Drug addiction is perhaps the biggest crisis on the Qualla Boundary, and it’s time that tribal government got serious about punishing traffickers, members of Cherokee Tribal Council agreed last week.

It takes a village to combat a drug addiction or mental illness, and Richie Tannerhill is hoping to see a multitude of villages turn out when the inaugural Western Regional Rally for Recovery comes to Lake Junaluska Sept. 19.

Recently recovered from rotator cuff surgery, Haywood County Sheriff Greg Christopher hasn’t popped a single prescription pain pill since the operation. Instead, he’s been using a combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen, over-the-counter meds that don’t pose the same risks of abuse and addiction as opioids. 

“Just this morning I was at the physical therapist,” he said in a May interview. “She said, ‘I cannot believe you didn’t take prescription meds.’ I said, ‘I didn’t need to.’”

A bigger number of Jackson County students could be subject to random drug testing if a proposed policy change being considered by the school board gets approved.

The future was looking increasingly frightening to 54-year-old Anita as she got to the end of her six-year prison sentence. 

All along, she had assumed that she’d be able to live with her mother while she got back on her feet, but a couple months before Anita’s sentence ended, her mother changed her mind. Anita had nowhere to go.

There’s a good amount of opioids in Haywood County, more than twice the national average. And apparently there’s a good number of people overdosing on the prescription medications as well. 

Kingdom Care Ministries, a faith-based recovery home for women that had been looking to locate in the village of Forest Hills, is searching for another place to settle. In mid-March, the organization had applied for a conditional use permit for the drug recovery home but has now withdrawn that application. 

An ordinance designed to keep student housing from taking over the village of Forest Hills is creating an obstacle for a drug recovery program looking to start up there. Mia Boyce, director of the Christian nonprofit Kingdom Care, began her efforts to set up a home there for women in recovery in October. She had been working with her daughter-in-law’s parents, who own the 11-bedroom home, to move her Asheville-based ministry to Forest Hills, so she sought the village council’s blessing. 

Amid the epidemic of prescription pill abuse, the Haywood County Sheriff’s Office is buying a niche device more common to pharmacies than police stations — a pill counting machine.

To Jean Parris, the drug bust in Haywood County last month wasn’t just a matter of locking up suspected drug dealers.

It was about saving lives.