“But I do need to get out of here because … I just need to get out of here.”

Raleigh is also a rougher town for the homeless, he said. His mother and sister live in the Raleigh area, but they don’t want anything to do with him, he said.

He’d spent the previous two nights at the Veterans Restoration Quarters in East Asheville because it was a “Code Purple” (32☏ or colder) and the shelter allowed non-veterans to spend the night. He’s been on his own since age 15, he said. Originally from Raleigh, Barber said he was given up for adoption early in life, lived with a foster family that didn’t want him, and left school after sixth grade. sitting on a bench in Pritchard Park in downtown Asheville on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “I mean, ‘cause if I didn’t have it, I’d already have killed myself.” Michael Barber Sr.

Drug users in Asheville, they said, including the unhoused and those who congregate downtown, often are survivors of abusive childhoods and horrific traumas, in a society that largely views them as a menace.īarber, preparing for a cold night and uncertainty about where he would stay, said at least he had alcohol, one of his “go-to’s.” The drugs and alcohol, he said, are a way to try to cope with the difficult past, the mental illness, the loneliness. And that’s what triggers it.” Drugs, Mental Illness IntertwinedĪsheville Watchdog interviewed front-line workers who deal with substance abuse. I’ve been alone my whole life, man, and my family, they say they’re gonna be there and then I get there and then I’m alone. “I’ll get clean, and then I’ll just be alone again. “It’s gonna end up killing me,” Barber said of the fentanyl. Milligram per milligram, fentanyl is roughly 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. I’m gonna do fentanyl.’ It was so stupid, man. My girlfriend and me, we argue when we do meth, so I was like, ‘Screw it. “I’ve been clean from heroin for 13 years and I just started back on this. He’s also got social anxiety, he said, and the meth helps him feel more outgoing.īut he said he hates himself for recently starting to use fentanyl. It sounds really stupid.”īarber ticks off a litany of his mental health diagnoses, including “paranoid schizophrenic with post traumatic stress disorder, manic depressive,” with some of his trauma related to being shot in the leg with a 12-gauge shotgun in his youth. “Everybody around here does it, you know what I mean? And if I have it, I mean, people want to talk to me, and then I have people to talk to. “I’ve been doing it for so long,” he said of the meth he smokes or injects. “If you’re unhoused, there’s not a lot of opportunities to feel good about life.”īarber said his drug use goes back years. Shuchin Shukla of Asheville, a specialist in addiction medicine and an opioid educator at MAHEC, the Mountain Area Health Education Center. “Methamphetamine is a way to feel good,” said Dr. The drugs are widely available on the streets of Asheville, and people experiencing homelessness, especially those with histories of trauma and mental illness, are particularly susceptible to addiction. Hallucinations, mood disturbances, and trouble concentrating can last years after a user quits meth. They’re more lethal - an average of three people a week are dying of overdoses in Buncombe County - and harder to kick. That’s if his next hit of fentanyl doesn’t kill him.Īnd sometimes, he said, he hopes it will.īarber, 37, acknowledged being a daily user of meth and fentanyl, the two drugs that have taken over the drug scene in Asheville, largely replacing marijuana, prescription pain relievers, cocaine, and heroin. sat by himself in the east side of downtown’s Pritchard Park on a recent Tuesday afternoon, wondering where he would spend the night.

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