CHRIS NEWCOMB: Welcome to Peer Into Recovery, a podcast with the focus on the profession of peer support. For more information about how to subscribe, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. Hey, everybody, this is Chris Newcomb. I am your host for another edition of Peer Into Recovery Podcast, a podcast that is focused on the profession of peer support.

Today, I have a great guest. His name is Tom Jackson. Tom comes to us from Stanton, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. Tom, how are you doing today?

TOM JACKSON: I am doing okay for a cold, rainy, not quite winter, not quite spring Monday. It was 80 degrees the other day and then there was snow.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I’m here in Richmond and they say, just give it five minutes, it’s Richmond, the weather will change. So, let me introduce you to our audience. You are a registered peer recovery specialist and you’re working there in the daytime at Western State Hospital, there in Stanton and doing quite a few things there, working with groups and individuals, as well as working in the diversion program for co-occurring disorder. You also have several certifications. You are a certified older adult peer recovery specialist. You’re an ethics instructor as well as a WRAP instructor and you completed the certified personal medicine coach program along with myself, which was a lot of fun and it’s a great modality. If you haven’t done that, check it out. And you’re also working at night with the VRAP or Virginia Recovery Advocacy Project. And that is spelled V as in Victor, RAP as in Paul. So VRAP, Virginia Recovery Advocacy Project.

I’ll let the listeners know Tom and I had such a great time talking that we probably should just get coffee because we could have done two or three episodes. But since we can only do one, we’re going to hone in on his journey into recovery, what he’s doing now in the profession, but particularly honing in on the advocacy piece of what happened in January and February in the state legislature because that has a direct effect to everyone who’s already working as Peer Recovery Specialist and those who will begin to work in the field in the years to come. So this episode is packed full of information. Grab a piece of paper, pen, tablet, your phone, computer, gather your friends and family, put it on CNN because this is really great information. So without further ado, Tom, action. Jackson, the clock is ticking. Your story. Let’s go. Boom. Hit it.

TOM JACKSON: Okay. So my standard introduction is, hey, everybody, my name is Tom Jackson. I use he, him pronouns. I’m a person in long term recovery, which for me means I haven’t used illicit substances since May 13th, 1991. And my last serious mental health crisis was in august of 2009. I was born in New York City. When I was nine, we moved to Eastern Connecticut. I was really fortunate. I grew up on the beach. And then moved to San Francisco when I was 22, to sort of follow the Grateful Dead, learn how to cook California cuisine and come out. And so I did everything all within like the first two or three weeks. You know, it’s like, let it get it all out of the way. And I lived there for 15 years.

Then I moved to Hawaii for four years and I moved to Charlottesville in 97, had a series of mental health crises, was homeless for a while. And then in 2002, got hired by somebody who is now a very good friend of mine as a recovery coach and house manager at Region 10 Community Service Board Dual Recovery Centers housing. And I went from, you know, literally like on a Tuesday or Wednesday, you know, Salvation Army with no anything to a roof over my head, 10 or 12 hours a week of pay and cable and you know, all that kind of stuff. And then just kind of, you know, got promoted, got promoted, got promoted, retired from Region 10 five years ago, as one of the program managers of the Wellness Recovery Center.

And then kind of hopped around from job to job, did some work at a group home, did some work with a rural federally qualified health center in South of Charlottesville, and then did some peer work for On Our Own in Charlottesville, the peer recovery center there. And without much warning, because somebody decided to go back to school, started on a contract at Western State three years ago in January. So I kind of got to see what the hospital was like just before COVID, and then everything shut down. And we’ve been, you know, kind of up and down and up and down, trying to get back to what life was like in January and February three years ago, but we’re still not all the way back. And then I got hired part time by the hospital that summer, full time in November of 2020. And so I’ve been full time on staff there ever since. In the summer of 2020, right?

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah.

TOM JACKSON: In the summer of 2020, I read a book called American Fix by a guy by the name of Ryan Hampton, who was one of the two co-founders of Recovery Advocacy Project and sort of our related annual conference, Mobilize Recovery. And in American Fix, toward the end of it, he basically said, what we need to solve in particular, the overdose addiction, suicide, and lack of recovery crisis was something akin to what I had done, I don’t know, what was it, 15 years earlier, give or take with the HIV AIDS movement, and in particular, what ACT UP did, where their motto was silence equals death, and that the only way we were going to really solve the whole addiction crisis was that everybody who had anything to do with it, talked to everybody they knew about what was going on with them, whether they were a family member who had a loss, an ally, or a person in long-term recovery. Short-term, long-term, sustained, or not. Or somebody, I do a lot of harm reduction work, or somebody who is still actively using substances.

