From addict to professional, speaker at Bethel Park symposium tells story of hope
Ashley Potts speaks during the Stop the Opioid Pandemic: South Hills Symposium event at Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park.
Ashley Potts speaks during the Stop the Opioid Pandemic: South Hills Symposium event at Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park.
Speakers during the Stop the Opioid Pandemic symposium were, from left, Ashley Potts, Kyle Harder, Jane Bionakonsky, Kelly Wesolosky, Soo C. Song and, at the podium, Dr. Karen Hacker.
Sally Wiggin served as emcee for the event.
Dr. Karen Hacker, Allegheny County Health Department director.
Soo C. Song, acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Kelly Wesolosky, FBI community outreach specialist and Pittsburgh division director of the HOPE Initiative.
Kyle Harder of Gateway Rehab and attorney Jane Binakonsky give a presentation about the science of addiction.
Ashley Potts greets the audience at the symposium.
Christ United Methodist Church hosted a full house for the symposium.
After first trying alcohol at 9 and OxyContin at 13, Ashley Potts upped the ante to the likes of cocaine and heroin.
“Whenever I tell people that I identify as somebody in recovery, I usually hear, ‘You don’t look like a drug addict. You don’t look like a felon. You don’t look like you have any of those problems,'” she’ll say. “My response is always: ‘What am I supposed to look like?'”
With her well-groomed appearance and professional composure, Potts would seem to look like her résumé would suggest, a licensed social worker with associate, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. And so people who meet her tend to have difficulty reconciling her current image with that of a desperate young woman who would do just about anything for her next high.
The story of her transformation, which Potts related matter-of-factly to a packed audience during the Sept. 19 Stop the Opioid Epidemic symposium in Bethel Park, is one of hope. It also is one of reality.
“I became a convicted felon at 20 years old,” she said. “I’m 31 now. Still, no one wants to rent to me.”
In her job with Allegheny Health Network’s Center for Inclusion Health, part of her work is to advocate for individuals who are in recovery and try to mitigate the stigma others attach to them.
“Just imagine somebody coming to you for help, how much courage that takes in order to do so,” Potts said, “because there’s always that thing in the back of my mind I identify as this: I know how you’ll treat me. I know how you’ll look down on me. You’ll think that I’m less than you.”
She knows from experience. Along with problems finding places to live, Potts has endured such frustrations as being rejected for minimum-wage jobs and scholastic internships, the latter resulting in her expulsion from one institution of higher learning.
“You try to reintegrate back into society so many times, and society keeps telling you, ‘No, you’re not good enough,'” she told the audience, to widespread applause. “That’s what we need to change. That’s what we need to break.”
Potts described her travails as a teenager into her early 20s, as she descended into a cycle of addiction that she repeatedly vowed to break but never took the proper steps to do so.
She frequently ran away from home. At one point, she was expelled from school. Eventually, she learned she was pregnant.
“I was determined to be the best mom that I could be,” she said. “But I still never went to treatment. I still never went to counseling. I still never did any of those things, and none of my behaviors had changed.”
By Sept. 11, 2006, Potts was facing “four active police cases with over a hundred counts of felony charges pending against me,” and she decided that enough was enough. She entered rehabilitation for seven days of detoxification and 29 days of inpatient care before agreeing to go to a halfway house, a transitional living place in Washington, to continue her recovery.
Her court case came in April 2007.
“The judge granted me 216 days’ time served and immediate parole, because that’s how long I spent in treatment,” Potts said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I used to think that a life in prison was all I was worth and that was all it was ever going to be for me,’ to thinking, ‘Wow. This judge really gave me a second chance, and what am I going to do with that?'”
She wants to see more people in similar situations be able to answer that type of question the way she did.
“The stigma needs to stop. The advocacy needs to happen,” she said. “We do recover, and people do get better. We have to have the opportunity to be able to do so.
“Luckily, the right people intervened with me at the right time, and I finally felt like I was worth something other than a life of addiction. I felt like I was worth something other than a life of prison. And now, I have the opportunity to be able to impact some lives.”