high-speed chase on Interstate 95 and U.S. 264 and was sentenced to jail for two months. He was released in October.
“He was doing good, and then right after Christmas Eve he started back on it, and he was just doing so much stuff,” Shackleford-Wright said. “It wasn’t him. It made him a beast.”
In the two weeks before his death, Shackleford was out of control, his mother said.
“I’m terrified of him, but I don’t want to put him in the street, because he’s mine.”
The day before he died, Shackleford was high and flipped his car into a ditch.
He was arrested and taken to Wilson Medical Center for evaluation.
Shackleford-Wright begged for her son to be kept in custody and re-committed.
“He’s high. He’s a threat to himself and the community,” she pleaded.
She said officials told her that unless her son signed his own commitment papers, he would have to be released.
“He had went back home and stole my car with no tags on it, and he’s riding around,” Shackleford-Wright said. “That night, when I got home at 7:30, he was knocked out, in a trance. He’s just in a deep sleep. So I go in my room.”
She pushed dressers and other furniture against the door to feel safe.
The mother said she and her cat had to crawl in and out of the bedroom through a window.
“This has been my life, living in fear,” Shackleford-Wright said. “He finally woke up, and I was scared of him.”
‘A HORRIBLE SITUATION’
Since her son previously pulled a knife and a gun on her, she knew anything could happen. Her son was known to walk up and down the highway naked when he was high.
The worried mother immediately called 911.
“They was like, ‘Yeah, somebody had called because he’s up the street screaming,’” Shackleford-Wright said. “The police come and can’t find him. He’s back in the woods. He came out high as he can be, ’cause now he’s drinking it. He’s drinking embalming fluid. So he’s a beast, and so they were like, ‘We remember him from this morning. He got out?’ ‘Yeah, they let him out.’”
Wilson police took Shackleford to Wilson Medical Center around 10 p.m.
“I’m like, ‘I can get some sleep now.’ I went to sleep,” Shackleford-Wright said.
But a couple hours later, one of Shackleford’s friends called to tell her he’d been released from the hospital.
“So by that time, my son called me all irate. ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that,’” Shackleford-Wright recalled. “And I can’t believe they let him out. I called 911, and by that time I’m telling them, ‘Please come on, hurry, because he’s already pulled a knife on me one time. He’s beat me up one time. Can y’all please just come?’”
Shackleford-Wright waited, terrified.
“Before I know it, he had kicked the whole door frame down. Me and him was in a tussle, and he didn’t make it,” she said, crying as she relayed the final moments of her son’s life.
Shackleford-Wright said last week she didn’t want to discuss the details of her son’s death.
“That’s something that is between me and my family,” she said.
Wilson police said Shackleford died of a gunshot wound around 1:27 a.m. on Jan. 27. Investigators say the fatal shot wasn’t self-inflicted.
“It’s just something I don’t want to talk about,” Shackleford-Wright said. “It’s already a horrible situation, and I just prefer to keep it like that.”
No charges were filed in the death.
“I was just begging them to help me,” Shackleford-Wright said. “I just needed help that day.”
She wished recovery programs were available for people abusing embalming fluid.
“Some people say it’s PCP. Some people say it’s ‘loveboat.’ Some people say it’s ‘poison.’ Some say it’s not a drug, but it’s doing something, because Wilson is terrible. Our young kids are on this mess. It’s nothing for you to go and see them like zombies. It’s just crazy, and I just felt like my son would have been alive.”
ALARMING FACTOR
Jeff Hill, director of the Wilson County Substance Prevention Coalition, said smoking embalming fluid produces a similar high to PCP.
“Embalming fluid can also be a carrier for the drug PCP,” he said. “It can be dissolved into it and used as a dipping substance to be able to smoke it.”
Addicts will dip cigarettes, blunts or marijuana cigarettes into the fluid before smoking them. Others will inhale the aerosolized fluid in vaping systems.
“The prevalence of ‘pressed pills’ on the streets is becoming higher and higher, and that is why you are seeing an increase in overdose rates because people are buying one thing and taking it and getting something completely different,” Hill said.“The alarming factor that they are bringing to light is that it is really beginning to infiltrate our youth within the county. The prevalence and the availability and the ease of access is the alarming thing for an organization like us to see when that gets into the hands of a 12-year-old or a 15-year-old.
We spoke with the county at a conference last week where they had two middle schoolers age 12 that overdosed off of fentanyl.”
‘THEY ARE NOT THEMSELVES’
Patricia Harris Atkinson, another MOM member, lost son Al Douglas Langston III to a fentanyl overdose.
