I Went Looking for What Drives Addiction and Found Something Harder to Untangle

We moved to Western Pennsylvania in 2017, drawn by the kind of place that feels increasingly rare: small towns with deep roots, historic homes built during the oil boom, and a sense that life here moved at a steadier pace.

It looked like a community people imagine when they’re talking about putting down roots somewhere quiet, somewhere grounded. We’d lived in different places, and I’d seen my share of the world. But it felt different, in a way that was easy to accept at face value.

Within a couple of months, that picture started to change.

We heard the sirens before we knew what they were responding to. Fire trucks moved quickly past our house and toward a wooded area just outside of town. It wasn’t a house fire or a brush fire, at least not in the way those things usually are. When crews arrived, they found a body burning in the woods.

The victim was a 25-year-old woman named Tausha Baker. She had been unceremoniously and unlovingly murdered; her body left there and set on fire. In the days that followed, as more details came out, it became clear the case was tied to drugs, not vaguely, but as part of the circumstances that led to her death.

It felt like a singular, tragic event. Something that could happen anywhere, even in a place that looked like this. But it didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t an outlier. The more I paid attention, the more it became clear this wasn’t just one story.

It was part of something larger I didn’t yet understand.

In the years that followed, I kept seeing pieces of the same story in different forms. Arrest reports. Overdose calls. Court cases. Conversations that started one way and ended somewhere else entirely. Sometimes the connection to drugs was obvious. Sometimes it wasn’t. But it was there more often than I expected.

I found myself coming back to the same question: what actually leads someone to a moment like that? Not just how it happens at the end, but everything that comes before it. The lives people are living, the environments they’re in, the experiences that are already in motion long before anything becomes visible enough to make the news.

One of the people who helped me understand that was Jayme Felmlee, a local activist who works closely with people in the community who are often overlooked–those struggling with addiction, cycling through the criminal justice system, or coming in and out of jail, but still very much human. And valuable.

Jayme didn’t come to this as an observer. She lived it. She told me she never knew her mother sober. As a child, she moved through environments where addiction wasn’t something that happened occasionally; it was part of the structure of everyday life. The people around her, the places she stayed, the instability that came with it, none of it felt unusual at the time because it was all she knew.

When she looks back now, there are moments that stand out differently.

She told me about a school science fair where her mother showed up high, knocked into a table, and ruined several students’ projects. Teachers and administrators told her to leave. Looking back, Jayme said it was obvious what was happening. And then she was sent home with her anyway.

That detail is what stayed with me.

Not just what happened in that moment, but what didn’t. The adults in the room saw it. They responded to it. But when it came to what happened next, there wasn’t a clear path. What were they supposed to do? What responsibility did they have, and what tools did they actually have to act on it?

Again, it stayed with me. Not because it was unusual, but because it probably wasn’t.

It made me start thinking about moments like that, not just what people see, but what they’re expected to do with it. Where responsibility begins, where it ends, and how much of that depends on the person standing there.

I didn’t have a clear answer to that. I’m not sure anyone does. But it felt like the kind of question someone in education might’ve spent a lifetime dealing with, not in theory, but in real situations, with real kids and real families.

So I reached out to someone I trust to give me a straight answer, my sixth-grade teacher, Bob Bales.

I was in his classroom in 1986. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. Over the course of a 38-year career, he worked as a teacher, a principal, and eventually a superintendent in Northern California. He’s seen the system from every angle, and I’ve always known he’ll tell me what he actually thinks, not just what sounds good.

If there was anyone who could help me understand what happens in moments like the one Jayme described, I figured it’d be him. When I told him about Jayme’s story, he wasn’t surprised.

He said situations like that aren’t as rare as people might think. Not always as obvious, not always as public, but they happen. Teachers notice things. They see changes in behavior, signs of instability, moments that don’t quite add up. And when something crosses a line, it gets escalated, first to a principal, sometimes to others, depending on what’s happening and what’s known at the time.

