Naloxone on Wheels: An Artist’s Approach to Preventing Fentanyl Overdoses with John Freyer, Associate Professor at VCU

In recognition of National Fentanyl Awareness Day, this episode highlights a powerful story of recovery, creativity, and community-based harm reduction.

We’ll learn how a conceptual artist, and person in long-term recovery, is transforming how young people engage with overdose prevention. Through his Free Naloxone Bike project and Rams in Recovery at Virginia Commonwealth University, John is meeting people where they are with life-saving tools and opening conversations that reduce stigma, create partnerships and empower action.  

This episode is a reminder that meaningful change can start with bold ideas, creativity and persistence. 

Transcript

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Music. Welcome to a new type of conversation with each episode, we'll meet with inspiring people sharing best practices at the forefront of creating change for our young people, we'll talk motivations that make a difference in how their lived experience can help empower us to take action and make a difference in the lives of young people where we live. My name is CJ Sturmer, and this is the champions for you podcast. What happens when recovery meets creativity and ends up saving a life. In this episode, we meet with John fryer, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, a conceptual artist, and a person living in long term recovery. He's on a mission to change how young people engage with harm reduction to prevent fentanyl overdoses. We'll learn how his incredible life journey led to the creation of the free Naloxone bike, a program that rides into communities to offer life saving overdose prevention, and more importantly, to start conversations that matter and to teach us the power of listening. We'll also hear the incredible story of one student who overdosed, was revived and is now using the bike to, quite literally, drive life saving change by empowering others to do the same. This one's about empathy. It's about thinking outside of the box when we show up for young people in ways that are real and human and healing. Take a listen as we explore how creative ideas and unexpected partnerships can become powerful tools for creating conversation, driving awareness and well, end up saving the lives of our young people. Hi, John, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Hey, CJ, I'm really happy to be here. So I'm an associate professor in the Department of photography and film at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I'm a person in long term recovery, and what that means to me is I haven't had a drink or a drug that hasn't been prescribed to me since May 21 2013 I actually started my job at VCU 90 days sober, and our first faculty meeting had an open bar. So I had a pretty challenging start to my to my first couple of weeks at VCU. But you know, over the course of my 12 years here, that the recovery piece has become a very active piece. It's become a public piece. I consider myself to be a person that recovers out loud and in doing so, I've had the great fortune of working with young people who are who were struggling and now are in recovery. So you have this program, a vcu called the free Naloxone bike. Tell us a little bit about what exactly is this program? What is this bike? Yes, so the bike is an extra cycle, long tail utility bike, and is it has a table on the back and a locking cedar box on the front, and it carries around doses of Naloxone and an inflatable CPR mannequin that we call Manny fresh. So we we ride the bike around, usually to places that were invited. We put the kickstand down, we inflate Manny, and we train people on how to use the life saving overdose reversal drug Naloxone. And we do that on campus. We pull up in a park. We do it in dorms. We do it at the Rams recovery clubhouse, which is a collegiate recovery program at VCU. It's one of the largest in the country. A lot of the work I do as an artist is in partnership with recovery community organizations, and in the case of VCU rams, a recovery Manny fresh the show. It's Manny fresh, star of the star of the show. Actually, I like to when I when I bring him out, inflating him is about two rescue breaths, and that's something that we train on. So I can demonstrate how we're filling the lungs of Manny and in a way that they will be attempting to fill the lungs of someone they might find an overdose. So from the time the kickstand goes down, the whole program is dedicated to really understanding what naloxone is. How do you use it, why you use it, when to use it, and then life saving effects. So it's really the step by step program to sort of build the awareness of essentially saving someone's life from potential opioid overdose. Yeah, and in the in in the Commonwealth of Virginia, overdose rates have plummeted in the last year and a half. You know, some credit that to the readily ready availability of naloxone. We've distributed, I believe, 6500 boxes of naloxone since we started in 2020 and we've done it at overdose Awareness Day. We've done it multiple times on Capitol Square at the invitation of of the governor or the governor's wife. Actually, in February, there was a full training of staff and members within