Langston, a 2015 Hunt High School graduate, had joined the Navy and served aboard the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman.
Atkinson said as a youngster, her son was polite and “never cussed me out before.”
“He never, ever, ever disrespected me in any shape, form or fashion as far as talking back,” Atkinson said.
In 2020, Atkinson said, her son started taking “Perc,” or Percocet, a prescription painkiller that combines opioid and non-opioid pain relievers with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid the Drug Enforcement Administration calls “80 to 100 times stronger than morphine.”
“They are paranoid when they get this stuff in their system.” Atkinson said. “They are not themselves. He fussed me out last February. He had a chance to wake up and call back and apologize. He wasn’t himself.”
Atkinson said her son had a bright future.
“He had a lot to lose by putting a pill in his mouth,” she said.
When Langston died on April 3, 2020, Atkinson said a toxicology reported showed her son had 6 milligrams of fentanyl in his system.
“It bust his heart wide open,” she said. “He had a heart attack. My son was bleeding out his ear.”
Atkinson said most people don’t understand opioid addiction until it affects their family.
“There needs to be something done about these drug dealers inside here making it, purchasing it, putting it out there on the street,” she said.
Unlike prescriptions filled at the pharmacy, pills bought on the street don’t come with a list of ingredients.
“I could be anything,” Atkinson said. “It’s supposed to be a Percocet, but if it ends up being heroin once they take it and put it in their mouth, it will kill them just like that.”
‘STREET CHEMISTS’
Hill said his first interaction with a person on embalming fluid was in 2018.
“I worked previously as a case manager for a different organization here in Wilson County, and unfortunately we had a client that, while they were intoxicated or high on this substance, unfortunately jumped from a building and took their own life,” Hill said. “It was literally because they thought they could fly.”
The drug’s effects can vary widely between individual users.
“It impacts us on a neurological level to the point where it can create feelings of mass euphoria to feelings of frenzy and anger and aggression,” Hill said. “It can also do things from making us so hyper-stimulated and hyperactive that we can barely control our actions to the point that we are so stuck in where we are at that moment that it feels like our nervous system is locked up to the point that we can’t even move.”
Hill said street chemists use a machine called a pill press.
“What it does is it allows them to take a substance such as fentanyl and mix it with something, and we will use heroin as an example, and it presses it into a pill that looks almost identical to a Percocet,” Hill said. “It can look like a Xanax. It can look like a bunch of actual prescription medication, but in reality it is a high dose of fentanyl or heroin, something along those lines, and that has become more and more pervasive.”
Hill said pressed pills are becoming more common.
“A lot of people refer to them as street-level chemists. You have to look at it in terms of this is not a controlled environment,” Hill said. “It’s not a pharmaceutical company. This is somebody who is taking a dab of this and a dab of that and throwing it in here and making it fit. And it becomes the phrase, ‘Is a dollar worth a human life?’”
‘IT WILL KILL YOU’
When Shackleford-Wright shared her tragic story, Alisha Winstead said “it was kind of like one and two clicking together.”
Winstead remembers saying “I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to go. Let’s just talk with Mayor Stevens and see if he can give us some direction.”
Wilson Mayor Carlton Stevens, who runs a funeral home, was shocked to hear that young people were smoking embalming fluid.
“I know the embalming fluid like in my job,” Stevens said. “If you ingest it, if it gets in your eye, it will kill you. So I don’t understand.”
Stevens said it seems to be “a rising epidemic in our community” and has vowed to help.
“I don’t think that people are aware of this terrible thing that people are getting into,” Stevens said. “These mothers have a story. These are moms that want to make a change.”
Winstead said she listens to hear the pain behind the mothers’ stories.
“What I was hearing was they had no help,” Winstead said. “They didn’t know where to go. They didn’t have any resources and didn’t know how to connect with the resources or the resources failed them. So when they came to me, I just said, ‘Let’s just see what can we start.’ We went into this blind. I was like, ‘I don’t know.’”
Winstead said Hill and the Substance Prevention Coalition are willing to partner with MOM.
“My passion is this generation that is coming up. I’m a grandmother,” Winstead said. “I’m concerned about my grandchildren and their friends. I’m a mother. You don’t want these kids having to go through this stuff, but it is out here, and I don’t think the community is aware just how bad it is.”
During a March 4 meeting, Hill told the mothers he was sorry.
“Let me say this as the leader of our organization: I apologize and I am sorry, and I wish that we would have been able to get you the resources that you need when you needed them, and I can accept that as a leader,” Hill said. “That was a failure on our part, so I apologize to you for that — to both of you, to all of you.”
