Hannah McDevitt has been sober from alcohol, cocaine, meth, and opioids for nine years. Her husband, who is also in recovery, works as a therapist in addiction medicine. They have a six-year-old son, and they live in Portland. Hannah has a sister living in Vancouver, Washington.
Hannah has been volunteering for four years doing harm reduction and overdose prevention work serving people living outdoors, many of whom are using drugs or alcohol, in areas east of Portland (the ‘East County’ area of Multnomah County).
“I think Washington and Oregon are fairly similar in terms of fentanyl just being widely available and incredibly potent. Fentanyl entering into the streets has been really, really devastating.” – Hannah McDevitt
Hannah contacted WIBM expressing interest in helping us. She and Blair Daly then spoke on a recorded Zoom call about her experiences volunteering. The video below shows nine minutes of that conversation we chose to highlight.
In the video Hannah discusses:
- Patterns she’s noticed among the homeless men she interacts with.
- Her response to criticism that harm reduction workers are enabling addicts.
- Elements of dignity for people living on the streets.
“I’ve been sober from alcohol, cocaine, meth, opioids for nine years. The last couple of years I was using substances, I would get a couple of months sober and then relapse. It was kind of this cycle. I relapsed quite a few times. I can’t say that there was anything different about the last time. I just stuck with it. I think I was done fighting it.”
‘Probably 70 to 80 percent are men’
Below is a partial transcript from the video above.
Hannah McDevitt: The narrative that men have everything, that everything they could ever need is laid out at their feet, I think I started to notice that was not true when I started volunteering. It’ll be four years now that I’ve been doing harm reduction work, which is very low-barrier.
The majority of the folks we serve — probably 70% to 80% — are men. A lot of veterans. A lot of men who had worked in the trades and been injured — construction, roadwork, any sort of skilled labor.
In a lot of that work there’s a zero-tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol, which can be a good thing, but what needs to go along with that is an open door to allow folks to talk about struggles they’re having with substances and having a conversation around wanting to go to treatment or wanting help with reducing their use. A lot of them are using substances basically to aid in their work. Working long days means needing a lot of physical stamina. Amphetamines are used a lot for that. When it comes to injuries from those types of jobs, there is a prevalence of using opioids for pain relief. **Continue hearing from Hannah McDevitt by watching the video.**
See related: A Sign Washington’s Government is Becoming More Willing to Acknowledge Inequities Affecting Males