But what happens after that isn’t always clear.

He told me about a field trip where a parent showed up intoxicated and passed out while responsible for a group of children. In that moment, the priority was obvious: make sure the kids were safe. But beyond that, the decisions became more complicated. What do you do with the child? Who do you call? What authority do you actually have to intervene?

Those aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re real ones, and they don’t always have clean answers.

As he talked through those moments, the uncertainty, the judgment calls, the limits of what schools can actually do, it became clear he wasn’t just speaking as an educator. His own father, he told me, had been a well-respected district attorney and a high-functioning alcoholic. It wasn’t something I would’ve understood when I was sitting in his classroom at 11 years old, and it wasn’t something that was obvious from the outside. His father didn’t get sober until Mr. Bales was an adult. But it added another layer to how he sees these situations, understanding not just how they look from the outside, but how they can exist inside a family without always being visible.

Over the course of his career, he said the role of schools has expanded far beyond what people typically think. It’s not just education. It’s food, stability, safety, sometimes the only consistent structure a child has. For some students, school isn’t just a place to learn; it’s the place where adults are most likely to notice when something is wrong.

But noticing something and being able to fix it are two different things.

There are systems in place, reporting requirements, protocols, and ways to escalate concerns. But even when those are followed, the outcome isn’t always immediate or visible. Sometimes the situation improves. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes the limits of what a school can do become clear very quickly.

Listening to him, it became obvious that the question I had been asking didn’t have a single answer. It wasn’t just about what schools should do, or what they could have done differently in a moment like the one Jayme described. It was about the boundaries of responsibility in a system that sees a lot, but can only do so much.

If Jayme’s story helped me understand how early these patterns can begin, and Mr. Bales helped me see how systems respond, I still didn’t have a clear picture of what it looks like from the inside.

Not growing up around it, but falling into it.

That’s what led me to Autumn Doyle.

Autumn’s story doesn’t start the way people might expect. She didn’t grow up moving from place to place or surrounded by constant instability. By her own account, her childhood was relatively normal. The shift came later, after an injury, when she was prescribed pain medication.

What followed wasn’t an immediate collapse. It was gradual. Manageable at first, then less so. The medication changed. The tolerance built. And eventually, what started as something prescribed turned into something she was chasing.

Over time, that progression led her from pills to heroin, and eventually to meth. There were stretches where she functioned, worked, kept things together, and stretches where she didn’t.

Listening to her describe it, one thing stood out more than anything else. It wasn’t just the drugs. It was the routine, the ritual of it, the way it became part of how she moved through the day. Something that started as an interruption slowly became structure.

Her life during that time was shaped by more than addiction alone. There was instability, relationships that were volatile and, at times, abusive, and the constant pressure of trying to hold things together while everything underneath was coming apart.

At one point, she left her five children home alone while she went to get high. A neighbor called police. That moment led to her arrest in 2019.

When she talks about it now, she doesn’t soften it.

“I didn’t care,” she told me. “I just wanted to get high.”

Her story didn’t answer the question I’d started with.

If anything, it made it more complicated.

Between Jayme’s childhood, Mr. Bales’ experience in education, and Autumn’s path into addiction, there wasn’t a single thread to follow. There were multiple starting points and no clear line separating cause from consequence.

The more I listened, the harder it became to talk about addiction as one thing.

It can begin in a home where it’s already present. It can begin with a prescription. It can take shape through trauma, through relationships, through environment, or some combination of all of it. And once it takes hold, it doesn’t stay contained. It moves outward, into families, into schools, into courts, into the systems that try to respond to it, and sometimes struggles to keep up.

That’s what this series is about.

Not a single story, but overlapping ones. The people living it, the people trying to respond to it, and the spaces in between where decisions get made, or don’t.

I don’t have a simple answer to what drives addiction or how to fix it. But I think there’s value in trying to understand it more clearly by listening to the people closest to it.

That’s where I’m starting.

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