I Thought Recovery Was the Hardest Part and Found It Was Knowing Where to Begin

When I sat down with Venango County Commissioners Sam Breene, Tim Heffernan, and Ken Bryant, along with Human Services Administrator Aime Wood-Wessell and Single County Authority Justin Heffernan, I thought I had a fairly clear question.

The question was simple enough: What is local government doing about the addiction crisis our community has been facing for the past three or four decades?

It’s a fair question.

Addiction reaches county government whether anyone wants it to or not. It shows up in jails, courts, child welfare, emergency services, housing, mental health, transportation, aging services, and public funding decisions. It also reaches families, employers, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and the people who end up trying to help after years of damage have already piled up.

But the longer we talked, the more that question felt too small for what addiction actually touches.

In the first part of this series, I looked at how addiction can begin in different places: childhood instability, family environments where addiction is already present, trauma, isolation, and sometimes something as ordinary as a prescription after an injury.

In the second part, I tried to understand recovery and found that it rarely looks like a clean line from using to sobriety. Chris Taylor, the project director at Oil Region Recovery, helped me understand that people returning to treatment are not always failing in the way outsiders might think. Sometimes, coming back is progress.

In the third part, I looked at the systems trying to respond: EMS crews, NARCAN access, county programs, jails, treatment courts, recovery housing, and the fragile work of keeping help available. I thought help was something people eventually reached if they were ready for it. What I found was that help is often being built, funded, staffed, restocked, and stretched in real time.

That pushed the question further.

I went in asking what the county was doing. I came out thinking the answer could not stop at the county government.

Commissioner Breene got to that point early in our conversation, noting that this was an opportunity for the piece to be more than just an elected official saying drugs are bad.

“Most importantly, I saw it as an opportunity for the people reading this who have family members, or themselves, going through addiction in the area to see what is available to them through the county,” Breene said. “Maybe there will be somebody who reads it and is convinced: ‘I haven’t tried that. I didn’t know that was available. Maybe I’m going to go up to 1 Dale Avenue and talk to Justin and see how I can get help.’ That’s a big win.”

That’s one practical purpose of this part of the series: to show where someone can start if they’re struggling, or if someone they love is struggling.

There’s a larger purpose, too.

Addiction can’t be left only to government, and it can’t be treated only as a private failure. It becomes a community problem because the damage moves through the community, and so does the response.

The Door at 1 Dale Avenue

Justin Heffernan is Venango County’s Single County Authority, or SCA. He oversees the county’s drug and alcohol program, as well as its housing program, which made sense as soon as he started talking. Housing and recovery are hard to separate.

In my earlier conversation with Chris Taylor, the project director at Oil Region Recovery, he told me housing would be one of the first things he’d try to fix if he had a magic wand. I told the county officials about one example he’d given me: a person who was expected to return to a home where drug activity was part of the household itself.

Justin Heffernan was not surprised.

“It’s always one of the top needs when we do our needs assessment through the county,” he said. “Getting affordable housing for people and just the availability of housing in general.”

Venango County’s housing program has three dedicated case managers who help people navigate the paperwork involved in Section 8, HUD, the Oil City Housing Authority, the Franklin Housing Authority, and other programs. Heffernan also pointed to shelter resources, including Bridge House, an eight-bed facility for women; shelter units in Franklin; multi-family housing; and Emmaus Haven in Oil City, a men’s homeless shelter.

None of that means housing is easy to find. He was clear that availability and affordability remain major problems. But it does mean that the county is trying to connect people to more than a treatment appointment.

Heffernan described the county’s Human Services Complex at 1 Dale Avenue in Franklin as a “one-door approach.”

“If they come in there, they can get help with mental health, drug and alcohol, housing, CYS, transportation, Veterans Affairs, and aging,” he said. “So you come in that door, and we can point you in any direction that you’re in need of.”

I think most of us, when we imagine government, imagine a maze. You walk in needing help and leave with a form you don’t understand, a number you have to call, and the feeling that you probably came through the wrong door. Heffernan described something different: a place where the first job is to figure out what kind of help someone actually needs.

Most of the initial steps, he said, are housed there. If someone needs a different provider or program, staff can help get that person connected.

That doesn’t fix addiction. Nothing I’ve heard in this series fixes addiction that cleanly. But it gives people a place to begin.

The Practical Work of Reentry

One of the things I’ve learned through these conversations is that recovery often depends on practical details that sound almost too ordinary to notice until they’re missing: a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a birth certificate, health insurance, a ride to an appointment, a safe place to sleep, a phone call returned by someone who knows the system.

If someone leaves jail or treatment without those things, the old cycle does not need much help getting started again. Breene said the county has tried to improve its response inside the jail by making sure people are assessed and connected before they leave.

“So we’re not just having as much of a revolving door, where you kick them out and say, ‘All right, you’re on your own,’” he said.

Heffernan said the county implemented a screening process about a year and a half ago as part of the booking process at the Venango County Prison. The county developed a screening chart with questions related to mental health and substance use. Based on those answers, staff can determine whether a person needs to be seen and how quickly.