within the government offices. So, you know, we've been we both advocate, but we also do the kind of on the ground work of doing direct services with naloxone. That's incredible. I'm happy to hear that the rates are finally dropping. I know in Virginia, for a while was like some of the highest, if not in the country, and the speed in which it was happening was just alarming. Yeah. Yeah, and it was increasing in lots of places, but in Virginia, it was increasing. It was almost two fold each each year. So to see it come down a little bit, it's been amazing. And if you look across the United States, the places that don't have harm reduction programs or don't allow fentanyl test strips or don't make access to Naloxone free, their rates are still going up, right? So we're starting to see the actual downstream effects of creating even just small programs of either one, education or two, access and availability of life saving methods, tools, you know, different things that we can put in the community and and a lot of that comes from awareness, right? So, you know, Governor youngkins, wife, Suzanne, you know, is a big advocate, because there are people that, that, I'm sure that, that she knows, that have lost children or lost loved ones to overdose. And you know, Naloxone works. Harm Reduction works. Harm Reduction saves lives. So, you know, it's, it's a it's not really difficult story to tell, because when you save someone's life, they have a chance, right? And, you know, I'm of the philosophy that people should have as many chances as they need, and that, you know, dead people can't recover. So having giving people an opportunity to continue on and take control of their life is, you know, something that Naloxone gives people that reprieve and that opportunity. I couldn't agree more. We actually interviewed Mrs. Youngkin for her. It only takes one campaign at the champions for youth summit this past fall in Virginia, and she shared very similar sentiments. We actually brought on someone that was family, friends of theirs, that their son did end up overdosing, and we also did a Naloxone demonstration just for the audience. And there was a lot of aha moments, things that people didn't know. And we work in public health, so I couldn't agree more with you, in terms of just the simplest, sometimes form of education, and even talking about the awareness and availability that can really change where we're going to create a solution for a problem. And you don't know who your allies are. You know, our allies are all over the place, and so, so, you know, this is a this is a conversation that has to happen across the political spectrum. Overdose and addiction does not discriminate, does not live in a particular zip code. So, you know, you know we definitely are as a harm reduction project like, we go where we're invited, we go where we're welcome, and we don't pay attention to anybody's political perspective, because what we're trying to do is save lives. You talked a little bit about your recovery journeys getting what you talk about, what that, what that has meant to you, and your journey there. How has that personal recovery journey got you to the point of creating this opportunity, either through previous programs? Tell me a bit about that recovery journey, and then sort of what has got you to where we are today, and I can tell you a story. Basically, for me, I've been recovering out loud since the day I stepped on campus, you know. So if you know anybody who's 90 days sober, they're not completely stable yet, and I certainly wasn't. But at New Faculty Orientation, Dr Rao, President Rao was addressing the new faculty and asked if anybody had any questions. And what was on my mind was, how am I going to make it through like this onboarding without having a drink? And I raised my hand and said, what kind of supports do you have for I think I said recovering alcoholics, which is language I wouldn't use now. And he didn't skip a beat. He said, Linda Hancock runs the Wellness Center here. She's right over there, and you should talk to her, because she's doing amazing things with people in recovery. And as I was, you know, as I was walking out the door, Linda Hancock came right to me and said, We are starting a group called rams and recovery to support young people in recovery, and I have never had a faculty identify as in recovery and a public space. So you're coming with me. And eventually I connected with Linda and connected with that that program at the time, it was a student group with one member, Ramsay recovery now has more than 100 and more than 150 regular attendees to their events. They've grown exponentially. They've gone from being a student group to being having part time staff to having three full time equivalent staff working plus supporting AmeriCorps. So my projects like have have always intersected with the things that were happening at rams and recovery. So the first project that I did as an artist in recovery was this project called Free ice water. I have these blue mason jars. We fill them with water, and we take turns telling each other about turning points in our lives. And obviously, people in recovery can point to a particular day or something that happened to them or and talk about that, and it becomes a becomes a catalyst for a