Judge Karin McGrath, left, moderates a panel at Thursday’s Communities Recover Together that included, from left, Rachael Adams, Bowen Center; Shanna Wallen, Kosciusko County Jail Community Recovery Program; and Richard Dunnuck.

Text and Photos
By David Slone
Times-Union

WARSAW — The thing that changed Judge Linda Davis the most regarding her thoughts on addiction was when her then-17-year-old daughter told her she was a heroin addict.

“I was dumbfounded. I could not believe this could happen in my own house and that I wouldn’t even know it,” Davis said Thursday night at the Warsaw Community High School Performing Arts Center as the keynote speaker at the Communities Recover Together event.

Davis was appointed to the bench in 2000 by Michigan Gov. John Engler, serving in that role until 2019.

Judge Linda Davis speaks at Thursday’s Communities Recover Together event at the Warsaw Community High School Performing Arts Center.

Prior to becoming a judge, she was an assistant prosecutor for 13 years, Judge Karin McGrath said in introducing Davis. Davis played a crucial role in the inception of Families Against Narcotics , now known as Face Addiction Now. McGrath said Davis has been instrumental in the enormous growth and success of that nonprofit organization, becoming F.A.N.’s executive director in 2019 when she left the bench.

“In her years as a judge and a prosecutor, Davis became all too familiar with the scourge of drug addiction and the damage it was causing her community. She prosecuted drug cases vigorously, and as a judge, she sentenced drug users harshly. And then, in a way (we) wish on no one, addiction came to her very own door step, causing her to rethink everything,” McGrath said.

Davis said as a prosecutor, she ran the drug unit so it was her job to make sure the streets were safe from people that sold and used drugs.

“And I really thought that was my job. I did not understand addiction. I had been through law school – I actually have nine years of college – and not once during that nine years did I ever learn anything about addiction,” she said. “And yet, as a prosecutor, and as a judge, the majority of my cases were dealing with drugs.”

She admitted her opinions then about drug use and people who abuse drugs were kind of molded by television shows like “Law & Order” that deal with criminals.

Davis talked about several things that started to change her mind about addiction. The first being the start of Drug Court in Michigan, which she checked out and took classes on.

“The good thing about that is that I started learning about addiction, and it started really penetrating like, ‘Well, maybe I’m wrong about a lot of things,’ and I had to say that I was beginning to question it even before I started taking these classes because the same people I prosecuted were now coming back in front of me as a judge. It was kind of a revolving door where it’s like, ‘We’re locking them up, and they’re getting out and coming right back and locking them up and they’re getting out and coming right back.’ It seems to me like I’m wasting a whole lot of taxpayer money,” she said.

She saw that just putting people in jail clearly wasn’t working and started reading up on studies about that. She found out that when you lock someone up for drug use or abuse, “you’re actually more likely to have them die when they get out of jail than ever get into recovery services because they sit in jail, without treatment, and when they come out, they go right back to using at the same level they did when they went in, and their bodies can’t tolerate it and oftentimes those people pass away. So not a real smart move on the part of judges to incarcerate people in situations where they are not receiving any kind of treatment or help while they’re incarcerated.”

Davis told the audience about how her daughter told her she was a heroin addict and how difficult it was then to get her daughter the help she needed. Davis and her daughter were treated like garbage because of her daughter’s addiction. Her daughter’s addiction started when a doctor prescribed her a dose of vicodin after surgery. She turned to heroin after her supply of vicodin ran out.

At Live Well Kosciusko’s information booth Thursday at Communities Recover Together are from left, Lisa Harman, Austin Rhodes and Sandy Vera

“The reason you get addicted has no bearing on how you should be treated once you are addicted to these substances,” David said. “If there’s anything that came out of the opioid epidemic that’s a good thing, is that I think it raised a lot of awareness. I think it made us rethink how addiction happens. There’s so many more studies around it now. There’s so many treatments around it, but we are a long way — a long way — away from having answers around this.”

Her daughter is now celebrating 16 years of sobriety as of this past June.

“During the course of the years I’ve been working in this, and it’s been over 17 years now, I really learned so much about addiction,” Davis said. “… This is a disease. It’s not a moral failing. It’s a disease. Yet, we as a community do not treat this as a disease at all. We keep treating it as a moral failing, thinking that we can convince people to believe it’s a disease when we have all these judgments about it.”

She said we don’t treat addiction as a disease, even though it mirrors them almost identically.

Davis talked about how she and five other families started a nonprofit group to educate people about the opioid crisis about 18 years ago. At that time, no one was talking about drugs like heroin and opioids, though it was OK to discuss alcohol and tobacco.

