William Perry and his wife, Ingela Travis-Hayward, were home in Columbus this weekend for ComFest after spending weeks on the road.
The pair and a handful of employees and volunteers have spent the spring at music festivals — braving the hot sun, mud and dust — to hand out free naloxone, a medicine that rapidly reverses overdoses.
Since starting their nonprofit, This Must Be The Place, in Columbus in 2022, they've given away more than 100,000 kits.
Perry said that's important because three out of five overdoses happen when someone else is around. If just one person in the area has naloxone, that can save a life.
Perry grew up in Columbus "running up High Street" and dipping into music venues when he was too young to legally be there. When he was a bit older, he spent his summer traveling to music festivals with friends.
"It was the lifestyle that I lived. Unfortunately, nearly all of those friends are gone now," Perry said.
He spent a decade in an Ohio correctional facility for his own drug use. There, he decided he wanted to make a positive contribution to the world. He couldn't bring back the friends he'd lost, so he made it his mission to save others.
This Must Be The Place was right at home at ComFest in Goodale Park this past weekend. This is This Must Be The Place's fourth year the festival, and Perry said ComFest was the first organization to give them a grant, to the tune of $1,800.
ComFest spokesman Marty Stutz said like other community organizations at ComFest, This Must Be The Place is there to share information and resources.
"Their efforts are to save lives and make people aware of the dangers of the federal epidemic in our society today," Stutz said.
Perry said getting more naloxone into the community matters even more now, as future funding for harm reduction groups remains amid federal cuts. Meanwhile, overdose deaths across the nation are inching slightly back up for the first time in about 17 months.
WOSU's Allie Vugrincic caught up with Perry last week after he returned from the Nelsonville Music Festival. It was the second year This Must Be The Place was at that festival.
Allie and Perry's conversation has been lightly edited for time and clarity:
PERRY: We were able to go down (to Nelsonville Music Festival) and make sure that all staff and anybody else that wanted it had Narcan on hand, just in case something happens at the festival. But you know, nothing did, as often happens. And then all of those doses, all those kits make it back into the communities.
ALLIE: Is that the goal — to get as much out there in the community as possible?
PERRY: Within the harm reduction community, we refer to it as saturation. And you could almost refer back to COVID when everybody wanted herd immunity. Our goal is always to get it into the hands of at least 5% of the community that we're serving, which means one in 20 are carrying Narcan. That actually does create quite the layer of safety.
ALLIE: So let's back this up. I'm curious about the name: This Must Be The Place. Where did that come from?
PERRY: So, "This Must Be The Place" (by Talking Heads) is one of my favorite songs of all time. We also knew that although we have an office here in Columbus, our work is not done out of that office. And, you know, I refer back to the lyric from that song that says, 'home is where I'd like to be, but I guess I'm already there.' And so every time that we set up wherever anyone will allow us to set up an outreach, a distribution, that's home.
ALLIE: Do you find that the festival communities are welcoming, or is there sometimes a stigma in some groups that are afraid to let you guys set up?
PERRY: It's both. First of all, there was a lot of trepidation about the legalities and whether or not this was promoting drug use. A lot of the festivals, their response was, 'well, who else is doing it?' And we were really lucky that a production company out of Cleveland — they actually threw the Wonder Bus Festival here in Columbus and three others — and they said, 'we really love this initiative and we'd like you to do all four.' And next thing you know, we're doing festivals like Bonnaroo and Burning Man, and we're taking trips out to Seattle to do festivals.
ALLIE: So, I've never been to a music festival like that. What are you guys doing on the daily?
PERRY: We set up a booth with an enormous sign that says, "free naloxone." Very simple. And they usually put us in a really heavily trafficked area, somewhere where people maybe have to walk from one stage to another. And we train folks up, and actually, at some of the larger festivals, we end up with a line, which shows that they're willing to wait to get the stuff. We do an optional questionnaire at the end of the training. It's not the folks that you would think that are walking up to this. It's not someone who's about to go do some drugs. These are, at about a 55% clip, complete and total non-drug users. People are tired of the opioid epidemic. They're tired of people dying and they're willing to jump in and help no matter what their station in life is.
ALLIE: Do you wanna be a lifesaver?
PERRY: Yeah, you wanna save some lives today. That's really what it comes down to. Would you save a life if you had the opportunity to? I think it's important to say that right now we find ourselves in really divided times as to who's at fault for the fentanyl epidemic. And there's a lot of our so-called leaders that wanna point blame for this. We have to do something because they are not (doing anything). That something is keeping each other safe. And that is literally all it comes down to. Our goal has always been to work ourselves out of a job, but as long as there's a need...this must be the place, we'll go there and that'll be home.
This Must Be the Place is scheduled to be at The FairWell Festival in Redmond, Oregon on July 18 and 19 and Lollapalooza in Chicago from July 31 to Aug. 3.
