CINCINNATI — It’s a picture-perfect moment inside Jessica Blackburn’s Price Hill home.
“You want to hold the baby?” she asks her 1-year-old daughter. “You want to hold your brother?”
The road to this white picket fence didn’t come easy for Blackburn.
“I would go Panhandle up and down 75 at rest areas, gas stations,” she said. “I did what I had to do at that time to feed my habit again.”
Blackburn has struggled with addiction on and off for years. Her mother and father struggled too. Her grandmother died of a heroin overdose in 2000. She swore she’d never end up like them.
“I wanted to make something in my life and no one in my family had,” she said.
A series of bad boyfriends and older male influences changed that. She first tried fentanyl on New Year’s Eve when she was 18.
“It made me feel really good,” she said.
She didn’t use it again for some time, but she was surrounded by people dealing with addiction. Eventually, she started using every single day.
“I found myself broke with nowhere to go,” she said.
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Blackburn sold drugs and turned to prostitution to make ends meet. She had a few short stints in jail.
“I was miserable,” she said. “I wanted to commit suicide. I hated it. And I kept telling myself, I'm going to get clean.”
While she was using, Blackburn’s brother died from an overdose. She also lost custody of three kids, who were each born addicted. Despite it all, she just couldn’t quit.
“I went up to the NICU with my son and sat with him every single day, but I knew they were going to take him from me,” she said. “I was like, ‘There's no reason to get sober. I'm never going to have my kids.”
Newtown Police Chief Tom Synan, who has become an unlikely crusader in the war against addiction after watching an entire family in his community die from addiction, said the influence of one's home "is powerful."
“The mother had abused prescription pills and alcohol,” he said of the family he saw impacted by addiction. “The youngest son was shot and killed buying crack cocaine. The oldest brother overdosed on heroin and fentanyl. And then last of the brothers, he personally set my car on fire in the parking lot, I had a long history with him.”
Synan said officers revived the last brother after an overdose, but he refused to get treatment at the hospital.
“It really left us with only a choice of gun, taser, handcuff and jail,” he said. “That's what we have in law enforcement to deal with addiction. I said, ‘We got to keep him alive for at least one more night, so take him to jail.’ And we accomplished our mission.”
The next day, Synan said the brother got out and did the rest of his heroin and fentanyl. He overdosed and died.
“It shattered my dream of being a police officer, saving the world,” he said. “I can’t even save a family.”
He started to write out his thoughts and published an op-ed in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“(It) got quite a bit of attention from people saying, ‘Let me tell you my story of addiction,’” he said.
Synan did not know it then, but the article would change everything. It led him to help start the Hamilton County Addiction Response Coalition, a group of experts and organizations dedicated to tackling the opioid crisis.
“When you have a group of coalition members that are doctors and psychologists and treatment professionals and people in recovery, they go, ‘I am human. This is what I'm seeing,’” Synan said, “You tell those personal stories and the more personal stories that come out, you hear the impact. You can see the commonality. That's how you reduce stigma.”
Eight years later, the coalition has grown to more than 400 members and 150 separate organizations, including addiction services organizations, law enforcement departments, athletic teams and the offices of public officials.
In Hamilton County, 433 people died from an accidental overdose in 2022, according to the county coroner’s office. The number is a 16% decrease from the number in 2021 (515) and a 24% decrease from the county’s peak in 2017 (567).
“To see the entire family lost and then see a community come together and help save so many, it validates what we did,” Synan said. “They were just one example of thousands of families that suffered. Everyone has struggled with addiction.”
Fentanyl was involved in 288 overdose deaths in the county in 2022, which is 67% of them.
One of Hamilton County’s tools to tackle the crisis is the Quick Response Team (QRT). The team deploys trained peer navigators (people who have lived experience or who are behavioral health specialists) and law enforcement officers throughout the community.
A QRT hotspot initiative, primarily focused in Price Hill, has documented success in cutting overdoses among a group of high-risk individuals. The program involves identifying drug users most likely to overdose, then wrapping resources around them. The pilot is a collaborative effort between QRT, Hamilton County and other law enforcement agencies.
Among the 14 participants in the first wave, the county says overdoses were reduced by 53%.
QRT and other organizations also distribute harm reduction supplies several days each week. These include clean needles, overdose-reversal medications (like NARCAN) and personal hygiene supplies.
Picking up those supplies has become a biweekly ritual for Nick Forrester, who struggles with drug addiction.
“I had ran into fentanyl/heroin when I was younger,” he said. “I caught a penitentiary number and I ended up getting addicted to heroin in Ross Correctional.”
That was the end of 2014. By early 2015, he said he was “full-blown” addicted.
“I didn't even know,” he said. “I looked myself in the mirror and I was sick and I didn't even know I was a junkie then.
Each day, he uses about 10 of the needles he picks up at these events. The clean needles ensure he’s not using needles that have already been used. He picked up NARCAN too, but more so to help people around him.
“I haven't overdosed in five and a half years,” he said. “However, I did just save somebody's life not even last week.”
Forrester estimates he’s saved more than 20 people from overdoses over the past seven years. He said each of them has overdosed several times.
“It happens a lot with me,” he said. “It's happened so often that I no longer panic.”
Harm reduction strategies have been around for decades, but one member of the QRT told WCPO there is still pushback.
“The general community doesn't agree with it, because they feel like we're aiding in their addiction,” said QRT Peer Navigator Alyssa Boiman. “But the way we see that is harm reduction is reducing the harm that the clients are experiencing while they're stuck in a cycle of addiction.”
It was a cycle that Blackburn was stuck in for a long time. She credits her husband’s support in her recovery.
“I told myself I was going to stay sober,” she said. “I was going to get my daughter back and nothing was going to stop me.”
Blackburn’s had her 1-year-old since she was about 5 months old.
“We just got custody in April,” she said. “Like full custody, completely ours, nobody can take her.”
She was completely sober during her pregnancy with her fourth child, born this year.
“My kids are my reason,” she said. “I need to get them back. They need me. I need them. That little girl saved my life.”
Blackburn has not used in about 17 months. This spring, WCPO was in the courtroom when she graduated from Hamilton County Drug Court.
“I do not wish using on my worst enemy,” said Blackburn. “It is the worst thing to go through, to wake up every day to be sick. It's a miserable life. And I don't ever want to be there again, ever.”
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