The county also has a reentry case manager based at the jail Monday through Friday. If someone is court-ordered for an assessment, asks for a drug and alcohol assessment, asks for a mental health assessment, or is identified through the screening process, the county can begin working with that person while they are incarcerated.

The assessment doesn’t stop at drug use.

Heffernan said the county looks at social determinants of health, including housing, employment, financial strain, food insecurity, child care, transportation, clothing, health care access and affordability, and utilities.

Depending on need, a person may be connected with resource coordination, which is a less intensive form of case management, or case coordination, which can involve meeting with someone several times a week after release.

“We’ll go to their house, we’ll go to McDonald’s, the library, wherever, just to help them get back on track,” Heffernan said.

He also talked about something the county is still trying to figure out: a centralized way to help people keep track of critical documents.

At first, that sounded like a small thing. Then he explained it. County staff may help someone get a Social Security card, driver’s license, and birth certificate. Then that person moves, loses the documents, or leaves them behind, and the whole process starts again. If the county can keep copies or help maintain access to those documents, that’s one less barrier later.

I don’t think I would’ve thought about a birth certificate as part of addiction recovery before this series. But if someone leaves jail without identification, insurance, housing, transportation, or food, the old cycle doesn’t need much help restarting.

That brought me back to Autumn Doyle, who spoke earlier in this series about the arrest that followed after she left her children home alone while she went to get high. A neighbor called police, and Doyle was arrested in 2019. When she talks about it now, she credits her time in the Venango County Prison with helping save her life because it interrupted the routine of using and gave her the beginning of a way out.

Jail is still jail. It’s punishment, consequence, and confinement. But in some addiction stories, it can also become the first place where the cycle is interrupted long enough for someone to start thinking clearly again. The question is what awaits that person when the door opens.

A Network, Not One Program

Aime Wood-Wessell oversees the county’s human services departments, including aging, child welfare, mental health and intellectual disability services, drug and alcohol services, and other areas. When she talked about the county’s response, she didn’t describe one program solving one problem.

She described people who have to work together because the problems don’t stay in their lanes.

“When Sam is talking about funding, we have a human services administrator who makes sure that all of our categoricals are working toward the same goal,” Wood-Wessell said. “We’re all aligned. We all sit down at the table.”

That’s especially important because addiction often overlaps with other systems. Child welfare workers may encounter parents struggling with substance use. Mental health workers may encounter people whose symptoms are tangled with drug use. Drug and alcohol workers may encounter people who are also homeless, unemployed, uninsured, hungry, isolated, or involved in court.

“Substance abuse clearly impacts the child welfare system,” Wood-Wessell said.

She talked about the value of having child welfare and drug and alcohol staff in the same building, at the same table, able to ask practical questions: What are we seeing? What help exists? Who can pay for it?

The overlap with mental health can be just as complicated.

“Is this substance use? Is this mental health? Is this so much substance use that we’ve led to psychotic symptoms or delusional thinking? Or is this someone using substances to treat schizophrenia or those symptoms?” she asked.

Those aren’t questions most families can answer on their own while they’re scared, angry, or exhausted. They’re not always easy for professionals, either. But Wood-Wessell said having departments in the same building, with working relationships already in place, helps the county use its resources more effectively and focus on what the person actually needs.

Bryant said one thing that impressed him after becoming commissioner was how many outside organizations worked with the county.

“It’s literally a monstrous team effort,” he said.

That phrase gets closer to the truth than any neat organizational chart. The county is part of the response. So are treatment providers, recovery organizations, schools, churches, shelters, EMS crews, police, courts, probation officers, families, neighbors, and people in recovery who answer calls from others who are still struggling.

During our conversation, Wood-Wessell rattled off the names of several local providers the county frequently works with. In a smaller county, she said, many of those relationships are direct enough that people can pick up the phone and work through a problem before someone gets lost in the system.

That’s one of the advantages of a small community. It can also be one of the burdens. People know each other. They know the families. They know the history. Sometimes they know when things started going wrong.

There’s no way to keep addiction at a polite distance in a place where lives overlap.

The Regional Question

That’s not only true in Venango County.

In Clarion County, Commissioner Wayne Brosius told me earlier in this series that free NARCAN is available through a machine outside the Armstrong-Indiana-Clarion Drug and Alcohol Commission office at the 800 Center in Clarion. He said NARCAN boxes are also installed in every public school district in the county and in some private schools.

Brosius also said he knows some people look at NARCAN and think it gives people a free pass to use drugs. He doesn’t see it that way. That kind of thinking, he said, can change quickly when the person overdosing is your child or grandchild.

That’s one of the recurring lessons of this series: addiction looks different when it stops being abstract and starts being someone you know.

Clarion County Commissioner Braxton White put it another way when we talked about stigma and accountability.

“As with any public health crisis, shaming addicts is not effective, nor is pretending it’s not there,” White said. “We must be honest about what’s going on and hold people accountable when they have crossed legal lines, but also give people grace when we can.”

White’s own story includes his father, who struggled with alcoholism, as his father had before him. White said his father ultimately lost his life to addiction. He also told me that, every couple of years, he receives word that a former student from his teaching days at Triangle Tech has died from an overdose.

