Addressing Addiction in Rural America
Heidi Heitkamp (00:04):
Welcome to the Hot Dish, Comfort Food for Middle America. I'm Heidi Heitkamp.
Joel Heitkamp (00:08):
And I'm Joel Heitkamp.
Heidi Heitkamp (00:10):
And we are your co-hosts for this amazing episode. I am so excited. One of my favorite people that I've met this year is a guy named Dale King. He's an entrepreneur and a veteran currently teaching others how to use CrossFit as a means for recovery to help them discover their full capabilities. But first we've got Sarah Low from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the co-author of a study on women-owned businesses benefiting from rural broadband access. We thought it would be great for all of you listeners to hear what she has to say about the importance of rural broadband to women entrepreneurs.
Sarah Low (00:54):
My name is Sarah Low. I'm a professor and department head in agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a land grant university. So we do research, we do undergraduate teaching, and we also do extension, cooperative extension. And so that's a lot of my work, is translating research and sharing it with people in rural America. My goal in life is to improve the livelihoods of people in rural America. If we go back and look over history, people in rural America have always been innovative and entrepreneurial out of necessity. We've been located a long distance from cities. We've had to invent things, we've had to fix things. So people in rural America are by nature very innovative, very entrepreneurial.
(01:45):
Entrepreneurship is so important to the rural economy now because we have less and less employment in production agriculture in rural areas. So we need entrepreneurs to be starting new businesses, creating job opportunities for people in rural areas. We also really need entrepreneurs in our rural and small communities to provide quality of life amenities. There would be no coffee shop, there would be no piano lessons for our kids. There would be no daycare if we didn't have entrepreneurs. I think that anyone who takes a risk and provides management is an entrepreneur. And so when we look at rural communities in America, we've got a lot of people who are hanging out their shingle, offering their goods and services to their local community. The women-owned businesses in rural America are really, really important. Yet when we look at entrepreneurs, we see there's not as many women entrepreneurs as there should be.
(02:47):
The women-owned businesses are so vital because in rural areas we really have a dearth of labor. We need as many people in rural America working, participating in the economy, providing services, improving the quality of life as possible. And so when women bow out of the labor force, perhaps they're doing elder care, perhaps with the onset of children they're doing child care, maybe they don't have access to a daycare, and so they have to bow out of the labor force. That hurts the rural economy. I think that's why having women entrepreneurs is so important. So Dr. Tessa Conroy and I decided to look into this research that looked at women-owned businesses in rural America. And so we hypothesized, hey, do women participate more maybe through entrepreneurship if they have access to reliable high speed internet? And that was the impetus for this research. And indeed we find that women in remote rural areas are starting businesses when they get high speed broadband internet. It's just awesome.
(04:00):
The effect in the remote rural areas was much larger than the effect in rural areas close to metropolitan areas. That suggests that these women were really hungry for that connectivity, for that access to markets that broadband provides. Women are able to connect with a small business development center counselor remotely if they have high speed internet. They're able to connect with lenders to get financial capital. So broadband is so important for quality of life, it's important for education, it's important for healthcare, but I think it's really, really vital for businesses and for business development more so in a rural area, and in a remote rural area especially. So I think it's really important that we provide both a policy environment that helps women entrepreneurs, but I also think it's really important that community leaders, people listening to this podcast, they can encourage women entrepreneurs, they can mentor women entrepreneurs. They can provide services to grow women entrepreneurship.
(05:09):
So I think it's in our country's interest to keep people in rural America so that they can be such good stewards, so that they can maintain the quality of life, the schools, the hospitals, the grocery stores, the child care facilities, that we need to have people in rural America so that we can grow food, so we can take care of the water, so we can have access to energy. Those all require people to be in rural America. And so that broadband internet is really important. And having entrepreneurs, having people who are willing to take the risk to make their own job opportunity, is so vital to the economy, but also the well-being of families in rural America.
