By Brandon LaVoie
For the Carter County Times
Some things don’t stay abstract when you live with their consequences long enough.
I’m a father of three boys and a small business owner here in Carter County. I work, raise my kids, and try to build something steady in the same place a lot of us are fighting to hold together. I’m not writing from theory. I’m writing from absence.
Drugs like fentanyl and meth didn’t just hurt my family. They erased it.
I’ve lost almost everyone. Some are gone to addiction. Some to the long-term damage it leaves behind. Some are dead. These aren’t statistics to me. They’re empty seats at holidays. Names my sons should know but never will.
My uncle Jimmy Blevins was my hero. He was a veteran. A hard worker. Someone I thought I’d spend my life working beside. Years ago, while working construction on a National Guard project in New Mexico, he became addicted to meth and opioids.
He came home different. He didn’t last long. He died of a heart attack at 32.
He never met my boys. Never saw the life I’m trying to build. And there are many others who were supposed to still be here… but who aren’t.
We talk about “weapons of mass destruction” as something distant. Something overseas. Something that comes with sirens and headlines. But I’ve watched substances wipe out families and hollow out a town quietly, one person at a time, over decades. If the measure is lives lost and futures erased, then we’ve been living with mass destruction right here at home.
What makes this harder is that we didn’t ignore the problem.
In the mid-2000s, I marched in Grayson with Pastor Jim Varney and thousands of others against drugs. Churches showed up. Schools showed up. Emergency services showed up. Families walked together. There was a shared belief that if we stood shoulder to shoulder, we could interrupt what was happening.
In the period that followed, pressure increased. Arrests were made. For a while, it felt like something real had been disrupted.
Many of the people I marched beside are gone now.
Time has a way of telling the truth. Awareness alone didn’t stop it. Enforcement alone didn’t stop it. Silence didn’t stop it. Pretending it was someone else’s problem didn’t stop it. The damage resumed quietly, and it kept taking people who burned bright; the complicated, creative, stubborn souls who carried joy and conviction at the same time.
Those are the people who organize cookouts. Who stand up at meetings. Who pull others together. Who would have stood beside me and many others when our community needed defending.
We don’t just lose individuals to drugs.
We lose community infrastructure.
I’m grateful to law enforcement for doing their job. Taking dangerous substances off the street matters. But this crisis isn’t fixed by arrests alone, and it isn’t fixed by treating addiction as a private failure that only requires private recovery.
We talk a lot about rehab for people, and we should. But we rarely talk about rehab for towns.
If we’re serious about healing, we should be asking bigger questions. What does it look like to restore the places where people gathered? Where families ate together. Where kids played. Where neighbors argued, laughed, and stayed connected. Where belonging was built instead of assumed.
Recovery shouldn’t end at the clinic door. It should extend back into the communities that were hollowed out.
Imagine spaces designed to bring people back together; community centers with picnic tables and food trucks, places for games and music, rooms for church groups, recovery groups, family gatherings, and town meetings. Places that replace what was lost instead of just naming it.
We owe that much to the people we buried.
And to the kids growing up now who deserve more than silence and memory.
If we don’t take this seriously – not as a headline or a talking point, but as a long-term responsibility – the cost won’t show up on a balance sheet.
It will show up as absence.
Again.
