grist.org · 1 day ago

Helene Frayed the Safety Net for People Who Use drugs. This Community Wove It Back together. | Grist

When Hurricane Helene severed the fragile threads connecting people in recovery to their medications, clinics, and support systems, the official disaster response had no ready answer for those facing withdrawal alongside flooded roads and powerless pharmacies. Kimberly Treadaway and others in western North Carolina's harm reduction community - many navigating their own journeys with substance use - filled that gap, delivering Suboxone, clean needles, and naloxone on foot and by ATV to people the system too often forgets. For a brief window after the storm, free emergency clinics offered something rarely experienced by those struggling with addiction: care without judgment, prescriptions without barriers, treatment as a basic right. "There's nothing worse than feeling like nobody gives a shit about you," said one organizer, and in their improvised response lay a quiet revelation about who gets counted in disaster planning and what becomes possible when compassion moves faster than bureaucracy. Now, as donations dwindle and the emergency safety net dissolves, those same advocates are left wondering whether the next storm will find them any more prepared - or whether survival will once again depend on people deciding, against all obstacles, to show up for each other.