Heidi Heitkamp (06:00):
Dale King is a nationally recognized speaker, entrepreneur, veteran, and CrossFit coach. He appeared in major media outlets such as NBC's Today Show, Fox & Friends, and the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Kelly Clarkson Show. After serving in the US Army, returned to Portsmouth, Ohio to open a CrossFit gym in 2010 in order to build a stronger community that had been ravaged by a depressed economy and the opioid addiction. Dale would later go on to co-found the nonprofit Team Some Assembly Required with his longtime friend Derek Carver as a vehicle for adaptive athletes to compete in CrossFit endeavors. And currently Dale is teaching others about his program, entitled The Portsmouth Method. He is a true American hero. And so if we could just start out, Dale, by talking about your journey and how you got involved in using CrossFit as a way to address addiction in your community.
Dale King (07:03):
Yeah. So born and raised a tiny town here in southern Ohio called Portsmouth, Ohio, and left in 1999 when I graduated, went up to Columbus, Ohio for school, and was fortunate enough to get an Army ROTC scholarship. So 2003, graduated, became a commissioned officer in the Army, had the honor to serve two deployments to Iraq during that time. And that's when I started picking up CrossFit when I was in the Army, and was fortunate enough to get a job working for the Department of Energy. And there was a small outpost in my hometown. So came home, and really my only outlet that I had was working out as a way to help transition back into the civilian world. But while I was gone, it just seemed like the town had completely done a 180. And what had happened is it's just been ravaged by the opioid epidemic.
(08:00):
There's a great book, Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, and pretty much documents the whole history of how pain pills started getting prescribed in the '90s and how that turned into heroin and now what we're dealing with fentanyl. And really that started here in Portsmouth. In the late '90s there was a doctor, and I actually went to school with his kids, but he created the scripts for cash business model. And once that, I hate to use the word pioneered that, but he started that and that quickly spread up and down the Ohio River and all over Appalachia. And so roughly the 10 years that I was gone, no businesses had came here. It was kind of the first wave of adults being addicted. And I came home and there was just billboards after billboards for pain clinics.
(08:53):
And I was like, "What the hell's a pain clinic?" And literally just lines of people outside of medical offices, I use that term loosely, just going from doctor to doctor to get scripts. And the crime rate also followed along with it, because once you have an addicted population and they start to turn off that spigot of pain pills, they turn to heroin or other illicit drugs and crime follows along with that. So that was my re-introduction back to Portsmouth, Ohio around the 2007 timeframe.
Heidi Heitkamp (09:28):
So you leave this town that you love, you're going to come back and maybe think about reconnecting with old friends and with family and living the life that you grew up living, and everything's changed, and it's not changed for the better. It has created huge problems. So tell us about how your emotional reaction to that was, and then what you did to overcome that emotional reaction.
Dale King (09:56):
I was kind of struggling myself, just trying to deal with reintegrating back into society. Nothing dramatic or traumatic like PTSD or anything like that, but I had been to war and seen people die in service of their country. And I came home and I really felt no one else really understood and knew their sacrifice. And then two, what did they sacrifice for? To see what had happened to my hometown. So luckily I had a therapeutic outlet in working out, and literally a lady approached me one day, she saw me working out in the corner of the gym, and she was like, "I don't know what the hell you're doing, but I'm opening up a gym here in town, and will you come teach people how to do that?" And I was like, "Well, sure. I get a free membership and we'll give it a go." And so that was my grand master plan to do entrepreneurship.
Heidi Heitkamp (11:00):
Can you walk us through how you felt about all of the people who were addicted and that judgment that you came to addiction with?
Dale King (11:10):
I held a conventional point of view, in that they were all weak-minded and it was their fault. And quite honestly, I thought they were the mascots for the downfall of our town. And that viewpoint pretty much sticks to this day with a lot of people, that, "Hey, it's your problem, it's your fault. You just need to say no and not do the most addictive substance known to man," and really angry at them. What I hear now is, and I'm ashamed to say this, is given enough time, the problem will solve itself. They'll all die eventually. And I'm ashamed to be in that boat, but that was the boat that I was in early on.
