About Follow The Poppy
Opioid Education and System Navigation.An Opioid Education and System Navigation Platform.
Mission
Follow The Poppy’s mission is to help people better understand and navigate addiction, recovery, and the systems surrounding the opioid crisis.
Addiction and the opioid crisis are often discussed in simplified ways, but the reality is far more complex. Treatment systems, public policy, trauma, and global drug markets all shape the challenges individuals and families face when seeking help.
Through education, lived experience, and honest conversations, Follow The Poppy aims to bring clarity and deeper understanding to addiction and recovery while exploring the broader forces shaping the opioid crisis.
Why Follow The Poppy?
The name Follow The Poppy reflects the deeper story behind opioids.
For centuries, the opium poppy has played a powerful role in medicine, trade, and global history. Many of the opioids used today—from prescription pain medications to heroin and fentanyl—can trace their origins back to this plant.
Following the story of the poppy helps reveal the larger systems behind the opioid crisis, including global drug markets, medical practices, public policy, and the lived realities of addiction and recovery.
Follow The Poppy explores these connections to help people better understand the complexities of addiction, recovery, and the opioid crisis.
What You’ll Find Here
Follow The Poppy is designed to provide thoughtful, reliable resources about addiction, recovery, and the opioid crisis.
From exploring the history of opioids to examining treatment systems and recovery pathways, this platform helps individuals and families better understand addiction and the complex systems surrounding it.
Through articles, resource guides, consulting, and speaking engagements, Follow The Poppy offers multiple ways to learn about addiction, recovery, and the broader forces shaping the opioid crisis. Each of these resources is grounded in lived experience, professional insight, and a commitment to helping people better understand and navigate addiction and recovery.
Follow The Poppy Blog
Insight on addiction, recovery, and the opioid crisis
The Follow The Poppy Blog explores addiction, recovery, and the broader systems shaping the opioid crisis.
Here you’ll find articles examining topics such as addiction and recovery, treatment systems, public policy, the global opioid system, the history of opioids, and the personal realities faced by individuals and families navigating addiction and recovery.
The goal of the blog is to provide thoughtful insight and reliable information that helps people better understand addiction, recovery, and the complex systems surrounding the opioid crisis.
From Hollywood to Heroin to Hope: Sarah Spier’s Journey
This was not supposed to be my story. My mother should never have found me unconscious in a dope-house, thin, pale, weak, and broken with bruised and bloodied track marks covering my entire body. She was never supposed to have witnessed me slip into a comatose...
Dear Family Warriors: Navigating the Opioid Journey Together
If you have a loved one struggling with opioid addiction, know that you're not alone in this journey. It's a challenging road, filled with uncertainty, but your support can be a lifeline that makes all the difference. Trust me when I say that you play a critical role...
Understanding Fentanyl: The Risks, Facts, Origins, and Global Reach
I wanted one of my first blog posts to be about something that has been dominating headlines and causing significant concern for a number of years now—fentanyl. Now, first and foremost, I'm not here to lecture you, and tell you not to do drugs or share more horror...