Then this past year, we did something really interesting, which was a coast-to-coast in both directions bus tour. Where, after the bus came to Richmond, which is where I did one event, and then I followed it up to Philadelphia and New Jersey, and then we ended up in New York. Several of us had the privilege of attending the Clinton Global Initiative, which was the Clinton Foundation’s first convening of CGI since 2016. When I first got sober almost 32 years ago, I was just terrified of public speaking, and I decided I was going to use 12-step meetings as a way to get over it, and I forced myself to share just about every 12-step meeting I went to for a couple of years. In this room full of lots of dignitaries and so on, there was a question and answer period, raised my hand, they handed me a microphone, and she had put up some slides that talked about a four-point recovery program that they are implementing, and it all looked wonderful. I said, this is great. You’re talking in two and three dimensions here.

The thing you’re missing is that fourth dimension, which is time, and that the time between somebody deciding, hey, I’m ready to do something, I’m ready to start my recovery, and the time that willingness fades, that window of opportunity can literally be, and sometimes it literally can be five or 10 minutes. One of the things that we are actively advocating for is same-day service, that you walk in and you will get services that day, not what Virginia currently does, which is an assessment and services within 10 calendar days. That’s my long-term dream. They will walk in and they will meet a peer specialist right away, who will guide them through the process and be available, if not 24-7, at least more than Monday to Friday, 8-5, to help guide them through their first few weeks of early recovery. Maybe by 2025, 2026, might be able to do some of that. But that’s my dream. That’s my advocacy dream, is to make the CSBs truly deliver same-day services, which are heavily, heavily peer-based.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s a wonderful dream. I know that you are committed to making that happen, and I’m sure that it will. This is the perfect segue to talk about advocacy and what just happened in the state legislature in January and February. Why don’t you tell us about VRAP, Virginia Recovery Action Project, in relation to what just happened during this advocacy period in the legislature?

TOM JACKSON: Okay. Legislative session ended on Friday. All things being equal with a split legislature, Democrats having a two seat majority in the Senate and Republicans having, excuse me, I think a four seat majority in the house and a Republican governor who clearly has presidential ambitions. All things being equal, it wasn’t bad. The only, before I get to the good news, the only not so good news was a bill passed. Fentanyl is now a weapon of terrorism in Virginia.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: What? Get out of here. Weaponization is usually a term you use between two countries that are about to go at it. You got to unpack this for us.

TOM JACKSON: It was a stealth bill. The title was Weapons of Terror. The title of the bill did not mention fentanyl. The hearing was at something like eight at night. Nobody knew about it. No, no advocacy organization showed up to testify. It passed overwhelmingly in both houses. There is a senator from Northern Virginia, I believe, named Scott Suraville, who’s a big recovery ally, who did stand up in the Senate committee hearing and got the words, give and sell, taken out of the bill. So you couldn’t be charged as a terrorist if you gave somebody something that was laced with fentanyl. You could still be charged under other felony laws, but not this one.

You know, the discrimination is starting to rise up again. Even, you know, the governor’s work on, you know, when he started his mental health program, what about a month ago, you know, crime and violence are mentioned every time he mentions the word mental health, even though we know there is almost no link between the two, that people with serious mental health conditions are, you know, I think literally 10 or 12 times more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator of one. And even interestingly enough, I just saw this the other day that more and more of even even the shootings that we see all the time, by and large, these are not people who have a diagnosable mental health condition. So, you know, to pair those two together and just, you know, continue the discrimination.

There’s a guy by the name of Bill White, who is really sort of the historian of the Recovery Advocacy Movement. A few months ago in a talk said, he’s even stopping using the word stigma and he’s just calling it discrimination. Let’s talk about what it is. Stigma is a feeling, stigma is a thought. Discrimination is the behavior. I mean, I can stigmatize people all I want, but that’s between my ears. Those are my thoughts and my feelings. The behavior is the discrimination. I think two things really. Number one is, instead of reducing the supply, let’s reduce the demand. That’s the first thing. Let’s make recovery the epidemic, as opposed to making drugs the epidemic. Because, you know, there are always going to be cartels, you know.
There’s been, you know, there were bootleggers when my parents were little kids, or not so little teenagers. You know, there were bootleggers then.