Heidi Heitkamp (11:53):
So how did you change your attitude? Was there some lightning bolt from the sky that said maybe you ought to rethink this? Or was it just gradually getting to know more and more people in town and seeing more and more the trajectory and the history of how this happened?
Dale King (12:10):
Well, it's funny what happens when you actually have a conversation with somebody that you're talking shit about.
Heidi Heitkamp (12:18):
It is, isn't it?
Dale King (12:20):
It's much easier just to talk about what an idiot they are and refuse to see where they're coming from. But what ended up happening several years later, I ended up opening up a gym, and then a few years later from that, a good friend of mine was on the executive team on a behavioral health center that was dealing with addiction, dealing with treatment, helping folks overcome addiction. And he said, "Hey man, I know you probably don't know this, but I'm in recovery." And I was like, "What's recovery?" I didn't even know what this term was. And he was like, "CrossFit and exercise and this gym has been really instrumental in my own recovery. I'm taking a new position here, and I would like to figure out a way for you guys to come over and do classes for the clients and the staff."
(13:07):
And I was like, "Yeah, that'd be great." Because I had seen what CrossFit had done for me as a veteran transitioning back, and I had been working with some men and women, adaptive athletes who had lost their arm or leg in combat or in a vehicle accident, and saw how therapeutic it was for them to overcome their trauma. And I was like, "Yeah, man, let's do it." So 2018 now, we did our very first class and just really fell in love with the guys in those first couple classes. And more importantly, it really came full circle from my time in the military, because we spent a lot of time working with Iraqi special operations units, training them up and getting them to be able to take over security for their own towns and cities and neighborhoods.
(13:59):
And to do that, you have to develop trust. You have to work alongside them and train and equip them and be able to trust them enough. And to be willing to do that, you have to take a real culture immersion in the folks that you're dealing with. And so that had always stuck with me, and I knew nothing about recovery, addiction, drug abuse. And so I would just come from a genuine place of curiosity and like, "Hey guys, how did you get here?" And then once I had spent enough time and built up enough trust with them, they were willing to tell me their back stories of how they fell into substance abuse. And it was some of the most horrific, traumatic stories that you could ever witness and never want to even hear.
(14:46):
And that's when I really learned like, "Okay, it's not their fault." And I don't mean that as an absolution of personal responsibility, because they still have personal responsibility how they got there. But the entire history and the system of how this started was completely targeted towards rural America. And it's a generational thing and it's people that are trying to deal with trauma, searching for other alternatives to overcome that. And that's when I really learned, okay, they want help. They don't want to be here, so what can I do to be in a position to help them out?
Heidi Heitkamp (15:23):
I love what you say about curiosity. Every person has a story that's worth listening to, and these are folks whose stories you listened to, and it drove you to think about what your role was going to be in revitalizing or repairing the damage that had been done to your town. So let's talk about that next step for you.
Dale King (15:46):
Yeah, so it all started when one of the first groups of guys got done and he's like, "Hey, I just want to come up and thank you. I'm done with the inpatient treatment and I won't be seeing you any longer, but just want to appreciate your time." And I was like, "Oh, sweet. This is awesome." I thought there would be some graduation ceremony or something, this guy's been officially deemed and blessed over for the rest of his life and he's going to be good to go. And I said, "Okay, well, where are you going next?" He's like, "Well, I'm checking myself into the homeless shelter." And I was like, "Whoa, why are we doing that? Don't you have a job and somewhere, a place to live?" He's like, "If I go back home, man, I'm going to end up relapsing."
(16:27):
So myself and another one of my trainers just looked at him and we're like, "Okay, tomorrow, 9:00 AM, come to the gym. We'll give you a broom and a mop and you can work out as much as you want until you figure something out." And that's literally how this whole thing started. That was 2018. Fast forward, he actually just had a baby boy a couple months ago, has a great fiancee, is going to college now to get his degree in counseling, and is a coach for me as well. So it really started with him. And where we're at now is, I own three small businesses here in Portsmouth and we employ anywhere from eight to 12 people depending on the seasonality, who are all in recovery, that all used to be clients. And it's some of the most fulfilling and rewarding work I've ever done, including my time in the military. They're just really some of the best people I could ever hope to encounter in my life.
