Tayas Yawks sits amid a sprawling green field with an unmarked gravel parking lot. It’s a big brown building with sparse signage, easy to miss and to drive past without a second thought. But inside, members of the community come together, bonding with events such as luncheons, bingo games and drum circles.
Tayas Yawks is a drop-in and peer support center on Onyx Avenue in Klamath Falls. It’s welcome to all, offering a safe space to community members by providing events and spiritual practices based on Native American culture. It provides a support network for those who are struggling with drug addiction by providing harm-reduction resources which include lifesaving Naloxone kits, which are also known as Narcan kits. These are provided by Max’s Mission.
Each kit provides nasal spray which can be administered to anyone who is suspected of overdosing on opioids, without the risk of harming them any further. According to the website for Max’s Mission, Narcan works by blocking the brain receptors that are activated by opioids. If unimpeded, opioids can slow and even stop breathing, leading to death by overdose. Narcan prevents the effects of opioids from taking hold, potentially saving the lives of those who have taken them.
Max’s Mission is an organization based in Southern Oregon that is named after Maxwell Pinksy, who died of a drug overdose in 2013. Max’s Mission has since worked to raise awareness about opioid use through education and outreach. These efforts have included work in conjunction with Tayas Yawks, including needle exchanges and providing Narcan kits.
Paul Monteith, who serves as co-director at Tayas Yawks, has dealt with substance addiction in the past and is now working to bring resources and community to those in Klamath Falls who are struggling with similar issues. He said that opioid addiction is a major problem facing Klamath County, particularly with the expanded availability of fentanyl, an especially potent and deadly opioid.
Joe Allred works as a clinical supervisor at Bestcare Treatment Services, which serves Klamath Falls as a detox and rehabilitation facility. He said that rehab facilities in Klamath County are also seeing the impact of increased fentanyl use.
“The cartels decided to flood the market with it,” Allred said. “What the reason behind that is, I don’t know, because they’re killing customers.”
Bestcare helps people rehabilitate from various substances, including alcohol and methamphetamines, though the uptick in opioid use has brought a fresh set of challenges. Allred said that he had personally witnessed an increase in fentanyl related fatalities.
“It doesn’t take much fentanyl to OD,” Allred said.
When he did, a patient on the grounds at Bestcare echoed his words, saying, “No, not at all. I’ve lost a few friends to that.”
Like Monteith at Tayas Yawks, Allred had a history using drugs before transitioning to care and rehabilitation.
“I was a drug dealer, career criminal for 25 years, and I guess I don’t understand the thought process of fentanyl being so deadly, why you’d want to flood the market with it when it has the potential to kill most of your customers,” he said. “But I guess new customers pop up just as fast as ants or flies.”
Allred discussed the many barriers to those seeking treatment, as well as the limitations felt by facilities such as Bestcare. He said that some people had been in and out of treatment repeatedly, and that some were afraid to seek treatment due to the stigmatization associated with using substances.
“A lot of addicts are anti-treatment,” he said. “They’re concerned that people are going to know and judge them, so they try to keep their addiction as private as possible. They don’t want to be seen in a town this size outside of a treatment center with their car.”
While treatment sometimes involves staying at a facility like Bestcare to detox, it can also involve giving patients access to drugs such as suboxone, a prescription opioid used to treat narcotic addiction.
“Some people are bias to people using a substance to get off a substance,” Allred said.
The perception of being judged brings an additional challenge to those seeking treatment. For this reason, the understanding of people like Allred and Monteith who have used drugs themselves are important to establishing trust to those who wish to overcome addiction.
Sabrina Garcia is a peer support specialist who works in harm reduction. She said that she is a recovering meth addict with five years of sobriety.
“When I had an opportunity to help people,” she said, “it was just a really natural fit for me to understand the barriers that they’re facing because I, in real time, had to face those same challenges in this community.”
Garcia said that while she didn’t personally deal with fentanyl addiction, her struggles using meth reflect those that addicts face today. She struggled to find help, and said that she wasn’t treated nicely due to the perceptions people had of her. These experience helped lead her to peer support.
“Watching somebody experience very similar things to you, it actually builds connections,” she said.
Garcia helps people by offering needle exchanges, infectious disease testing, and Narcan training. In one instance, a man told her that she had saved his life because she had trained the person who had administered Narcan to him during an overdose.
Garcia said that there are still some who are against harm reduction as a means to combat the community drug problem. But, she said that harm reduction and “helping people with their substance use, it’s overall cheaper to the taxpayers.”
Miranda Hill, the program coordinator at Klamath County Public Health, said that fentanyl provides a particular challenge to the community, not only because it is so deadly, but because it can be found in unexpected places.
“It’s not just in opioids,” she said. “We’re finding it in cocaine. We’re finding it in other drugs. It takes two grains of sand. That’s all, for any of us to overdose on fentanyl.”
Both Hill and Garcia have performed work with ballot Measure 110 and the Opioid Settlement Fund, which will be used to in communities around Oregon to address issues such as comprehensive behavioral health, peer support, mentoring and education.
Hill stressed the important of education and of having Narcan available in schools in case an overdose were to occur on campus.
“They have Narcan there ready,” she said. “It’s like a fire extinguisher. You hope you never have to use it, but it’s there in case you do.”
As the issue of fentanyl continues to make its way through Klamath, it is important that people are aware of the resources available to them, even if they’re not ready to completely step away from substance use.
“Pretty much any harm reduction is treating the people like they’re humans and always giving them an opportunity no matter where they’re at,” Hill said. “So they can keep coming back, and when they’re ready, they can receive services.”