And, you know, there’s always people who are going to sell, who are going to make money selling substances to people, because there’s always going to be a demand. So you can make recovery the epidemic and reduce the demand, you know, provide treatment, provide treatment on demand. And then, of course, the two biggest things of underlying long-term recovery are safe housing and a job. And, you know, if we felt the more we felonize, you know, small sales and so on, the more people have a felony record, they’re never going to get a decent job. Oh, that’s starting to change a little bit. And there is, you know, perilously nowhere near enough recovery housing. I mean, Richmond is nationally known for the quality and quantity of the recovery housing it has. But it’s really an exception.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: So we have this bill that got snuck in at the last hour and weaponization of fentanyl, which is just unbelievable. So what else happened? Give us some good news.

TOM JACKSON: OK, so the single biggest news from the peer perspective is that the barrier crime bill passed both houses and is on its way to the governor. And what that means is that peers who have a barrier crime, and Virginia has the longest list of barrier crimes by at least a hundred of any state. So last year we tried, you know, going through making a list of and getting, you know, just chopping that list way down. And that did not pass. So this year, what a bunch of advocates put together was a bill that makes those crimes reviewable on an individual basis, based on how they related to an individual’s pre recovering life. And how their recovery basically counterbalanced or counteracted whatever the charge was. You know, what have they done? What’s the person done in recovery to, you know, whether it’s to make amends or not do it again or whatever, but for them to be reviewed on an individual basis. And there was also a line item in the budget that we sent out an action on to actually fund two positions to do the to do the checks. because, you know, it’s not going to do much good if if the if DBHDS Department of Behavioral Health doesn’t have anybody there to actually do the checks. It’s on the way.It should be on the way to the governor.

Other things that passed or and I can’t some of them it’s hard to tell just sort of looking through it. There is the beginning of a program on jail based substance treatment and transition services. The beginning of it was delayed a year as the house and Senate got in a spat about it. But it looks as though it might be moderately well funded. You know, the idea of course being that there is a huge danger and lots of people who overdose and die coming out of jails and prisons, because by and large, they are substance naive, they’re, you know, and have been for some period of time. Although, of course, you know, whatever, what all my clients tell me is that, you know, jails are a great place to buy drugs. One of the bills that has passed both houses starts Virginia on the road to providing jail and prison-based substance use services, and also transition services to the community for people who are being released from jails and prisons. The overdose rate of people who resume use after incarceration is off the charts. Their bodies are drug naive, and they go back and they do the same quantity of something that they did months or years before, and with an increasingly poison supply on top of it, the overdose and death rate is very high. So there’s some recognition that that needs to get fixed.

I don’t know how much this is a response to the fact that there are inmates in some states, I don’t think in Virginia yet, who are suing jails and prisons under the Americans with Disabilities Act and are winning to be provided substance treatment in jails and prisons. And there’s been some initial success. And I wonder how much of this is an attempt to head some of that off. What else?

Oh, one big thing. Let’s see. The Substance abuse Services Council is now going to be the Virginia Addiction Recovery Council and adding a couple of members. Let’s see. What else? Oh, jail and prison employees are now authorized to administer Narcan, which is also something pretty important. There is some increased funding for mental health and rehabilitative services for military service members transitioning to civilian life. One other thing that personally, and also relates to the plan the governor came out with, a bill passed to increase the accountability of community services boards, many of whose reporting is always non-existent. And there was a presentation that DBHDS got maybe six weeks or so ago. And the variation from non-existent to very good is just all over the place. Health insurance is now required to provide coverage for mobile crisis response services and for residential crisis stabilization.

Two last things, there is some increased tracking of naloxone distribution and overdose reversal, although not as much as we were hoping. And then the last thing we were hoping originally to get a person with life experience appointed to the Behavioral Health Commission. And what we were told is that the Behavioral Health Commission is exclusively composed of legislators and they are not going to let anybody else on. So the proposal was to form a committee of people with life experience to advise the Behavioral Health Commission. And while the bill that passed doesn’t explicitly say, form a committee, it does charge the commission with actively soliciting and receiving responses from people who have received mental health or behavioral health services in Virginia. So hopefully, that will lead to an advisory committee of some kind. So that’s all the stuff that passed, which is not bad.