That’s part of why he keeps NARCAN in his car.

The details differ from county to county, but the larger question is the same across the region. What do we do when someone needs help?

Not what do we say we believe about addiction in the abstract. Not what do we think should happen to “those people,” whoever those people are supposed to be. What do we do when the person struggling is our child, our parent, our former student, our neighbor, our employee, our friend, or someone we remember from school whose name now appears in an Explore crime report?

What Help Looks Like

When I asked where the community is succeeding and where it’s falling short, Wood-Wessell said Venango County has many resources for addiction. But the bigger challenge, she said, is reducing stigma and helping people know where to go.

“It’s not an embarrassment that your child is struggling or your mother is struggling,” she said. “They need help, just like you would get them help if they had diabetes or cancer. Call a doctor. This isn’t something that they chose. This isn’t a character flaw. We have a problem. We need to get this person help.”

That’s easy to agree with in theory and harder to live out in practice. Addiction causes real harm. People lie, they steal, they disappear, they frighten their families, and they neglect people who depend on them. They burn through trust; they make choices that leave others hurt, angry, and exhausted. But nothing about reducing stigma requires pretending those things aren’t real.

Shame doesn’t build recovery housing. It doesn’t get someone to detox. It doesn’t drive someone to a meeting. It doesn’t help a parent figure out what to do when their adult child is using again. It doesn’t help a person leaving jail get identification, insurance, or a place to sleep. It doesn’t keep someone alive during an overdose.

If anything, shame can keep people from reaching for help until the situation is much, much worse.

Heffernan said people rarely realize how many resources are available until they need them, and then they don’t know how to access them.

The starting point in Venango County is simple: call the Human Services main number at 814-432-9100.

People don’t need to know the right category before calling. They don’t need to know whether the issue is drug and alcohol, mental health, child welfare, housing, aging, or transportation. They can start by saying they need help.

“What’s going on?” he said, describing how many calls begin. “‘I’m having trouble. I’m having trouble thinking thoughts about using.’ Hang on, let me get a hold of Justin or Michelle or Lisa, or one of his case managers. ‘My neighbor, I think something’s going on with their kiddos.’ Okay, hang on. Let me get you in touch with Aime or Christy or one of their case managers.”

He said the question is not, “What’s your problem?” It’s, “What can we help you with?”

That’s a different posture.

It doesn’t remove accountability. It doesn’t erase consequences. It simply gives someone a place to start before the problem becomes even harder to untangle.

Heffernan said the county can complete a drug and alcohol assessment within seven days, or within 24 hours if there’s an emergent need. The county can take self-referrals and court-ordered referrals. If someone doesn’t have insurance, they should still come in, he said. The assessment has no cost, and treatment funding can be worked through based on income, insurance status, and available funding streams.

From there, the county can determine whether someone needs outpatient treatment, intensive outpatient treatment, inpatient treatment, detox, or some combination that changes over time.

Earlier in this series, one of the phrases that stayed with me from recovery conversations was that the door is always open. People disappear, relapse, come back, try again, fall apart, return embarrassed, and sit down in the room one more time. What I heard from the county officials and human services leaders I talked to was a more practical version of the same idea.

The door exists. The phone number exists. The programs exist. The providers exist. The question is whether people know they can reach for them, and whether the rest of us make that easier or harder.

What All of Us Can Do

I don’t think everyone in the community has the same role. But nobody is completely outside of one.

Some people can carry NARCAN. Some can support recovery organizations, shelters, churches, or food programs. Some can help someone make a phone call. Some can offer a ride. Some can stop treating addiction as a private shame that should be hidden until it becomes a public crisis. Some can learn where help begins so that when someone finally says, “I don’t know what to do,” the answer is not a shrug.

That doesn’t mean being naïve, ignoring the damage addiction causes, excusing crime, or pretending that love alone can make someone ready for recovery. If this series has taught me anything, it’s that addiction is too complicated for slogans.

Choices matter. So do trauma, genetics, mental health, poverty, family structure, isolation, housing, transportation, treatment access, and the community around a person when they’re trying to come back.

“It’s okay not to be okay,” said Heffernan, quoting Wood-Wessell. “It’s not okay to stay there when you have all these resources that can help you.”

That line works only if people know that the resources are there. It works only if asking for help doesn’t feel like a confession of worthlessness. It works only if the rest of us are willing to be part of a community where someone can be honest before everything collapses.

I started this conversation by asking what local government was doing about addiction. That’s still a fair question. Counties help fund treatment, coordinate services, run jails, support reentry, connect people to housing, and work with providers across the region. But government is not the whole answer. It can’t be.

Addiction reaches too many places for that. It moves through families, classrooms, jail blocks, emergency rooms, churches, treatment centers, workplaces, neighborhoods, and quiet living rooms where somebody knows something is wrong but does not know what to do next.

So the question belongs to all of us.

What kind of community are we willing to be when someone needs help?

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Related Articles:

I Thought Help Was Easy to Find and Found It Was Fighting to Keep Up

I Thought Recovery Meant Quitting for Good and Found It Was More About Staying in the Fight

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

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