conversation about recovery, but it's also something that the general public can do. And the basic prompt is, can you think of a turning point in your life that made you turn left instead of right? And the question is, you know what has happened to you, what made it possible for you to be right here, right now? And it. Generates really interesting conversations, and the conversations are designed to be between people that don't know each other. So we were able to sit for 20 minutes and they talked to strangers, and they found out really interesting things about each other, and some people were in recovery, and many people were not. And again, when we take time to talk to people, how we learn things about them. And this is a project that came out of my experience early in recovery, and my experience is being connected to fellowship, going to recovery meetings. And in early recovery, what I learned was how to listen so free ice water is a way to share the idea of listening and speaking deeply with the general public and with my recovery community. The second project that came out of my relationship and partnership with ransom recovery is a project called the free hot coffee bike. And we started this in 2016 we worked with a local coffee roaster to develop a custom edition of coffee that we call recovery roast. And as soon as we had the coffee, we had to figure out what to do with it. And I thought the best thing to do with it was to build the bicycle and ride around campus and serve coffee to people. And my project partner said, that is a terrible idea. We're not going to spend $5,000 on a on a bike, because we don't even have that money. But eventually we wrote it into a grant that was unsuccessful. The description was so compelling to me that I went to my dean and the Office of Sustainability and someone in the Provost Office, and we found$5,000 in order to build the bike, and that bike is designed to create space for conversation. So that's that's a theme that's going to come up anytime you're talking to me about my work. It's about creating space for people to have real dialog. And so that bike was built, and it's designed to slow people down. You see free hot coffee. That's pretty appealing in comparison to standing in line for your, you know, $6 Starbucks cup, right? Because it's free, especially for a college kid. Yeah, that's right, right? But what they learn when they get there, when we hand them the hand grinder to grind the coffee for the next person. As we expanded the the riders on the bike to students, became people in recover and their allies and the allyship, and it just broadens the I the idea of recovery capital. It just broadens this, the swath of people that are that care about people in recovery, you know, and that's I always make room for allies. And that does two things. It allows friends and family of people to come in, but it also allows people in recovery in an anonymous program to be an ally in a public space while being a person in recovery in a private space. It sounds like the common denominator, sort of, out of all these programs, is taking a page out of the traditional recovery book The Power of I think I enjoy the way that you say it the slowing down and sharing the experience the story, conversation between two strangers, I think, is a really powerful way of saying that, and the power of just listening, and it sounds like like that. That's the key like that's the big common denominator that is something so simple of just listening and sharing and finding that commonality is really kind of what's helped us evolve probably the most as a an art professor, you work in education, you work in contemporary art. Do you think that perspective has played a role in the success of things like the fri Naloxone bike? How has that changed? Maybe than just the traditional public health space? So what I found is that, you know, my art practice is kind of slippery, and it's an in between spaces. So I mean, I think a great example in terms of the benefits of being ambiguous is the free Naloxone bike. So that was something that was that I built with a donation that came to the School of the Arts, and it was specific to building this particular bike, and it was donated by somebody who had experience of addiction in their family, and they wanted to, they wanted to support these efforts. And that comes around, because sometimes people are asking about Naloxone, and they want to know who bought this bike, right? Is this coming from public health money? Because this doesn't seem like a worthy thing of it. And having an art donor donate that made it, makes it so that we're kind of freed from that. Another piece of this is that, you know, originally, when we were when we started the free Naloxone bike, we were working with Richmond City Health District, and I became a member of the Richmond City Medical Reserve, and that's where we got naloxone. And eventually, because we we kept getting Naloxone from them, and had some success with the bike. We applied to be recognized as a Naloxone only harm reduction site from Virginia Department of Health. Wow, right. And if, if Ramsay recovery applied to VDH to be a harm reduction site the university might say. A that's not really within the purview of serving students if you're going to be serving