One Community Took a Radical Approach to Fighting Addiction. It’s Working.
When Officer Chelsea Johnston came across a wanted felon one evening in May, Johnston jerked her cruiser in front of him, sprinted after him and tackled him to the ground. Still catching her breath, Johnston
motioned for someone to step out of the cruiser: Joy Bogese.
“Thank God,” the man said. “It’s you.”
Bogese, who served time for financial crimes that fed a heroin addiction, now spends many of her evenings in a police cruiser as a recovery specialist helping people with addiction get into treatment. The man asked Bogese to help him get into a drug-treatment program at the local jail, where Bogese occasionally facilitates groups.
She is part of a growing effort in Chesterfield County’s fight against addiction. In this county of nearly 400,000, overdose deaths have dropped by half in a single year—about double the decline of the rest of the country—to levels seen before the crisis began in 2015.
The precipitous drops have astounded public officials and health-policy experts, who have traveled across the country in an attempt to learn the formula and replicate it. Governors, members of Congress and sheriffs from as far away as Alaska have all come through, along with an acting U.S. drug czar...READ MORE + PICTURES
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