If you or a family member are suffering from drug addiction, recovery is possible and there is hope. That’s the message of National Recovery Month, which is being celebrated this September. On Friday afternoon, the celebration came to Dalton’s City Hall with a stop of the Georgia Recovers Bus Tour. Dalton is one of 63 cities that the tour is visiting this month.
“I’m proud that the city of Dalton is a stop along the way for Georgia Recovers,” said Mayor Annalee Sams, who presented a mayoral proclamation during the tour stop declaring Recovery Month in Dalton. “I think it’s important for us to show our support of the recovery community.”
During her presentation, Sams pointed out that the city has been able to take action this year to help those in recovery. The city received funds from the National Opioid Settlement and has used that money to provide operational funding for the local chapter of Narcotics Anonymous as well as funding a partnership with the Conasauga Community Addiction Recovery Center. Settlement funds were also used for a training conference for human trafficking prevention hosted in Dalton this summer.
“I would say that we see you and you are as included as anyone,” Sams said when asked what her message is for families who are dealing with addiction issues. “What Recovery Month achieves is that it just brings awareness to the general public, and that’s an important message to get out there.”
“Everybody matters in this town,” said City Council member Dennis Mock who attended the tour stop. “Addicted folks are important, too, and we want to do the best we can for folks here.”
The Georgia Recovers Bus Tour is an official state of Georgia National Recovery Month event funded by Commissioner Kevin Tanner of the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities and supported by the Georgia General Assembly Working Group on Addiction and Recovery. As part of Friday’s tour stop, organizers donated two overdose reversal Narcan kits to the city. The kits can be used to reverse an opioid overdose. Earlier this year, the members of the General Assembly passed a law requiring cities and counties to have Narcan kits in every public facility where an automated external defibrillator is present.
“(The bus tour) breaks down stigma surrounding the disease of addiction. We believe that the stigma is the most dangerous part of the disease,” said Jeff Breedlove, a policy adviser for the Georgia Council for Recovery. Breedlove himself is in recovery. “So we break that stigma down and we save lives. We also believe the bus shows people, my brothers and sisters that may be in active addiction or in very early recovery, that, yes, recovery is really real and it can happen for anybody.”
The Georgia Recovers bus is covered in hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of signatures. At each tour stop organizers invite everyone who attends to sign the bus as a show of support for the recovery community. Sams and the other Dalton leaders and residents in attendance added their signature before sending the bus on to its next stop.
“The bus itself becomes a story,” Breedlove said. “Because as we make those 63 stops … you sign the bus. At the end of September, there will be well over 20, 25,000 signatures on this bus. And they will each tell a story.”
According to tour organizers, drug overdoses are the number one cause of death in America and Georgia for people ages 18-45. On average, there are 200 overdoses a day in the United States.
Addiction is a serious problem but the good news is that recovery is real, and it’s possible. Organizers say there are more than 900,000 people in recovery from addiction in Georgia.