Rhonda and Jacob Oliver (Photo by Jay Paul)
When it comes to selling himself, Jacob Oliver is as smooth and natural as they come.
As he greets me one afternoon in the lobby of the nonprofit where he works as a mentor, he offers a firm handshake, maintaining eye contact all the while.
Walking the halls, he exudes an easy self-assurance, the aura of a leader. Guys young and old — from men fresh from the streets to professionals who work there — approach him, giving and getting dap as Oliver offers encouragement and sometimes playful teasing.
We’re at the Healing Place, in Manchester, a peer-run program of the nonprofit CARITAS, which, among other things, assists alcohol and drug addicts. Oliver, 23, a former high school class officer, is a recovering heroin addict who has worked his way through the program, from living in a ward-like hall with other men, to where he is now, serving as a mentor, with a private room and a flat-screen television and a cell phone of his own.
I’ve come to Healing Place to meet a young man on the cusp of a milestone. In nine days, Oliver is scheduled to graduate from CARITAS Works, and from there, to move out and take on the world, possibly to pursue his dream of becoming a real estate agent. It’s a moment that’s been months in the making, and will determine the course of his life for years to come.
“This place,” he tells me, “has done wonders for me.”
But the truth is, Oliver is lying.
He’s lying to me, his family, to the peers he’s working with in the Healing Place who so obviously hold him in esteem, and, probably, to himself as well.
The proof is in the results of a drug screening that Oliver and several other program participants take that very afternoon: The results are positive.
“I had all the support in the world,” Oliver says, apologizing to me, on graduation day. “I just couldn’t pull myself out of it …”
Jacob Oliver (seated left) and family at the CARITAS Works commencement. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
As Common as Depression
Heroin and other opioids are disrupting families across Virginia. Addiction cuts across all demographics, though Richmond shelter workers and first responders say they are seeing more women and younger addicts than they dealt with in the early 2000s.
At The Virginia Center for Addiction Medicine in Richmond, patients range from the wealthy to those who are newly poor because of their illness, says James Thompson, CEO and a physician.
At any given time about half of addicts are in treatment; the rest merely muddle through life, in denial and unready to get help. Thompson cites estimates that there are 20 to 30 million drug and alcohol addicts nationally, but only 10 million are getting treatment.
This epidemic affects us in innumerable ways, from petty crime as addicts seek money to feed their habit, to an influx of children into foster care as their parents can no longer take care of them, says Danny Avula, public health director for the Richmond City Health District. “The fact that this has been so widespread should make us as a society think differently about it, and try to intervene in a different way than we have historically,” he says.
Virginia’s Deputy Health Commissioner Hughes Melton says that addiction is as common as depression. At some point in life, you’re going to encounter it, either in a loved one, a co-worker or a neighbor in the community.
Overdoses overwhelm emergency care providers in Richmond and across the state.
“A couple of overdoses a day is sadly the norm,” reports Rob Lawrence, the chief operating officer for the Richmond Ambulance Authority.
Overall, opioid overdoses killed 1,133 Virginians in 2016, a 30 percent increase from the previous year, and more than double the death toll in 2010, according to a report by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Jacob Oliver was nearly among them.
From left, Jacob Oliver, Rhonda Oliver, Nick Oliver and Corey Edwards (Photo by Ash Daniel)
“All It Takes Is One Time”
As hard as recovery can be, Thompson notes, it’s even harder when you are in it alone. In other words, the larger the support network, the better. The addict without a strong and extensive one, he says, faces “a difficult journey.”
The CARITAS program that Oliver was in emphasizes the importance of peers being there to support one another, and of instilling the idea that one’s peers of addicts are one’s family.
Blood ties can also be crucial to an addict’s recovery.
Oliver’s biggest booster is his mother, Rhonda, who has set a rather complicated example for her son. She was the one who urged him to go to CARITAS for help, and she is the one now helping him to sort out what comes next. She ferries him to appointments and support group meetings, and is forever looking for ways to keep him occupied and away from the temptations of the streets.