“What was shocking to me was the number of people that would show up. At our first town hall meeting, we had over 100 people that showed up. They came from Indiana and Ohio when they heard we were talking openly about this addiction thing because nobody was talking about it, and people like me, who had family members that were suffering, they were hungry to get the information. They wanted to know what in the world was going on, how was this happening in our community and what could we do about it,” Davis said.

The group continued to educate others, with zero dollars and no one getting paid to do it. They all did it in their spare time.

“For seven years, I spoke at a breakfast, lunch or dinner or evening meeting every single day of the week for seven solid years to get this up off the ground. And none of us got paid and none of us wanted to be paid,” Davis said.

Chapters started so others could do similar work. There are now 23 chapters in Michigan. They educate over 200,000 people a year on addiction because once a month, if you’re a chapter, you have to hold educational meetings.

The organization continued to grow and branched off to form related organizations like Hope Not Handcuffs.

Davis said she thinks prosecutors and judges are beginning to realize that incarceration is not only expensive, but it also does not work. Throughout all of FAN’s programs, Davis said they also do harm reduction.

“If we’re going to talk about addiction being a disease, we have to be all about harm reduction,” she said. “… We want people with diseases to use safely. We don’t punish them when they aren’t able to follow rules. You may say, ‘Well, that’s different.’ It’s only different if you believe this is not a disease and that this is a moral failing and a choice. That’s the only time you get to make that argument is if you truly don’t believe this is a disease and that this is a choice you’re making.”

Davis talked about how needle exchanges can help prevent the spread of hepatitis and AIDS; and keep people out of emergency rooms for things they don’t need to be there for like abscesses. “We do so much in the community when we treat this like a disease, and we give people safe supplies to use with. And, the other thing is, is they are five times more likely to get into recovery if we treat them humanely while they are using. And those are absolute statistics that bear true,” Davis stated.

After Davis showed the audience a video on FAN, McGrath hosted a panel discussion with Rachael Adams, Bowen Center peer supervisor; Shanna Wallen, Kosciusko County Jail Community Recovery Program resource navigator; and Richard Dunnuck, a father, grandfather and a great-grandfather who landed at Fellowship Missions a few years ago and now helps others with their struggles. All three panelists have had struggles with addiction.

They each talked about their own moments of clarity when they realized recovery was possible, and what they felt they needed to hear again and again for it to really sink in.

“I guess what I really needed to hear was encouragement, to not give up, just to keep going. And it’s not going to happen over night,” Dunnuck said. Having people around him who had compassion who really wanted him to recover also was a big help.

Rochelle Taylor left, LITE Recovery, and Lucas Lengacher, right, Bowen Center, man resource information booths at Communities Recover Together on Thursday.

“So the first six years of my recovery, I did it completely on my own. I didn’t even have God in my life. But after six years, I invited God back into my life and I have him to lean on,” she said, noting that her church at the time didn’t understand her addiction or the things she talked about. “Thirteen years into my recovery, I started attending Celebrate Recovery and that’s when I started with 12 Steps. It literally changed my life.”

McGrath asked them what was really helpful to them. Adams said MRT (Moral Recognition Therapy), while Wallen said Celebrate Recovery and Dunnuck said finding a community because “community is everything.”

On what advice they would give themselves when they first started recovery, Dunnuck said he would tell himself to be honest with yourself and your recovery coach. Wallen said she’d tell herself she can do it and she was worth it. Adams said to extend as much grace as she hoped to receive.

The last question McGrath asked in the 30-minute panel was what advice they would give to people who want to help someone struggling with addiction.

Dunnuck said, “If you want to help somebody, first you’ve got to see if they want to help themselves.”
Wallen said if they don’t know what to do, there are many organizations they can reach out to.

“I think loving people where they’re at. Even if they’re not ready to get help today, you don’t want to destroy that relationship, because when they are ready to get help, then they’re not going to come to you,” Adams said.

Wrapping the event up, Warsaw-Wayne Fire Territory C.A.R.E.S. Director Chris Fancil said he was a small part of a group that was able to get a Rural Communities Opioid Response Program grant, which funded the whole event. He said they are hopeful they can do one or two more similar events before the grant ends.

The entities that are part of that group include Bowen Center, Fellowship Missions, CARES, Live Well Kosciusko and K21 Health Foundation. Most of those organizations, and others, had information resource tables at the event.

“It’s very important that we all understand it’s all of us working to make this better,” Fancil said.

Eric Lane, Fellowship Missions executive director, stated, “I think one of the things we talked about at this event is normalizing this conversation. Getting it out there. Repeating it.”