Now, I started outlining it yesterday. You know, VRAP will be sending out actions to our 860 person mailing list. Go to Virginia Recovery Advocacy Project on Facebook and sign our platform. And all it’s going to ask for is your name, email, and zip code during a legislative session, especially when we would find out, you know, 36 hours ahead of time that something was going to be heard. Try to encourage people to take action. We’ve got a great tool called Action Network, which is a very good database for taking actions. You know, it’s pretty simple to put together an email that links to an action page where you can automatically send stuff to your representatives, state and federal. By zip code, it will figure out who your representatives are. We can do custom lists to committees and subcommittees and joint committees and so on for particular bills and so on and stuff like that.

We’ve had things where we’ve sent out a couple of thousand messages to delegates and senators. We had one that we did for adding Cultural Competency to the Virginia Peer Certification Training. because as of the current manual, which is finally under revision, I got the draft of it a couple of days ago and I have till Wednesday to provide comments. But Cultural Competency in the manual was three paragraphs. We did a listening session on Peer Services and an African American, a man who identified as African American and queer, said that when he did his peer training, he just didn’t relate to anything. He didn’t feel safe in the class, he didn’t feel heard, he didn’t feel comfortable. And so we decided to do an action. We sent 120 or 130 letters to the Office of Recovery Services, and which led to the formation of a series of panels at VCU, which in turn led to a pending revision of the manual. It also led to one day train the trainer program for LGBTQIA plus issues. There’ll be another one on BIPOC, Black indigenous People of Color issues, and so on sometime in the future. So that was an action. That was our most successful action to date.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: So, you know, to wrap it all up, recovery is about not just living, it’s about thriving, not just surviving. And so, you know, to bow tie it all together, we’ve been talking about things with the legislature and moving this whole profession forward to help people who really need it. I want to summarize what you have shared with us, that there are quite a few things that were happening in the legislature. Number one, the barrier crimes are now going from a sort of a mass categorization to more individualized case by case basis. Number two, jail-based substance support and treatment has now been approved. And number three, the Substance abuse Council has now been renamed to the Virginia Addiction Recovery Council. And then number four, jail and prison employees now are able to administer Narcan, which is fantastic. Number five, veteran increased services in transition to civilian life has been put into motion and more money has been allocated for those services. Number six, increased accountability of CSB reporting, which has heretofore been a little bit spotty, so they’re improving that. And then number seven, health insurance is required to cover mobile response services and crisis stabilization services. And then number eight is an increased tracking of naloxone distribution and overdose reversal, which is a really good thing.

TOM JACKSON: We at least reduced some of the harm of the one bill that calls fentanyl a weapon of terrorism, getting at least the part of giving it to someone or an individual sale, getting that removed from the bill. So, you know, if you sit down with a friend and you split something and it has fentanyl in it, you’re not going to be charged with terrorism. You can still be, I know, if the person overdoses, you can still be charged with multiple felonies for, you know, for giving the drug already. But this just, you know, added to it in a just totally, you know, headline burning ridiculous way.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I do want to say again and mention the Action Network Database if people want to get involved with the Virginia Recovery Advocacy Project. They can find that on Facebook, oddly enough, under, you guessed it, Virginia Recovery Advocacy Project, where you can sign up for the newsletter and also receive advocacy alerts to take action.

TOM JACKSON: You can also find the National Recovery Advocacy Project at recoveryvoices.com.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s just great stuff. Tom, thanks so much for sharing all the information that you’ve given on this podcast of what was going on at the state legislature earlier this year, the great things that are being put into motion and all the work that the Virginia Recovery Advocacy Project is doing. Thank you for the work you’re doing as a Registered Peer Recovery Specialist there at the Western State Hospital in Stanton and working as a peer in a hospital setting and bridging the gap between clinical and peer services, which when that happens, the best of both worlds. Also, we were joking earlier, I’ll just reiterate what you were telling me that you’re like, hey, I’m speaking as an individual, not as a official employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia, lest anyone think I’m speaking definitively from on high. But we know that your reporting is accurate and thank you for that. However, if anyone does have a problem with anything Tom said, his email is, I’m just kidding. Hey, thanks, Tom.

TOM JACKSON: Hey, thanks, Chris.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I’d like to thank our listeners for listening to the Peer Into Recovery podcast, which is brought to you by the Virginia Peer Recovery Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. And if you like our show and would like to subscribe to the podcast, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. And please leave us a brief review on iTunes. In the meantime, please take care of yourselves, everyone. We’ll see you soon.