the public Naloxone, right? But the bike is my project, and it applied, and it was granted that status. Now, where does that bike live? That lives in the Rams recovery clubhouse. So you know, anytime anybody walks into that space. There's a there's a there's a there's a bike that has naloxone in it. Everybody who works there has been trained to distribute naloxone. So the impact of it is that that there's, there's harm reduction, there's a harm reduction site on the VCU campus, and if it's ever a problem, we can roll the bike somewhere else interesting. You talked about these different partnerships, like someone working with, you know, an Art Institute Professor frames and recovery type of situation compared with public health department, is not a common partnership. And partnerships are something that we often, I often really talk heavily about, because funding and access to resources is often a barrier for a lot of local evens. I would even say some states, across the entire United States. How do we empower our folks to think differently about establishing these partnerships? I mean, my experience with funding is that when I apply for something, that is where I solidify the idea, and if that idea is a good idea, or I consider it like worthwhile, I do what we did with the coffee bike, which is, you know, we applied for a grant that we didn't get. But since I, since I had written about what we would do with the bike, I then found smaller partners. I mean, I am an artist that, that I, you know, I don't get giant grants. And each proposal I've written and not been funded, I've completed in a different way, right? So, you know, if I got that money, I would be able to do it this way, but since I didn't, I'm still going to do it, and it just takes a different form, right? Like, you don't need a $10,000 donation to buy a fancy bike. You could have a 10 speed that you got at the Goodwill. And you know now that naloxone is over the counter. You know, it's so much easier to distribute because you don't have to take intake forms and you don't have to create, you know, do demographics. You're just essentially taking a name that they give you to distribute. And, I mean, you could do that on a folding table, right? So, you know, to me, the bike is a way to attract people. It's a way to build awareness. People know what the Narcan bike is. They've seen it. And you know that awareness, that awareness, has an impact. Having that bike on campus, having students know where it is, people walk in to ransom recovery. They may have a friend who's struggling. They may have a they may be struggling themselves. They they get some Naloxone, and that, you know that's going to be the difference for somebody right? Let's hope right, right doesn't have to be this big, elaborate thing to take action. It's not just writing a pamphlet or putting a flyer up like it's important that you have to take action, but ask, ask unlikely people ask for $1 here and there. Ask people that want to get involved. I think that you that's what I got out of that is it doesn't take a lot to take action. You just have to move forward and bring people along that are willing to participate. And you know, the Narcan distribution, or naloxone distribution, in the city of Richmond, was originally part of the and still run by the Richmond City Health District through the Richmond City Medical Reserve, so I got trained and became a member of the Richmond City Medical Reserve so that I could distribute naloxone, right? And then I could go to the health district and check out Naloxone and distribute it. I didn't pay anything. I didn't have a grant for that, right? I didn't need a bicycle for that. I could have done that work through your barrier. You figure out a barrier, and you like, okay, what can I do to get through that so I can get to our goal? That's right. So. And then what we did is we trained, you know, for for ransom recovery. We had everyone become a member of the riches City Medical Reserve. And then when we didn't, didn't have to do that, we became trained the trainer, so that we can train and distribute. And each of these things is is provided mostly free. And you could be trained, and you could help us take the bike out and train on the locks, and we have volunteers do that all the time. You could have have an event at your at your at your place of business, where you invite the Narcan bike, and we could train your staff. We were going into restaurants when you're in a restaurant and people are in and out of the bathroom. They may or may not be using drugs like having Narcan in the hands of servers and bartenders. You know, makes the difference between reviving someone and and having someone die in your restaurant, which which is a terrible thing to happen. The Power of Thinking outside of the box, to take action in a way you may not have thought before, in order to like, solve for the what ifs right, we we don't know, but solving for a what if scenario, it's very swimming upstream, which we talk a lot about here. Do you have, do you have a moment or a story when, when you realize that. Free Naloxone bike is really making a huge difference. