The Article below was published in Vol. 135, Issue 3 of the Lake Forest College Stentor on November 8, 2019
By Josh Hager ’22
Staff Writer
As part of Lake Forest College’s Ethics Center 2019-2020 programming focusing on Pharmaceutical Ethics, students, faculty, staff, and members of the Lake Forest community filled the seats in the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel on October 29 to see Necia Freeman, Realtor and Brown Bag Ministry founder who is featured in Academy-Award nominated Netflix documentary Heroin(e). Opening her talk, Freeman explained she started the Brown Bag Ministry in Huntington, West Virginia, because “I love poor kids and prostitutes.” Once a bustling industrial town, Huntington has become the epicenter of America’s modern opioid epidemic, with an overdose rate 10 times the national average. According to the film’s Field Guide, Heroin(e) “highlights three women working to break the devastating cycle of drug abuse. Fire Chief Jan Rader spends the majority of her days reviving those who have overdosed; Judge Patricia Keller presides over drug court, handing down empathy along with orders; and Necia Freeman of the Brown Bag Ministry feeds meals to women selling their bodies for drugs.”
The opioid crisis in Huntington became most apparent to Freeman when heroin laced with carfentanil, an opioid 100 times stronger than fentanyl, caused 27 overdoses in the time span of four hours. While Narcan saved most of the users who overdosed, what became clear was that the prevention of drug abuse meant going beyond resuscitation. Freeman delved into how widespread the problem could be because of the over-distribution of pharmaceuticals and noted that there are “towns of 1,800 people [that] are getting millions of painkillers.” Freeman explained that “there is a profit to be made from suffering for the pharmaceutical industry, and this pharmaceutical profiteering led to the widespread use of heroin, and eventually fentanyl when the original opioids were restricted.”
Freeman started the Brown Bag Ministry after a female sex worker was found dead in a cornfield outside of Huntington. Following the woman’s death, Freeman noted that “the newspapers reporting the story did not give the victim’s name or humanize her in any way.” In order to provide support to sex workers in Huntington, the Brown Bag Ministry gives food and religious messages to the women to support them and works with them to eventually get them off the streets and off of drugs.
Explaining the origins of drug addiction for some, Freeman described the shocking horrors of the physical and sexual abuse that many of the sex workers endured as children. Freeman told the story of “Cornerstone,” a sex worker who she has befriended over the course of her work with the Brown Bag Ministry. Freeman noted that Cornerstone’s “abuse by a family member . . . led to drug addiction and the need for her to become a sex worker to afford her addiction.” Freeman also explained that Cornerstone’s “father and abuser received little jail time for the sexual abuse of his own daughter, but received double the sentence for cutting the ear of a dog after being released from jail.”
For Freeman, abuse is the “common thread between many addicts and sex workers.” Additionally, she explained that “in the state of West Virginia as a whole, 10 percent of children are raised by neither parent, leading to a foster system being overloaded and filled with abusive caretakers, which continues the traumatic cycle. First responders are also affected, firefighters and EMTs who see people in their darkest hours are not unshaken by what they see, having high rates of suicide and alcoholism.”
Freeman explained that “most cases of opioid addiction stem from over-prescription of pain pills after an injury, but such rampant addiction would also be impossible without the conditions of post-industrial unemployment, patriarchy which causes and enables child abuse, and poverty.”
Following Freeman’s talk, an audience member asked Freeman for her opinion on the effectiveness of the incarceration of addicts, since illegal substance addiction is still treated criminally. Freeman stated that “mass incarceration is another environment which causes extreme alienation for people already addicted, in addition to other factors which might cause someone to be imprisoned, addiction does not exist in a vacuum.”
Josh Hager can be reached at hagerjm@mx.lakeforest.edu