Heidi Heitkamp (17:27):
And I think it's always important in these parts of the story to say not everybody's going to have the experience of your first guy, that the patience and the grace that we need to exhibit on relapse, and every addicted person is different, that they react to the substance differently.
Dale King (17:46):
There's actually two guys, Andrew's the guy that I'm talking about, but there's another guy that was completed around the same time as him, and they both worked together, and he ended up relapsing. A matter of fact, he stole some of my business partner's lawn tools and pawned them for drug money. And fortunately we were able to track them down, and that's where having military experience helped to go find them. We found them and we just presented with the officer, like, "Hey man, you've got to go back into treatment. You've got to do what they tell you, and we'll have your job for you if you want it when you're ready to get done with it again, or you can keep doing what you're doing and you're going to die or end up in jail."
(18:28):
And so we learned that lesson the hard way. And I looked at my business partner and I said, "Well, look, if everybody that we deal with is a 100% success rate, then this isn't challenging." And so we just made the policy like, "Hey, if you relapse, that's okay. You just need to be honest with us so we can get you back into treatment."
Heidi Heitkamp (18:46):
I think it's so interesting, because I think maybe conventional wisdom, if you haven't dealt with addiction personally, you think conventional wisdom is that they have no shame. They're just selfish. And you don't want to say, they are self-loathing, and that's part of the problem. They already have enough guilt. And having someone around like you who, "I see you, I'm not going to BS you. You did wrong, but you don't have to feel bad. Take the next step." And I think that's so critical, and I think your story is just absolutely exceptional. You were featured in a documentary called Small Town Strong, right?
Dale King (19:29):
Mm-hmm. It's a project that took around four years, and it's completely independently financed and independently produced. My Army buddy actually and his brother did all the work. We put it together and it was designed to be a developmental project, we were just going to pitch it to streamers and networks. And we did, we had great meetings, we were able to get in the door, but surprisingly, Hollywood doesn't have much interest in highlighting small town addiction stories. So after getting rejected enough, we just said, "Screw it. We're going to produce it ourselves," which is what we did, and we got a distribution deal. It's streaming on Amazon Prime right now. It highlights the story of a really good friend of mine and several of the people here engaged in the fight, and these are real stories told by the people themselves.
Heidi Heitkamp (20:20):
You are a patriot and you make me feel like there's hope. And I think it's rare to feel hopeful a lot of times in this country, but if we talk about bridging cultural divides, you've done it. You are an excellent example of a great veteran and a great American patriot.
Dale King (20:40):
Well, thank you.
Heidi Heitkamp (20:42):
Thank you so much, Dale. This has been great.
Joel Heitkamp (20:45):
Yeah.
Heidi Heitkamp (20:45):
This might be one of my favorite podcasts I've ever done. I hope that you will go watch his documentary on Amazon Prime. It is Small Town Strong, and he is a real deal guy and absolutely an inspiration. And so Joel, you really should, you should listen to the interview with Dale. You'll love him. Okay, Joel, summertime, you've been bragging about your pumpkin patch to anyone who will listen. How goes the farming, Joel?
Joel Heitkamp (21:18):
Well, it's my first year as a farmer, so I want to go on record on that. I think the key is, when you're getting free land to grow pumpkins on from your cousin, don't choose the low land like he gave you. Make sure you talk them into the higher land, because as any farmer will ever tell you about rain, don't bitch about rain because it can shut off. Well, my pumpkins are dead because of rain, but that's a whole 'nother issue, Heidi. It's devastating all the work we put into it, and quite frankly it's just, when I look at it, I realize I'm meant to be a talk show host.
