Former UGA coach’s addiction group launches at Georgia Capitol

The Atlanta-Journal-Constitution earlier this month exclusively reported Cochran’s story of leaving UGA football this year to devote himself to his recovery from addiction and to work toward recovery advocacy on a national level.

The overarching goal of the American Addiction Recovery Association is to save and improve lives through attacking barriers created by stigma and shame associated with addiction. They want people to talk openly about addiction and recovery like any illness. That will make it enormously easier to address policy, Breedlove said.

Their first concrete goal is to work with institutions — governments, businesses and places of worship — to spread the placement of overdose kits. The second is to work with elected officials in other states to form caucuses — interest groups within electoral bodies — composed of people working on addiction and recovery issues. Breedlove said those people currently tend to be scattered within existing mental and behavioral health caucuses, but they need their own voice.

“We are here to eliminate the whisper,” Cochran said. Instead, he said, people should share pride in recovery.

“I’ve been known as the fourth quarter guy, right? Everything that I’ve done is to win in the fourth quarter,” said Cochran, a veteran of college football championship teams at Georgia and Alabama. “Well, I would like to see the fourth quarter of this epidemic. That is my goal,” he continued, drawing cheers.

In this year’s legislative session, Georgia lawmakers approved a new law to make naloxone, the opioid-reversal drug, more readily available in schools, on college campuses and in government buildings. It allows anyone to carry naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, and administer the drug to someone experiencing an overdose.

Breedlove said from his former position as a congressman’s chief of staff in Washington, stigma surrounding addiction translates to controversy in politics. Politicians are leery of taking on issues dogged by controversy. The URL for their group is “eliminatethewhisper.com.”

Credit: Ariel Hart

Credit: Ariel Hart

Cochran and Breedlove’s group intentionally includes both addiction survivors and family members of people in addiction.

Speaker after speaker at Wednesday’s press conference spoke of losing a child to overdose or losing part of their own life to addiction. Jon Langston, an advocate and addiction survivor from Jackson County, noted that federal data suggest that a construction worker is 16 times more likely to die from an overdose than from a work-related injury.

“We are going to ask you to start talking and addressing the issue of addiction,” said one of AARA’s members, TaTa-Nisha Frazier. “Let’s talk and discuss the elephant in the room together. This is a bipartisan issue.”