It’s Saturday morning, and Chauncie Beaston greets the steady stream of people to the folding table she’s set up in the grass by a convenience store just off of Williamsburg Road.
“How you doing?” Beaston asks.
“All right,” a person responds.
“Good. You need some stuff? We’re giving out some hygiene products, socks, we got Narcan, condoms, fentanyl test strips.”
“I’ll take a couple of fentanyl strips,” the person says.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, they’re always good to have. Here are instructions on them. They’re the opposite of a pregnancy test,” Beaston points out.
Beaston’s on home turf. East Richmond’s where she grew up, did high school musical theater, raised her son. It’s also where she first used drugs, from drinking and smoking in her teens to using Percocet as a new mom and injecting heroin and smoking meth into her 20s. Like many working people who use illegal drugs, her addiction stayed hidden until it got too big to manage. By 30, she’d ping-ponged in and out of recovery, sold many of her belongings, lived in her car, spent time in jail.
“I remember one of the things that really bothered me so much about my drug use was thinking, you know, ‘I’m going to end up this way. I’m going to die this way and I’m never going to get the chance to live that dream of helping people.’ I just knew in my heart, ‘I am meant for something more. There’s no way I’ve gone through all this trauma and all of these issues in vain.’ These experiences are what I’ve needed to be able to relate to people and to really understand.”
Now six years sober, Beaston’s making good on her pledge. When she’s not working her full-time housecleaning job, she’s distributing free sterile syringes, fentanyl and Xylazine test strips, clean socks and deodorant, and responding to calls and text messages from people struggling with addiction. She shares her views on TikTok, too, spoofing drug culture and taking aim at addiction misinformation. And she’s always rolling her car window down.
“You need sharps?” Beaston asks. “Longs or shorts? . . . You need any condoms, Narcan?”
She’s also started a foundation to promote what’s known as harm reduction, an approach to curbing addiction that’s gaining traction. Studies have shown that drug users reached by harm reduction programs are five times more likely to enter drug treatment, and three times more likely to stop using.
“We don’t coerce people into treatment,” Beaston said. “I know a lot of people think, ‘If I just get my loved one into treatment, today, right now, I won’t have to worry about them, anymore.’ Unfortunately, what the data looks like when you force someone into treatment, is that they leave early, or stay the whole time, to try to appease you, and then they come out and they relapse, and, because they’ve had that period of sobriety, their tolerance goes down, and their rate of overdose risk increases dramatically.
“We have to start shifting our perspective and look at what it is that people need to come out of these things.”
Two keys to success? Human connection and support.
“All right, give me a hug. When I find some stuff, I’ll come find you, ok?”
Nearly one in four Americans used illegal drugs in 2023. And while overdose deaths from opioids, particularly fentanyl, are down slightly, including in Virginia, overdose deaths from cocaine and psychostimulants like meth are up.
That syncs with what Beaston sees. With disruptions to the flow of fentanyl, she worries about new drugs popping up that don’t respond to naloxone, especially xylazine, known as “tranq,” and medetomidine. It’s part of what keeps her showing up for those she calls “her people.”
“We are akin. We are in the same company.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.