When an addict walks by another person on the street, no one turns to look.
But when four local men who have all suffered from recent overdoses walked down the streets of Huntington and Charleston early last month, lots of people stopped to stare.
The four men were dressed in head-to-toe red suits and would only say they wanted to "raise awareness."
At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, during a lunch break in the ongoing trial of Don Blankenship, U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin explained what issue they wanted to spotlight:
West Virginia has the highest drug overdose rate in the nation, more than double the national average, according to a June report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
All West Virginians know an addict. Addiction affects all walks of life.
Some of them just don't know it.
"It could be a friend," Goodwin said. "It could be a family member. They look like you and me."
"Social media lit up with sightings and speculation," Goodwin said. "Some even reported being creeped out by their presence ... but what people didn't know was that these gentleman have struggled with addiction. These gentleman, at some point in the past, have overdosed and they each have their own stories, but often they're remarkably similar. They struggle with addiction, often in silence, not knowing where to turn or who to turn to. If you're going to be creeped out by something, that is certainly something to be creeped out by."
Goodwin announced the creation of a new website, www.makethecallwv.com, and a new smartphone application, The Call WV, meant to quickly match up addicts up with resources in their communities when they are ready to accept help.
"It's not a problem that we can arrest our way out of," Goodwin said. "We have to do something about the demand side of this problem as well."
The Make The Call WV website provides a long, searchable list of contact information for organizations providing addiction services, including prevention education, treatment, meetings and housing.
The new app is available on Androids and iPhones and uses a smartphone's GPS system to locate the user and direct them to resources in the immediate area.
The online resources were created with grant funding from Goodwin's office awarded to the Huntington Office of Drug Control Policy and the Huntington Police Department.
Public service announcements have also been created to publicize the creation of the website and application.
The U.S. Attorney's office and others who worked on the project met the addicts who volunteered through the Recovery Point of Huntington.
The men participating, including Terry Lilly, said the initiative has given them a sense of purpose and belonging.
"I say thank you all the time to the people I work with because I'm so glad that I got this opportunity," he said.
Walking around in the suits might have been strange, but they already knew what it was like to feel uncomfortable in their own skin.
Lilly described the feeling that contributed to his addiction as "basically not feeling equal, always feeling less than."
"That's a shared experience by most addicts," he said.
Lilly was an active heroin user before he sought help from the Recovery Point of Huntington.
His last overdose, about four months ago, marked a turning point, in part thanks to his mother.
"Seeing the pain and suffering she was going through, seeing what it was doing to myself, seeing that reflected through her back at me, was my wake-up call," he said.
Jon Thomas, another volunteer, said it was the "gift of desperation" that inspired him to seek help.
"I had lost everything that meant anything to me, including myself," he said.
Addiction was his way of trying to escape.
"It could be sunny outside and that could be my excuse," he said. "It could be the worst day of my life and that could be my excuse. It was ultimately because I didn't want to deal with what was around me. My reality had changed."
Joe Murphy volunteered as a creative strategist and came up with idea for the smartphone application and the awareness campaign.
Murphy said his team has determined there were 3.3 million Web impressions generated by the campaign after it hit national and local media.
"We couldn't have bought that kind of advertising," he said.
He thought of sending addicts dressed in red out on the streets after seeing a map, on which red dots marked locations of overdoses in Huntington.
"I realized at that moment that I had met these people," he said. "I had been at Starbucks beside them, in the movie line with them, they've waited on me here and there. They could be my doctor and my lawyer. I realized with that many overdoses, all of us had come across them every day."
Now, on an interactive map on the Make The Call website, red dots mark community resources.
Reach Erin Beck at erin.beck@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/erinbeckwv, 304-348-5163 or follow @erinbeckwv on Twitter.