“It scares me to death,” she says, of a potentially fatal relapse. “All it takes is one time and they will never wake up.”
I first meet Rhonda Oliver at the Healing Place on the day Jacob is supposed to graduate.
The cafeteria has been transformed into a celebratory area for the grads, friends, family and their peers who are working the program. The graduates sit together, in suits and ties and custom-fitted shirts courtesy of Ledbury. Each addresses the assembled, and is met with rounds of whoops and applause from families and peers.
“I had all the support in the world.” —Jacob Oliver
Jacob Oliver was supposed to be the 15th member of Commencement Class 50, but instead sits with his mother and family in the audience in a light jacket instead of in a suit with the other graduates, and watches as two of his brothers — his older brother, 29, a recovering alcoholic, the other, his twin, a recovering heroin addict — graduate.
In a side room, away from the festivities, Rhonda Oliver shares her story. Diminutive and determined, she speaks in a voice textured from years of cigarette smoke.
Even for a mother, she has more empathy than most.
After all, she tells me, she’s got firsthand knowledge of what they’re going through: She’s in recovery herself, a graduate of the Healing Place program for women in Raleigh, North Carolina.
She says she medicated herself with alcohol for years, and was emotionally absent during the years her children started on their descent into drugs and drink.
After high school, she eloped to get out of the house and away from her parents’ rules. She became a mom for the first time, but then drugs entered the mix and the marriage ended in divorce.
She joined the Navy, stationed in California, and married a second time. After leaving the service, the couple settled in Indiana, where her husband’s family lived, and that’s where Jacob, his twin brother, and her youngest son were born.
She never stopped using, however, and so that marriage also ended in divorce.
Her extended family became more involved, caring for her kids when needed.
When crack entered the mix is “when things really spiraled down,” says her sister Shannon Pope.
Rhonda describes the addiction to crack as “instant.”
She began stealing and forging checks.
One night, she was so sick that doctors told her that she might not make it through the night.
It was horrifying, says Pope, a physician who lives in Smithfield. The sisters had always been close, but not then. That was driven home to her when Pope was pregnant and Rhonda “was too spun out on drugs all the time” to be of any help.
In 2008, Rhonda completed a treatment program, but relapsed a week later. She got herself back together, but a year later she was out of control again. A friend told her about a Healing Place for women in North Carolina. She told them in that initial phone call that she had been clean for a year, but that she was struggling. “I knew it was a matter of time,” she says.
She completed the North Carolina program, but relapsed one weekend in January 2011.
It was at this point, she says, that something clicked. She realized that drugs don’t make anything better.
From that point, says Pope, “she became the person I always knew she was.”
Her family’s trust in her had never been weaker, says Pope, but Rhonda earned it back as she cared for their grandmother, who had fallen ill with meningitis.
Though she still “white-knuckles” through nights from time to time, today she calls a sponsor or someone and talks herself into a better place. “As soon as I speak it,” she says, echoing a counseling koan, “it loses its power.”
Now, she draws strength from a supportive family, including Pope; a good relationship with a good man; and a steady job at her sister’s medical clinic.
“She’s a big help,” says Pope, of her sister’s active presence on staff, which ranges from attending 12-step meetings with patients to counseling them, including, recently, a three-hour session one weekend with a troubled teen.
Her ties to her mother, Rhonda says, have never been stronger. Having grown in her understanding of addiction, her mother understands now that it’s a disease and not a character flaw. Her stepfather’s thinking has yet to evolve to that point, she says, but he’s supportive.
If there’s one thing she wishes me to know, Rhonda says, it’s that this is a solid, middle class family with deep roots in the community. And that addiction can hide in any family. “People think addicts are dirty and lowlife, and that is so not true,” she says.
For years she worried about the strong tendency of addiction to run in families, but hoped that her sons, having seen firsthand how devastating it can be, might have escaped its vicious trap. Still, she is determined to look forward. “I don’t dwell on what I missed out on,” she says.
