Random Excellence: Lori Swadley's '52 Addicts'

The June 5 & 12 issue of The New Yorker features a long "Reporter at Large" article by Margaret Talbot called "The Addicts Next Door: West Virginians fighting to save opioid abusers—and their town—from destruction." It's a long, engrossing article, if one that's difficult to read.

The article includes a series of mini-profiles of a number of people, and one of the first ones featured is Lori Swadley, a successful wedding, portrait and boudoir photographer from the Martinsburg, West Virginia area. Despite obviously having lots else to do, Lori started an Instagram series called "52 Addicts."

Courtesy Lori Swadley, used with permission

Lori says in The New Yorker story that she herself was inspired by a reporter named Jenni Vincent, whose byline was on many of the stories about overdose deaths in The Martinsburg Journal online. "You could tell she wanted the problem to be known," Lori told Margaret Talbot. "Because at that time it seemed like everybody else wanted to hide it. And, to me, that seemed like the worst thing you could do."

That took me back to my son's first girlfriend, a bright, personable 14-year-old named Katelyn who I know I'll never be able to forget. Despite a loving mother (we didn't know her dad), Katelyn died of an overdose at 20—and there was no mention anywhere of how she died.

I spoke to Lori on Saturday, and she said she wondered when she was talking to the reporter whether there would be any negative blowback for her business, but she's found that all the responses to the work and the publicity have been positive.

Great admiration to Lori for taking on her "sideline" project for the sake of transparency and honesty and to honor those among her neighbors and her community who are struggling against the epidemic.

Mike
(Thanks to Lori)

Random Excellence = excellence randomly encountered.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Comments

[Del Bomberger]

Until I recently retired, I worked for more than 20 years with homeless, addicted and poor people-although addiction doesn't touch the lives of as many homeless as is portrayed. Programs I oversaw had politicians and well known college/professional football players (one of whom could not read or write). At the same time my wife has a rare, poorly understood physical disability now in its 13th year. Without Opioid drugs she could not function. Yet this 'epidemic' is making it continually more difficult to get the drugs all of her pain doctors and other specialists completely understand the need for. From my perspective this is about money (and insurance companies) as much as anything.

The government response to this (I think driven by the insurance industry) is to keep everyone from access to these important drugs to prevent addiction. If this is the plan, they should have started with Alcohol, years ago.

Also, have you seen the recent change to the AP Stylebook which I understand makes it unacceptable to describe anyone as an "addict".