It was March 30, 1846 when civil rights activist Frederick Douglass stood before a crowd in Paisley, Scotland and shared about his struggle with alcohol addiction and his commitment to the Black Temperance Movement. He spoke this truth there because “God has given me a skin not colored like yours,” and was excluded from the Temperance Movement meetings in the U.S. which were started during the pre-Civil War era to decrease alcohol consumption by getting men to make a pledge in front of a church congregation that they would decrease their consumption of hard liquor.
Black women, ministers and abolitionists formed temperance societies from Baltimore to Boston (1829–33). In the twentieth century, African American churches promoted alcohol abstinence “for blacks’ self-respect as well as to fight their high rate of diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver.”**
Since then, many Black pioneers have shed light on behavioral health disorders that continue to ravage communities of color today, including Jerome Adams, MD, Vice Admiral in the U.S. Public Health Commissioned Corps and the 20th Surgeon General of The United States, who focused on the treatment of opioid use disorders and reducing opioid overdose deaths.*
While there is progress to celebrate, Ahmond Hill, Regional Director – BHG D.C., Glen Allen and Richmond, VA, said these leaders are not talked about enough and that we still have a long way to go. According to a 2018 SAMSHA report, 1.2 million non-Hispanic Blacks out of the 10.3 million people nationally, aged 12 and older, were estimated to have had opioid misuse in 2017.
As a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and an Army veteran, Ahmond’s first exposure to addiction was with a few comrades while in the service where drug use was seen as a weakness versus a disease. His perspective changed when he worked two years at DaVita, a national kidney care provider, before coming to BHG. The facility was in the inner-city wards 7 and 8 in D.C. Being military trained, he arrived to his job interview 45 minutes early and started noticing the condition of the place and talking to patients.
“I saw how dilapidated it was with missing baseboards and the floors were coming up. It was heartbreaking to see patients coming there for life-saving treatment in a place that was beyond belief. As I began to see the conditions they were living in, I started to educate myself and understand the root cause.”
Drug use is one of many systemic issues in low-income, urban communities. With regard to methadone, people of color are relatively under-dosed. Data shows that people of color are twice as likely to get minimum mandates for minor drug possession. When released from prison, they can’t get loans, they lose custody of their children and are not able to get good-paying jobs.
“There’s a negative generational impact. If I can make a difference upstream, that would be amazing. BHG has been a game changer for me personally. We can make a difference for generations if we can help people understand that addiction is a disease and that it can be fixed with a lot of hard work.”
Ahmond said that several of his staff are recovering addicts who inspire him every day in their work. Patients know them because they once lived in the same community.
“My colleagues had a transformational change and wanted to give back. They’re able to connect with our population more than I ever could because they’ve been there. They have an amazing story to tell. They motivate me and give me and our patients hope.”
What can we do to carry on the legacy of Black leaders who’ve come before us? Ahmond said he wants to see more young people of color get involved in the mental health field and he will be working with his team to build stronger relationships with churches, local prisons, jails and schools.
For students considering this challenging path, he tells them what he tells his kids, “doing the right thing is never easy, but it’s always right. At the end of the day, if your heart is in it, follow your heart.”
Ahmond continues to follow his heart and is only a few hours away from earning his PhD at Liberty University where he’s studying organizational leadership and has included much of what he’s learned about inequities in his dissertation.
“We have a lot of work we can do, as a company and a nation. We can get there.”
*Online Museum of African American Addictions, Treatments and Recovery
Regional Director