 Whether you've experienced it personally, or know of someone who currently is or has struggled with drugs, this epidemic affects most walks of life in many ways. I had a chance to speak with a few employees of the Williamson Health and Wellness Center to see how their new plans on how they are helping combat drug addiction. Williamson Health and Wellness Center developed a partnership with Marshall University when the initial grant was written for SAMHSA. And we received a huge grant from SAMHSA to expand medical assisted treatment. And so, in part of that grant, we agreed to do forums and things like that. I think it's important just because you need the whole community to get on board. So, you know, we've invited a lot of leaders in the community to come to the table with us today to really brainstorm and try to come up with some solutions. I think more than anything, the important part is the team building process and breaking down the barriers of each agency willing to work with each other. It's crazy because the rest of the country is kind of lagging behind where we are in this region because we're almost coming out of the opioid crisis and moving into the methamphetamine crisis. This initial forum is going to be a small forum to develop a bigger forum in February that we plan to invite people who's in recovery right now to get their input because we don't think it should be anything for them without them involved. Plus, it'll be other community leaders. So, this initial forum is for us to come together to how can we heal? How can we move forward and how can we help this population and serve them the best? People can recover. People do recover. Me, a lot of people know my story. I made some mistakes in my life and I've rebounded. We have some success stories here. It's just not about medical assisted treatment. Some people can do abstinence based and really for us here at Williamson Health and Wellness Center it doesn't matter if it's abstinence based, medical assisted treatment. We just want people to survive. I'm actually a recovering addict. I have a little over a year and a half clean and so definitely some of my patients, you know, we've kind of gotten them from all walks of life whether it be starting fresh from an inpatient program or whether they're just walking out on the street, came in the door and said, hey, I want some help. We have started from the bottom up and we are trying to work with everybody that we possibly can to try to end this stigma of addiction whether it be jobs, transportation, any barriers that may stand in the way of success for recovering addicts. I feel like and especially, you know, when you have competitors especially in this business people may feel like, oh, well, you know, why would you guys include them on stuff that you are slowly doing yourself. It's nothing of the sort. We want at the end of the day for us to really make a difference. All hands have to be on deck. And that's the main end goal is to get everybody together and let's make a difference. That's first and foremost. If we don't have the service we'll be glad to refer them to where they can get what they need but 304-236-5902 and hit extension 500 and somebody on the other end is more than willing to help. We're not going backwards. We're definitely moving forward and that's the end goal. So, yeah, it seems like that everybody's going really good especially I've been here for about a year with Williamson Health and Wellness and I feel like even from the beginning when I started to where we are now it makes my heart happy. It makes my heart happy truly.