“It’s not going to be fun to point out how historically some things haven’t worked out so great and they have bad impact on business and the residents,” Coalition of Asheville Neighborhoods president Rick Freeman told the audience at the Coalition of Independent Business Owners meeting April 5.
Some people in recovery or who reenter the workforce after incarceration find that potential employers won’t even interview them. This happens most with felony charges, especially drug-related ones.
Lacy Hoyle spoke about the local priorities for addressing homelessness, how she incorporates the views of those who have different beliefs than she does about its causes and misconceptions about the homeless population.
This summer, Kevin Mahoney decided to return to Sunrise Community for Recovery and Wellness, which he co-founded and where he will focus on educating the younger generation of peer support specialists.
At a Downtown Commission meeting July 14, Assistant City Manager Rachel Wood said that portions of the 60-day downtown safety and cleanliness pilot have transitioned into ongoing services.
Four firefighters compose the team — two primarily reaching out to people who may be unhoused or experiencing a behavioral health issue, and two primarily meeting with downtown business owners to address their needs and concerns.
North Carolina criminalizes the possession of drug-testing equipment as drug paraphernalia. The state defines paraphernalia as “all equipment, products and materials of any kind that are used … [for] testing, analyzing … or otherwise introducing controlled substances in the human body.” But the state also exempts the possession of fentanyl test strips “for personal use.”
Discussions about health and wellness have been dominated by COVID-19 for nearly three years, and that’s certainly been reflected in the media landscape nationwide. In Asheville, however, the effects of COVID-19 on physical health and mental health are just one story to be told.
Justin Shytle moved to Asheville when he was 7 years old and remembers a childhood attending Bele Chere and skating around the former Vance Monument. But at 14, their childhood came to an abrupt end when they discovered their father dead from an overdose. The experience “opened the door for my IV drug use and […]
“One solution: Once arrested, our legal folks need to either mandate time in lockup or mandatory rehab for users and strict time for dealers. This must stop, or it will get worse!
The 20 years that Kevin Mahoney served in the U.S. Air Force might sound like a dream deployment for some. Mahoney, who lives in Asheville, joined at 24 and trained as a cryptolinguist in Arabic and Farsi. The Air Force deployed him to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. He was able to travel […]
Drug abuse changed during the 13 years that Adam McIssac has been working as a drug and alcohol counselor in Asheville. At the beginning, McIssac mostly saw clients who were addicted to methamphetamine. But over time “pills,” including opioids like oxycodone (OxyContin) and hydrocodone (Vicodin), became the main drugs that his clients abused. Opioid abuse […]
Military service is difficult enough, but for many, life gets even harder once they’re done. Over half of the 2.5 million soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during America’s longest continuous period of war have returned with mental health conditions directly related to their time in uniform. Twenty percent have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress […]
Asheville is also seeing an upsurge in heroin use and overdoses, says Asheville police department’s Drug Suppression Unit. The department began tracking overdoses March 29, 2014, as they became strikingly more prevalent. Through July of this year, officers responded to 25 overdoses.
Amid escalating use and abuse of opioids nationwide, the number of local narcotics-related overdoses has increased rapidly in recent years. The drug naloxone can temporarily suspend those drugs’ effects, and the Asheville metropolitan area leads the state in confirmed cases of opioid overdose reversal, according to the N.C. Harm Reduction Coalition.