Her experiences have taught her invaluable lessons, she says. When her sons were jailed, she didn’t bail them out; she let them face the consequences of their actions and work things out for themselves. It’s incredibly important, she says, to take responsibility.
The Good Boy
Peers at the Healing Place were shocked that Jacob Oliver left the program, says Stephen Vicoli, transitional coordinator for the program. Everyone liked him.
CARITAS claims that 70 percent of the men who complete the program are still sober after one year. But as drug counselors and addiction specialists repeatedly point out, nobody wants to relapse, or intends to; it’s just part of the process of recovery, says Teresa McBean, executive director for the National Association for Christian Recovery and pastor of NorthStar Community, a recovery church in Richmond.
Addicts may have seven or eight lapses before they achieve lasting sobriety. And there’s no shame in it, she makes a point of emphasizing.
The lapse left Jacob Oliver at an unfortunate crossroads. He had the option of repeating the Healing Place program, but that was of no interest to him. And so he left Richmond for a while, spending time with his father’s family in Indiana. He has since returned to Virginia and is now living with his mother in a rural area outside Surry.
He says he wants to reconnect with his family — his best and most believing supporters — to show them that he’s capable of changing, to remind them of the promising kid he once was.
As a young boy, mindful of his mother’s troubles, he had vowed never to get involved with drugs. “I always thought I was above the negatives,” he says.
Growing up, he was the class officer and student council member who loved to be around people, one of the kids who volunteered to set up the school dance or the campus blood drive. The twins were smart, lively kids — tons of fun, says Pope.
But away from school, Oliver was partying hard. It started with smoking pot and drinking in high school, and quickly devolved into harder stuff.
“The first thing on my mind is to use,” he says. “Anything I wanted was a phone call away.”
He says he earned a free ride to Ball State University on scholarship, but flunked out his second semester. Drugs were always around. “I could quit at times, but I always went back to it.”
Set up on his own in his grandparents' home in Indiana, he turned it into a party house. Every paycheck went to drugs and alcohol, and he neglected to pay utilities.
Jobs came and went, because he was unable to hold on to anything because of his drug use, which at this point had begun to include heroin.
Rhonda Oliver says that she initially thought a little money and a change of environment would help, so she encouraged him to move back to Virginia in 2013.
“People thinks addicts are dirty and lowlife, and that is so not true.” —Rhonda Oliver
This seemed to help, at least at first. “I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what,” she says.
Jacob Oliver tried; he enrolled in Tidewater Community College, and worked as a food server in Portsmouth. He was drug-free for six months, but then he used one night and was right back where he had been in Indiana.
He dropped out, and things went bad fast. He got a DUI. He lost his license. He overdosed twice, the second time at a gas station. He was found slumped in the driver’s seat of his car, with the music blaring. The police were called, along with paramedics, but no charges were filed — the authorities believed he’d had enough of a wake-up call.
He never did tell his mother about that night. “I kept that one hidden,” he says. But then he wrecked his car.
And then he wrecked his brother’s car.
And then he overdosed on the James River Bridge in Newport News.
A family friend who saw him in the hospital described him as gray, almost blue, and told his mother that it “wasn’t looking good.”
He recovered, only to spend 40 days in jail.
Jacob Oliver (far left), his mother, Rhonda Oliver, and his three brothers (Photo courtesy Rhonda Oliver)
A Sticking Point
It’s late June, more than three months since our first meeting, and I’m sitting across from Jacob and Rhonda in a restaurant in Surry, eating pizza. Jacob is relaxed and forthcoming as he describes his plans, making eye contact all the while.
He assures me that he’s had no more slips, and I want to believe him.
His twin, who completed the Healing Place program and is now working two jobs and on his own, is a source of inspiration and encouragement to him. He’s also regularly talking with other program peers.
He tells me he’s earning money, too, helping his grandparents with chores and odd jobs, re-establishing bonds of trust.
The extended family is optimistic and supportive, Pope says. They help as they can without enabling, and keep praying. “At some point they will get themselves straight,” she says.