Heidi Heitkamp (21:55):
I just want to know, are you going to pay your grandchildren for the slave labor that they've invested so far, or are you just going to say, "You could take the lumps with me?" And those of you who don't know this story, Joel claims that he planted, what, five acres of pumpkins?
Joel Heitkamp (22:12):
Oh, five is pretty strong. Yeah.
Heidi Heitkamp (22:14):
Okay, what, three acres then of pumpkins, with the idea that his grandchildren would be the slave labor harvesting them, for which you might or might not compensate them going forward.
Joel Heitkamp (22:29):
Well, let's just be honest here. It isn't three acres either, so I didn't bite off more than I can chew work-wise or for the kids, but here's the scenario. The grandkids all come out to the lake and the pontoon's got gas in it and the boat's got gas in it, the yard is mowed and the weed eating is done, and so they just get fun time, right? So I decided without any discussion with their parents, I might add, which was an issue, I decided that we were going to raise pumpkins and gourds and watermelon and whatnot. And so we'd raise it, they'd hoe it, they'd be involved in it, we'd put the drip irrigation system in. Obviously they'd harvest it, which isn't going to be a big issue, and then they could sell them, which means they have to interact with people. Let's just say what's still left, what they're going to sell will be, it'll go really fast in terms of the sales.
Heidi Heitkamp (23:24):
Are you going to get any crop, Joel?
Joel Heitkamp (23:26):
Yeah.
Heidi Heitkamp (23:26):
People, we should post, I wonder if we can post a picture.
Joel Heitkamp (23:30):
Yeah, I don't think we'll do that. I don't think we'll do that. But yeah, we're going to get something out of it. And actually, do you understand what scarring pumpkins are?
Heidi Heitkamp (23:44):
Yes, I do.
Joel Heitkamp (23:46):
Okay. Well, we were going to scar your name in one, and with all the crap you've been giving me, no, you're not getting a pumpkin. Seeing as how I may end up with three, one isn't going to you.
Heidi Heitkamp (23:56):
Boo-hoo, boo-hoo. So Joel, your pumpkin patch has failed.
Joel Heitkamp (24:05):
Failed is too strong of a term. It's been hit. It hasn't failed yet. There's a lot of reasons to be positive, just not over positive.
Heidi Heitkamp (24:15):
Spoken like a Democrat from North Dakota.
Joel Heitkamp (24:17):
Yeah. Well, if I was truly a Republican, I would have taken out a ton of crop insurance and then blame the government and taken the money. But being a Democrat, I didn't take out crop insurance and I'm just going to go with it.
Heidi Heitkamp (24:31):
Okay. Well, Fourth of July is coming up, and there have been Fourth of Julys where at our lake places you have fed breakfast to over 70 people.
Joel Heitkamp (24:44):
About 50 of them we liked.
Heidi Heitkamp (24:48):
And the rest were our siblings.
Joel Heitkamp (24:56):
Yeah, there's some truth actually.
Heidi Heitkamp (24:56):
The problem now with the Fourth of July is that it's going to be the middle of the week, and that always creates some attendance issues, right? So do you expect you're going to have that many people at the lake, Joel?
Joel Heitkamp (25:09):
Well, I think we will. And you nailed it, being that Thursday, what that means is that people are going to take Friday off, which means that they're going to be there Wednesday for the Fourth, going into the Fourth. So we've got Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then about Sunday, hopefully about noon they'll say, "Time to go home." But the key is at the high camp compound to buy a lot of toilet paper and a lot of hamburger.
Heidi Heitkamp (25:38):
We also have septic, so call the septic guy, have everything pumped before the Fourth of July. For those of you who have always just lived in a city where you have flushed the toilet and it goes away, trust me, when you live in a place that you use septic and you introduce probably about 50 more people than what you normally have, that can be an issue, Joel.
