New Waynesboro treatment center helping people with opioid addiction
WAYNESBORO, Va. (WVIR) - There’s a new opioid treatment center in the Shenandoah Valley hoping to help people overcome their substance abuse disorder, and it just opened up this week.
The director says the phones are already ringing. After three solid years of hard work to get there, MARC (Mid-Atlantic Recovery Center) is now seeing patients.
“If you can’t function in your daily life without the drug then you are dependent,” MARC Director Natalie Broadnax said.
Opioid addiction is an epidemic. “It’s not an exaggeration, and you know it’s not something people just say, it’s real,” Broadnax stated.
And it’s killing people. “We’re seeing increases in deaths nationwide, we’re seeing that in the state and we’re seeing it specifically in the Staunton, Augusta, Waynesboro area,” Broadnax said.
She says COVID-19 has played a part in that. “There’s a lot of income insecurity. There’s a lot of insecurity within families, and if you’re not reporting to work and you were already abusing medications, now you’re at home,” she stated.
Fentanyl is also playing a part. “Fentanyl ends up in pills or it ends up in heroin. It ends up in something else and that is what is killing people,” she said.
Broadnax says the choice to put the Mid-Atlantic Recovery Center in Waynesboro was deliberate. “Talking with everybody to probation officers, to sheriffs, to the commonwealth’s attorney, doctors, nurses... this was the area of need.”
It’s right on the bus line and four minutes from the interstate. “We talk about eliminating barriers to treatment and transportation is one of those barriers,” she said.
Treatment, which is a progression, includes medication to stabilize patients alleviating withdrawal symptoms, and counseling.
“You’re not going to get better just from medication alone,” Broadnax said. “You really need to have counseling and peer support so that you can get your whole life together.”
But you can get better. Broadnax says it takes time, but people can recover from opioid addiction. “We want people to have the ability to say that this is what I chose. This is the life I chose and it’s not being dominated by this need for this drug every day.”
One of the other barriers to treatment can be money. Broadnax says a typical patient pays $13 a day. MARC works with Medicaid and insurance.
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