Mickey Ashpole knows firsthand how addictive drugs can be, having fought addiction since he was a Wawasee High School student about 16 years ago. Now an outreach coordinator with Satori Waters, a residential rehabilitation center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Ashpole has returned to his hometown community to help others fight the disease. He has organized a panel on drugs and recovery for 6 to 8 p.m. May 17 at Warsaw City Hall, 102 S. Buffalo St., with doors opening at about 5 p.m. Titled “Solutions and Resources for the Addiction Crisis,” the presentations and panel are open to the public. The agenda will start with a 10-minute introduction by Ashpole. From 6:10 to 6:55 p.m., Allen County Health Commissioner Dr. Debra McMahan and Fort Wayne Medical Education Program Associate Program Director Dr. Gregory Eigner will speak on “Opioid Crisis and Adverse Consequences.” Then Lutheran Foundation Director of Community Initiatives Kristina Johnson will speak from 6:55 to 7:10 p.m. on “Healing our Community with Hope.” Trek Limitless Recovery Executive Director Michelle Merritt will speak for 15 minutes on “Recovery is Possible” before a question-and-answer session from 7:25 to 8 p.m. The panel also will include Warsaw Police Department Chief Scott Whitaker, Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Department Lt. Chris McKeand, Bowen Center Director of Addiction Services Vicki Ley and Kim Kelley from Serenity House. Moderator will be Warsaw Community Church Pastor Denny Wilson. Ashpole came up with the idea for the drug panel while he was at a Drug & Alcohol Consortium of Allen County town hall meeting in Fort Wayne. The city’s chief of police discussed the opioid crisis, and a Chamber of Commerce vice president gave a presentation as a mother about her son’s heroin addiction and how she didn’t know where to turn for help. “I was sitting there thinking, I’m from this community. I graduated Wawasee High School. I struggled with addiction and it started for me in high school at 16 when I got into a car accident and I was prescribed narcotic pain meds, and I kept getting them prescribed to me,” Ashpole recalled. His mom kept asking his doctor not to subscribe more pain medications for him. “Finally, he took me off one of them and I would go to the medicine cabinet to find more. If there were none in the medicine cabinet, I’d go to a friend’s and ask their parents if they had any or if there were any in their medicine cabinet,” he said. If they didn’t have any, he’d ask about their grandparents’ medication or if they knew anyone taking painkillers for a sports injury. He’d network out to find more. That happened more frequently as his prescriptions would run out sooner and sooner than he could get refills. “That all led me very quickly into – this was 16 years ago – oxycodone and Fentanyl patches. For a 16-year-old kid, this was pretty serious,” Ashpole said. His parents sent him to the Bowen Center, but he didn’t take anything serious. In his household, his addiction wasn’t specifically talked about. “I was in honors classes, KYLA, sports, but all the time I was addicted to the pain killers and no one even knew. I won my sectional tennis matches high on morphine. I took my SATs ripped on morphine and still did pretty decent on them,” he said. Condensing his story, Ashpole said he was basically sitting with a friend one night years later and she knew he was struggling but didn’t know to what extent. She told him he needed to stop lying to her and himself, and he realized she was right but didn’t know what to do about his problem. “She’s like, ‘go to rehab, go to treatment.’ I was like, ‘What is that?’ I didn’t know what these places were. I didn’t know they existed because there are none in Indiana. There’s one in Indianapolis, Fairbanks. If we’re talking about a real residential treatment facility, that’s it,” Ashpole said. “You have like the Salvation Army, the homeless shelter, halfway houses, but none of them offer the dual diagnosis, substance abuse and underlying mental conditions (treatment).” A couple of years ago, he went down to Satori Waters as a client. About seven months after he completed their program, he was asked to work for them since people were reaching out to him for help and he had some experience in marketing. In a marketing meeting his boss asked if anyone would like to spend two to three months at a time in their respective home states to market their facilities. Ashpole said yes. “Coming up here, the local resources are there, but they’re just not to the level of care they are in Florida. But the whole thinking of the town hall meeting was, ‘I went to the hospitals, I went to counseling centers, I went to law enforcement, I went to all these different places, I went to mental health centers. I’m a member of the Kosciusko Coalition on Drug Education, so I know all of the places.’ So the goal of the town hall meeting was to get all the resources together, in front of the community ... talk about the drug problem and educate everyone,” Ashpole explained. Though some people don’t want to talk about it, he said there is a drug problem in this community. “Right now the thing that is killing people is the opioids, mixed with benzos, but also the heroin. About 5 to 10 percent of people in high school have tried heroin,” he said. Ashpole said he’s also working with the WPD and its Drug Task Force, KCSD and law enforcement agencies from area towns on Police Assisted Addiction Recovery Initiative. Going on in the East Coast now, the reactive part of the program allows drug or alcohol addicts to go to the police and ask for treatment help without being arrested. The proactive part of the program allows officers to go out to known drug users and ask them if they want to get help. “It’s working on the East Coast. They’re getting help to a lot of people,” Ashpole said. In sponsoring and creating the panel, Ashpole said, “Everything I’m doing is because this is my community. I have ties to the community. My dad owns the Sears store here in town. I grew up in this community. I know a lot of people, and I’m just trying to make it better. I know there’s a problem so I’m just trying to get everybody together to get everyone on the same page so we can get help where it’s needed.”
