‘The fire is raging.’ How Lexington recovery center helps young people break addiction
Hunter Welch knows how to help addicts in recovery because he knows how quickly drugs can take over your life.
As a college student, the Columbia native saw his life get swamped by substance abuse, quickly moving from a pastime to something that dominated everything else.
“I was the one who would bring drugs and offer them to everybody at the party,” Welch, 24, remembers of his recent past. “Then I would bring them and not offer them to anybody at the party. Then I would just do the drugs and not go to the party.”
After his habit caused him to drop out of Clemson University and go into recovery at 21, Welch found his way to the Courage Center in Lexington. He is the center’s program manager helping teens and young adults navigate substance abuse issues from recovery coaches who know from personal experience what the young people are going through.
A new grant announced last week will help with that goal. The Courage Center is one of four such recovery centers in the country to receive a grant to boost its response to overdose cases in Lexington County.
The grant will allow the recovery center to partner with Lexington County EMS to better reach those treated for a drug overdose. More than $100,000 will go, in part, to pay for each patient treated for an overdose in the county to receive a “care pouch” clipped to their clothing that includes, among other recovery material, a cell phone pre-paid for 60 minutes, programmed with Welch’s number.
“It’s an innovative approach to overdoses,” said Adrienne Bellinger, the executive director of the Courage Center.
Following up with people who overdose is crucial to making sure they don’t overdose again, Welch said, but patients will often provide first responders with a fake phone number or address. But now, Welch will be able to call the patient a week after treatment.
“We’ll reach out three times, and if we don’t get a response, then a recovery coach, an EMS worker and a law enforcement officer will go and visit them,” Welch said.
Separately, the center has received a $50,000 grant from the S.C. Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services to target outreach and intervention to six “hotspots” for opioid abuse in Lexington County — Cayce-West Columbia, Gaston, Irmo, Red Bank, South Congaree and Swansea — that have “consistently registered since March 2020 as areas experiencing the highest number of suspected overdoses,” the center said in a press release.
That grant will go toward safe prescription medicine disposal and outreach through local churches.
Records show the need for the program in Lexington County. In the last three months of 2020, first responders averaged 62 calls a month that required the opioid reversal drug NARCAN. So far in 2021, paramedics and firefighters have administered the drug 37 more times.
The idea for using the phones came from the center’s contact at the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department, who noted the department has hundreds of confiscated cell phones going unused — although Bellinger said the center will purchase phones before opting for ones that have been used.
Welch’s role, like that of other recovery coaches at the Courage Center, is to provide encouragement and guidance to young people dealing with substance abuse and the issues that can lead to and be caused by it.
Part of the center’s approach is matching those young people with a coach who has dealt with addiction and recovery themselves, something Welch is all too familiar with.
When he started school at the College of Charleston in 2015, an underage Welch was handed a drink at his first fraternity party. Drinking led to smoking marijuana and harder drugs like cocaine so quickly that even Welch was surprised how quickly he took up the habit.
“People think peer pressure means everybody standing around you in a circle saying, ‘Do it, Hunter. Don’t be lame,’” he said. “But it’s really that you see everyone else doing it, and you don’t want to feel left out.
“By second semester, I was selling enough mushrooms to get 10 years in prison,” Welch said.
Knowing he needed a change, he left Charleston midway through his sophomore year, and after taking some courses at Midlands Technical College, enrolled at Clemson. But he fell into the same lifestyle there, and by 2018 he had left school and was seeking counseling for depression. He credits Clemson counselor Mimi Metcalfe with helping him realize he needed to clean up his life.
But a 21-year-old Welch found himself an odd fit at meetings with people who found a need for recovery later in life. His best friends on the road to sobriety were 30 and 44. Their life experiences and relationships with substance abuse just didn’t match up with those of people his age.
“If you’re 55 and you lost your job and can’t see your kids, it’s not hard to convince you that you need help,” he said. “If you’re 16 years old, you’re having the time of your life.”
But after he came to the Courage Center’s small headquarters next to a community garden outside Lexington, he felt more comfortable with their focus on young people like himself. He started volunteering as a recovery coach, which eventually led to his current job running meetings and activities for the center.
“Most people reach a jumping off point when they can’t continue,” Welch said. “They’re standing on a cliff, and the fire is raging behind them, the bear is coming, and they need someone at the bottom of the cliff saying, ‘Jump. I’ll catch you. Trust me.’ That’s what a coach is for.”
The Courage Center started at Mount Horeb United Methodist Church to provide substance abuse services to people aged 15 to 26. It had difficulty finding a permanent home when neighbors on South Church Street opposed a town planning decision to allow them to set up shop.
The center eventually landed in an old home construction office on Park Road near their old church, although Bellinger stresses that faith and spirituality are just one pathway the center uses to encourage recovery. Besides meeting space, the venue provides a gaming center, a pool table and a basketball court that both give clients something to keep them occupied, and an atmosphere where they might feel comfortable talking about their problems.
“It’s not clinical. We don’t do therapy,” Bellinger said. “We just give them a chance to connect with other people. Connecting with others is important, because at that age your peer group are the most important people in your life. As adults, we’re told to change the people, places and things that lead us to use. Young people can’t do that as easily. It can be hard and lonely... We want kids to connect to other young people, and show them to live life and have fun without drugs and alcohol.”
Welch hopes the center can expand its current staff of three full-time employees and move its offices to another location so more space on Park Road can be given over to their clients — and hopefully feel like they have another shot at life.
“You feel like your life is over if you drop out and need help,” he said. “But you can come out of it a better person.”
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
.jpg)