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think two fold here is that being a person that recovers out loud and being being very public about that makes it so people come and talk to me when they're struggling, right? And, you know, one of my favorite examples of this is last year, someone who's now my assistant was a student of mine and was struggling, clearly struggling, and reached out to me at the end of the semester, and I connected her with resources. And now she's done peer recovery support specialist training. She's coming up on a on a year in recovery, and one of the things she wanted to do was become a train, the trainer to ride the Narcan bike, because when she was in high school, she overdosed and and was dead, wow, and survived that and came to the School of the Arts and got help. I had to buy a different seat and a different length bike tube so that Ella could ride the bike. And Ella and that that the the smaller, the smaller seat is on that bike all the time now, because she takes it out, she takes it out more than me. So here's a project that I started in 2020 and somebody who asked for help was connected with resources. Wanted to give back because of her own personal experience. Now is one of the leads in training on Narcan on the campus, that's a really, really powerful story. And just a big shout out to her for being able to, like, recognize that, be able to find a safe space, to have that conversation, and for you to create something that she felt safe in that moment, to it, and it is now setting an example for other people paying that forward in a way that's that's really touching. I'm trying not to get emotional about it, hearing those types of recovery stories and such small ways make such big impact, we're not trying to, you know, build these massive programs for millions of dollars. Something is so simple as a bike literally saved this young girl's life. So that's incredible. That's a really incredible story. Any final words of wisdom? How can we empower our audience to continue to do more, to think outside of that box, whether that be partnerships or, you know, whatever the case may be, what can we empower others to do? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the most important thing is that you don't know who your partners are, and that you don't know who your potential partners are. Because I think, I think for me, being open, listening, pivoting, right? I thought I knew what the coffee bike was, or the Narcan bike was, but it became something else because of the way that that people interacted with it, the way that people ran it. So, you know, I think anytime you have an idea, the best thing to do with it is beta testing. Just go do it. Don't wait for the grant. Don't wait for you know you can, you can do things, and maybe you get a response. Maybe you meet the person that that's going to fund that grant, or maybe you meet the person that is going to be the one who adapts the bike to fit them and then rides it all over campus, because I'm busy, right? I don't ride the bike all over campus, but, but Ella does, so, you know, and and I wouldn't have known that she was that ally when she was my student, right? I knew that she was struggling. I didn't know her her larger history. The first time she trained on her own was on the fifth anniversary of her overdose. We trained her to train but like had never done it on her own, and just just train people, and that was the way for her to give back. And I didn't know that six months before that, she would be the person that she is. So, you know, you don't know who you're, you don't know who your allies are, and and so you gotta listen, and you gotta, you know, you gotta be, you gotta be kind, and you gotta be, you gotta be ready. The power of creating a seat at the table, slowing down having conversation, listening and provide an opportunity. Because, like you said, you just you never know where a partnership could come from, from a single person, an organization, somebody that just wants to help, whatever that means. Yeah. I mean, guess what? Every organization that's doing this work is understaffed and and needs volunteers, and you could volunteer for them today. Then you'll meet people. You'll meet people in recovery. You'll meet people that are harm reductionist and and you'll you'll learn to care for people and provide care and attention to human beings who deserve it, right? Wow, John, thank you for taking the time to sit down and tell this story and to tell us a little bit more about your your journey and the impact that this program has really made, just based on your own lived experience. I really, really appreciate you. Well, thanks so much. It's been a great conversation. And you know, conversation is what I traffic, and so I really appreciate it. There you have it. It only takes a little to do a lot. It's time for us to explore new perspectives and create partnerships in the unlikeliest of places. The only way we can make real changes if we do it together a forever thanks to the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth and prevention connections for their continued support. And don't forget that five star review you. It really means a lot to find out more about our programs and other ways to get involved. Check us out on the web@vfhy.org and as always, no matter what you do in this world, go out there and go do good. Thanks everyone. We'll see you next time you.