Joel Heitkamp (26:02):
We'll work it out. It hasn't been an issue before, but you're right. You've got to be ready for something like this. The key is to feed them a big breakfast, then you don't have to feed them three times a day. If you feed them a big breakfast and then something later in the afternoon, then they're good. If you feed them an early breakfast and it's something light like a muffin, you're going to have to feed them at noon. You're going to have to feed them for supper, our Midwest term. For all of you folks, you might call it dinner, but man, then next thing you know you're feeding them three times, which means they're going to drink more beer. And so it's a real issue. Feed them twice, that's my advice.
Heidi Heitkamp (26:41):
Well, you think about the Fourth of July and you think about this great American holiday and how divided we are as a country. I don't know what's going to fix this.
Joel Heitkamp (26:52):
I know you're in state here in North Dakota a lot, but the truth is you're in Illinois and Chicago and you spend a lot of time in DC and every now and then New York. When you live here all the time like I do, what you see every day when you go to work are bumper stickers that don't represent the people that you might vote for. That's just the truth. And if you do, you have the potential of having your pickup keyed, so you just keep your head down. On the Fourth of July, there will be a ton of pontoons out on our lake with Trump flags on them, and they'll go by and by and by our house, because we're the only Democrats on the lake that they can pick on on that side. So you've just got to not care. You've just got to look at it and go about what you're doing, which means hopefully we won't blow the dock up again this year with fireworks. Remember that? That wasn't my best Fourth of July.
Heidi Heitkamp (27:50):
Yep, yep. Well, I've been telling people you don't see the level of enthusiasm. You don't see the number of Trump flags on pickups. You don't see, it doesn't mean that he's not going to win North Dakota big, but I think it's interesting. They did a rally last weekend on the Capitol grounds. They were expecting like 1,000, 2000 people. They got maybe 100. And the boat parade everybody said would be like 800 boats, and it was maybe 100. And so either people are too busy or they're just over it.
Joel Heitkamp (28:26):
Well, and to tag onto that a little bit, you look at my state where I live, North Dakota, just went through a primary, and if you look at the vote totals in that, they didn't get anybody out to vote. And we had a hotly contested Republican primary where there were four Republican candidates all seeking the same job. And they campaigned, they put ads out there, they spent a lot of money, and nobody really turned out to vote. And so you are right when you say that there isn't any enthusiasm in it. I think if that's the case nationally, I think that that actually hurts Donald Trump. I do. I know that people might disagree with me on that, but his strength has always been this dedication, this 15,000-person crowd, this, "Holy cow, if they're for him, I've got to be for him." And I know the poll numbers are this way and that way, but I'm not picking up on that excitement. I just think that to some degree some of the people that are in the middle are sick of him.
Heidi Heitkamp (29:38):
Well, Joel, we'll wait and see. Hopefully we'll have a chance to talk about the conventions coming up. Are you going to both conventions again?
Joel Heitkamp (29:47):
No. As of right now, I'm not. We'll see if that changes. I love Milwaukee. Milwaukee's got brats, it's got beer, what the heck is not there to enjoy? My daughter went to Marquette. I've been to Milwaukee a number of times, so I'd love to go.
Heidi Heitkamp (30:04):
We'll have plenty of time to talk about this, but in the meantime, tomorrow's the Fourth of July. Go out and really celebrate what's amazing about this country and think of ways that you can begin a dialogue to bring the country back together. Hopefully this Fourth of July, have a conversation with someone you don't think you're going to agree with. Joel will have those because there will be a number of them on the compound at his lake house.
Joel Heitkamp (30:31):
I would add, those warning things on the fireworks are real. If you don't believe me, come and see this great big dent that I have in my aluminum dock. The truth of the matter, it's life or limb. You've got to tend a risk every now and then.
Heidi Heitkamp (30:47):
Well, have a great Fourth of July, Joel.
Joel Heitkamp (30:49):
You too, Heidi. Thank you for joining us today on the Hot Dish, which is brought to you by the One Country Project, making sure the voices of the rest of us are heard in Washington. Learn more at onecountryproject.org.
Heidi Heitkamp (31:04):
And we'll be back in two weeks with more Hot Dish, Comfort Food for Middle America.
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