KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — After around 14 years, the Metro Drug Coalition will soon have a new director to guide its mission to serve the community and help people recovering from substance abuse.
Its current director, Karen Pershing, said she started fighting against addiction and focusing on recovery after finding a reason to drive her.
"My big 'why' was really to make a difference," she said. "What needed to be done, and what I could do."
After finding her "why," she started working toward years of local and statewide change. She established the Metro Drug Coalition to help create a recovery community center in an area of need. It makes resources available for people struggling with substance abuse and expands the opportunities available in prevention, reduction and recovery for all stakeholders.
"Every family, every individual, knows someone who has struggled with substance use disorder," said Pershing. "I started sounding the alarm."
She said she noticed an alarming drug use trend hit the East Tennessee community in 2010 — the prescription drug epidemic. As part of that epidemic, local clinics prescribed many addictive drugs to people. Many of those people overdosed on those drugs, leading to the overdose epidemic.
"Prescribing rates of opioids, or whether it was sales of opioids, and overdose deaths at that time were being caused by prescription medications," she said.
She also said efforts at the Metro Drug Coalition led to changes on the state level, when lawmakers signed the ID Bill into law in 2014. As part of the law, people need to present IDs when picking up prescribed narcotics. Over the last decade, she said the MDC Substance Misuse Task Force also helped pass nine laws to address the prescription drug epidemic in Knoxville.
It has also sponsored recent proposals urging the FDA to consider Naloxone, an overdose-reversing drug, to be available over-the-counter.
"Our lawmakers need to hear more from those of us who are in the trenches doing the work," she said.