Morse Clinics and NC Health News

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- There's a new effort -- on wheels -- to get potentially life-saving care to people battling addiction.

Dr. Eric Morse, the founder of Morse Clinics, which provides opioid addiction treatment and medication across the Triangle, has recently launched a mobile clinic aimed at improving access to those services, with a second mobile clinic in the works. Those efforts come as the North Carolina first lady Anna Stein helps launch the new initiative Unshame NC to increase awareness of substance use disorder, end the stigma around it, and promote medication for it.

People who have dealt with the throes of addiction call the new mobile service potentially life-changing.

"I knew the first time I used that everything about my life would change or I would die," said Megan Peevey, a Raleigh woman formerly addicted to opioids.

Peevey knows as well as anyone what it takes to beat an addiction, and how much harder the stigma around addiction can make that.

"It was disheartening and confusing to know that I just wanted to get well and I just wanted to be better. And I didn't want to die. And people were still telling me that it wasn't OK or it wasn't enough," she said.

Peevey said she first started using opioids around 2012 before spending the next several years in and out of prison. In 2019, in the very room where she met with ABC11 on Monday night at the Morse Clinic in north Raleigh, she started her journey to sobriety. It's been an effort that's taken her from the lowest lows to a seat on the first lady's addiction treatment panel.

"To be a part of the solution and to be able to share my experience with people who may not know that this is what success disorder looks like. It just is. And we get to be a part of the solution and have a voice. It's pretty amazing," Peevey said.

According to Peevey, ease of access to opioid treatment medication such as methadone and buprenorphine can make all the difference in someone's probability for recovery. That's what Morse is trying to improve with his new mobile clinic in Wake County.

"We're pretty much able to make sure that people aren't paying for treatment anymore. It's free. But transportation is now the No. 1 barrier to get in getting into treatment," Morse said.

Morse has run brick-and-mortar opioid treatment clinics in the Triangle since 2010, with the goal of getting people easy access to medication minus the stigma, and a safe space to take their supervised dose. Earlier this month, he launched his first mobile clinic at Healing Transitions in Raleigh, with a second set to provide service in Granville and Franklin counties this fall. Morse said there's been a drastic shift from where the conversation was when his first clinic opened 15 years ago.

"We were kind of working in the shadows. We were in silos. And now partly because it is an epidemic, we've been brought to light," he said.