In many ways, Surry is a good place to be for Oliver, a healing place of its own, but it’s hard to go forward when you’re in recovery and you live out in the country, miles from a state highway.
It’s even harder when you’ve lost your license to drive, as Oliver says he has.
The days without work and responsibilities — without people to look after and serve — are long, and Oliver finds himself with a lot of time on his hands. He confesses to having watched a lot of cartoons.
There are a lot of unaccounted hours in his day, and in his week.
His mother is cautious, but optimistic.
“There’s always a little bit of fear,” she says. “Every little thing that happens, you panic for no reason.”
But she’s watching her son, and she’s proud of him, proud of how he’s staying strong, proud of the progress he’s making.
The Right Direction
Early July, Jacob has gotten a bit of good news. He’s landed a job, installing gutters. It’s not selling real estate, but it will give structure to his days and also earn him money to help pay for his court fees.
Until he earns back his driving privileges, though, he has to rely on his mother or his boss for rides to and from work.
It’s not the total independence he wants and needs, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Like Jacob, I want to believe that the positive drug test is simply a point along a continuum of recovery for him.
He speaks, as ever, with confidence and determination. He’s never been more persuasive.
“I’ve got to get myself back in the stream of life,” he says.
I want badly to believe him.
Sources: Virginia Department of Health; National Institute on Drug Abuse
Opium History
Opium abuse is at least as old as civilization (it was grown in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago). Founding Father Thomas Jefferson reportedly raised Papaver somniferum, opium poppies, at Monticello, and opiates were used in the mid 1800s for everything from alleviating pain after surgeries to treating hemorrhoids, according to Shauna Devine, a medical historian at Western University and an advisor to the recently canceled PBS Civil War-era medical drama “Mercy Street.” Opium use was extensive, and addiction became such a problem that it was known as “old soldiers’ disease.”
Addiction became a larger societal problem later in the 19th century. The drugs could be obtained without a prescription. Opium was considered a good way to stop children from crying, and opioids were components in medicine for “female complaints.”
The first federal regulations on drugs were enacted in 1906 with the Pure Food and Drug Act.
James Thompson, physician and CEO, Virginia Center for Addiction Medicine (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Heal Thyself
This physician knows addiction struggle firsthand
Dr. James Thompson knows firsthand what his patients at the Virginia Center for Addiction Medicine face: He’s in recovery himself.
For a long time, he thought his addiction to drugs was something he could surmount on his own, without help, if only he had sufficient strength of character and exercised self-restraint. This was not just how society had trained him to think about addiction; it was how many doctors saw and treated it, too.
Only after an intervention did he think to seek help.
It was there, in counseling, that he understood that what he was struggling with was an illness, a disease.
Society is evolving in its attitudes toward addiction, but not quickly enough, says Hughes Melton, the state’s Deputy Health Commissioner. Though there is ample scientific evidence to show that it’s a disease, he argues, many still cling to outmoded notions of personal responsibility, and look askance at needle exchange programs. Far from encouraging addicts, the science shows, these programs have significantly helped to prevent the spread of infections such as hepatitis and HIV. “Solutions that initially seem sort of illogical,” says Melton, “become logical when you understand the nature of addiction.”
Understanding the nature of addiction not only changed Thompson’s life, but it also helped to shape his long and distinguished career in treatment.
The doctor is quick to make the point, however, that having insight is not the same as having answers, at least not all the time.
Exhibit A: Thompson himself.
Though professionally he thrived, finding new approaches to treating his patients, personally he struggled, he confesses, unable to forgive himself. He often felt ashamed.
Five years ago, he had an epiphany, as he worked in treatment with otherwise successful professionals who struggled to stay clean — and struggled with their image of themselves as users.
In their stories, he heard his own.
His patients were the prod he needed, he says, to open up, finally, and share his own struggles with his fellow addicts.
“It really changes minds, talking with people. It really opens their eyes,” says Thompson. What they see is that addiction can overtake “anybody, at any time.”
