Fighting Addiction in Kent County with F.E.A.R. by Evan Gaines

Crossing the Bay Bridge into Queen Anne’s County, there is a sign staked between two guard rails tallying the County’s yearly opioid death toll. The sign quickly fades in the rearview mirror as drivers whip down route fifty towards the beach, but it serves as a sad reminder of the epidemic that has made a resurgence within an already exhausting pandemic.

Addiction is a disease that feeds off isolation and insecurity, so it takes no stretch of the imagination to understand why substance-related deaths in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent COVID months.

There are few exclusions from this trend in America, but for rural communities like the Eastern Shore, the lack of accessible resources continues to leave those most impacted by addiction stranded in the country expanse—the children of users.

“Kent County had the highest rate of grandparents raising grandkids in the whole state, the smallest county in Maryland, and that’s a direct effect of the opioid crisis, says Paul Tue III, one of the program directors at Club F.E.A.R. (Face Everything and Rise).”

Between 2019 and 2020, the Delmarva peninsula’s thirty-eight percent increase in opioid deaths was second only to Western Maryland’s forty-one. While opioids continue to kill off rural residents at a similar rate as urban users, the nonexistence of prevention programs and the scant recovery resources provide context to why opioid deaths have been rising on the Shore.

And for children growing up in environments plagued with addiction, the trauma of those experiences is one of the factors which puts them at risk for continuing this cycle of addiction.  

Now, the first-of-its-kind prevention program for the Eastern Shore is in the process of converting a vacant American Legion Hall by Chestertown into a community space for adolescents affected by substance abuse. 

Growing up in Northeast DC, Tue had family members struggle with addiction and witnessed the disease’s corrosive cycle in his community firsthand. He sees the same cycle playing out on the Eastern Shore.

“People die from overdoses, and people are going to jail for a crime that committed to feed a habit, and leave granddad and grandma to raise the kids.” 

Maude, 80, has fed one of these kids since he was four. We’ll call him Josiah. The Kent county business owner requested pseudonyms to be used for her and Josiah. 

“Unfortunately, there are many kids in this area that have had these experiences.” Maude then expressed that there are many large families absent of parents in the Eastern Shore’s impoverished communities, often too busy feeding their habit to feed their kids. 

The maternal-but-informal guardianship Maude has adopted is a delicate legality, but a precarious blessing that lets Josiah live at his grandparents while Maude mothers him to football practice or tutoring. Growing up under his grandmother’s roof in a brood of much older half brothers, Josiah’s grandmother often sent him to Maude for free meals. 

“I can get mad at her,” said Maude, “then I say to myself, ‘You have no right to judge this woman. You have not walked a mile in her shoes.’ And for you to have food and let her go hungry is unconscionable.”

Maude’s most pressing concern for Josiah is to make sure he doesn’t turn the frustrations and anger, which often come with a dysfunctional home life, against his sense of self-worth, especially if that leads to seeking solace within substances. 

This past year has wiped out any structure, and for kids in situations similar to Josiah, that means no reprise from tumultuous home life. Like how Maude works to involve Josiah in extracurriculars, Club FEAR understands that young people need positive spaces to be themselves and develop positive social relationships.

“Especially now with COVID, I see the trauma of poverty and what that can do to a family and availing kids looking at substances as an outlet.” says social worker and F.E.A.R.co-director Doncella Wilson.

Working to break the cycle of addiction through prevention and engagement, Club F.E.A.R.’s Chestertown and Dorchester locations extend support where it’s never been offered to the Shore. But anti-drug campaigns are an earmark of the floundering “war on drugs,” so how is Club F.E.A.R. different from the trite chorus of “just say no”? 

“Our whole model is having [young people] say yes to advocacy, education, history, community engagement, extracurricular activities to divert them from substances,” says Wilson. 

Partnering with local schools, families, truancy courts, and other local health resources, the children referred to Club FEAR will be included in afterschool activities like fishing, kayaking, cooking, or podcast production. The program also focuses on providing lessons on life skills in finance, leadership, and community advocacy. 

For those who require more personalized support, there are mentors the club can assign for those individual adolescents. However, if a club member needs treatment for substance abuse disorders, Club FEAR will connect the family with treatment providers in the community. 

The Shore’s geographic isolation is what can make these situations uniquely inescapable for youth, so to collapse the space, FEAR is working to link school transportation to the clubhouse, as well as providing their vehicles to get kids to Chestertown. 

When asked what the goal is for adolescents coming through the program, Wilson envisions having “a twelve-year-old all the way through [until] they’re seventeen or eighteen. By then, we will have put so many different people in front of them: environmental people, education, mental health people, they will have an array of support and services.”

Tue and Wilson believe that building a community around these kids will provide them with the self-confidence, skills, and knowledge to pursue whatever future inspires them. 

With their grand opening canned by COVID last spring, FEAR has been working to address a problem intimately connected with addiction in Kent County– food insecurity.

Every week since last March, the wood-paneled halls of Club FEAR have been occupied by foldable tables brimming with food donations. Their efforts have gone to feed over two hundred families and elderly residents of the Shore. 

Once the space gets into its full groove this summer, Tue and Wilson hope their community garden, open kitchen, and juice bar can continue to provide a healthy meal for their club members whenever they should need one. 

Amidst these quiet months, this old veterans’ watering hole has bloomed into an Eastern Shore Eden. The nine-acre plot has two massive parking lots, grass fields, and a curtain of trees tracing an inviting river inlet. The calming nature of the property is complemented with an osprey’s nest overlooking the clubhouse’s entrance.

The space promises innumerable opportunities to be a community cornerstone far surpassing the initial goal of addiction prevention.

“This is a great first step,” says Maude to Club FEAR, “they’re going to find that there are a lot of problems that they didn’t realize you were going to have, that they will have to be able to sort out as they come up, but it is so needed.”

Club FEAR is a service offered by Minary’s Dream Alliance, Incorporated. Their mission “To transform the lives of youth, families, and communities through education, resource development, and community engagement.” For more information, go here, and Facebook.

Evan Gaines is a recent graduate of Washington College.